Delicious may be the answer to one of my life’s little aggravations. All in all, I work off 5 computers, and I have a bazillion bookmarks on each one. It certainly seems that consolidating them all into one place will be useful, although how long it will take me to delete duplicates remains to be seen. One thing I have done in Delicious since the course started is to start bookmarking sites referenced in class as Thing14, Thing13, etc. I think this method will help me find specific sites more quickly when the class is over.
I can see many applications at school. The fifth grade did a science project this spring, and there was not enough information available through netTrekker for all the projects. If all the teachers contributing to the search tagged through Delicious, I think we could add that Delicious site into netTrekker for the students to access. We might also be able to let someone else do some of the initial work in finding sites – always a bonus. Click here to access my Delicious site.
All I can say is, it’s a good thing Google Reader has the “Mark all as Read” feature as well as the capacity to organize into folders. Processing long strings of information is far more difficult than chunking smaller amounts. I continue to enjoy the feeds from Larry Ferlazzo, especially his chunked “Best of. . . ” websites. This particular one is a listing of “Interesting Ways” Series on Using Web 2.0 Apps in Schools. Mr. Ferlazzo includes VoiceThread, Google Docs, Google Earth, pocket videos, and interactive whiteboards in his listing.
Also, I enjoy the Reading Rockets feeds. We have been working on the school’s summer reading lists in hopes of making them more palatable to our reluctant readers. Follett has given us permission to use their summaries, and the books are given a 1-4 ranking, according to the reading level. The students return postcards for the books they have read, color coded to their grade level. When the required number are returned, the student receives a one subject homework pass. We also award a whole day homework pass for proof of completion of a public library summer reading program in addition to our summer reading. This has been more successful each year, although it is time consuming to manage it during the summer. Students also rate their books with 1-3 happy faces. We track the 1 happy face books and delete them from the list, if appropriate. We also view fewer books with 1 happy face as an indication that we have chosen books the students actually want to read.
Oh – we noticed that students/parents very often didn’t read the directions about how many books were required and instead sent in all the postcards they were given. We make a point now to send extra postcards to each child.
I confess to being a book snob in my earlier days. I thought children should only read good Literature (note the capital L). I now think that the first step with many students is to get them to read, period. It’s a lot easier to raise the bar when they can decode and comprehend with more ease.
I could have spent hours more on this, but I must call a halt. I visited Wordle to make a goodbye page for an album. I spent more than a few minutes trying to make a talking dog on Blabberize, but I have to review instructions again. ToonDoo was great fun for making cartoons, and one you might use to help teach visual literacy skills. I have visited LetterPop briefly and made a quick newsletter, but it was not immediately apparent how to embed/link to one. There was some mention of workshops which dealt with embedding and other skills in the FAQs, but I could not find any other information. I will probably use PollDaddy to make a survey regarding summer reading, and Quizlet will certainly be useful, both to teachers and to students for obvious reasons.
Once more distracted. . . I revisited Quizlet to look at the social features. All quizzes seem to be available, but there are ads within the quiz lists. Also there is a link to brain training games on the Luminosity site. Word Bubbles is fun to play and aids in developing/improving mental fluency.
All of these sites have the capacity for editing or commenting by others.
This is not the perfect format yet, but I will try in BubbleShare as well. I would love to be able to add links to the images (Serpinski Triangle), but I’m not sure that is possible in Rockyou.
BubbleShare slideshow will be posted on the wiki. I like it better. However, it doesn’t show up with the theme that I chose. Any ideas?
The discussion of tagging and folksonomies was useful to me in that it provided clarification for me about how tagging works. I liked the description of the tagging being a bottom-up process and not driven by some expert in the ether. Wordle was fun to experiment with and could have a number of applications.
I was more intrigued with using blogs with younger children and writing mentors. In this experiment, first and second graders were paired with pre-service teachers as blogging buddies. The pre-service teachers responded to all of the blog posts made by their buddies, offering positive feedback and some tips on writing such as capitalizing names and the first word of sentences as well as punctuation, etc.
Some of our fifth and sixth grade classes have a buddy set-up with kindergarten and first graders. Being a blogging buddy might be a natural extension of this arrangement, although I think it would work better with 2nd and 3rd graders given the dyslexic nature of our student population. Using a blog or a wiki for our older students’ summer reading might also intrigue the students into writing/reading more.
This box turtle is in the process, very slow, of laying her eggs right outside the back gate. As I understand it, I need to protect the nest from predators with some sort of wire that will let a quarter size turtle escape sometime in August. This is a first!
Oh, happy day. I finally saw the little pulldown arrow on the bottom right of the blog post box and the undo button. Now if I could just be more efficient and less distracted while searching Flickr. . .
I’m writing this from Batesville, Georgia, a small ‘burb you might find if you drew a triangle around Helen, Cleveland, and Clarkesville. The closest landmarks of note are Lake Burton and The Mark of the Potter, which borders my neighborhood. Being here always makes me think of good homegrown food, so I thought I might search for themes related to Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, books which made a great impression on me. However, the signs for Polyface Farm were somewhat uninteresting, and it was hard to tell when the chickens were happy chickens.
So, I thought I would focus on a theme more concrete, like triangles which are everywhere. (This may appear by the pictures of the books, but I can’t figure out how to fix it.) One of my favorite subjectsas a classroom teacheris math, and this year, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to teach a 6th grade math class in addition to my library duties. We could have used the Flickr images in several ways. We created an Inspiration study guide for types of triangles complete with photographs of the different types in actual buildings, etc. You could use the images for sorting activities on the SMARTBoard. I like the idea of using images as writing prompts, having used my avatar picture a number of times. However, as I said before, I’m leery of letting students search on their own. Those nekkid ladies keep popping up, even with a safe search on triangles. No, I’m not including that image. . . I would love to know how you get around this.
I have not noticed Creative Commons anywhere except in conjunction with this class. I’m glad to know about it and will certainly use it personally, but I will take care before I mention it to students. I spent some time poking around the images and discovered some pictures and language that would not be appropriate for an elementary school. Perhaps our filter would not allow access to this, but I would certainly have to check. Paranoid, you say? Perhaps. But - I was fooling around at home one day creating a project for students to compare prices on iPods. I made up an example for an iPod with a rhinestone-studded Elvis on the cover, available only at Big Mama’s Bargain Barn. Just for fun, I made up a link – www.bigmamas.com. Decided I’d better check it when it turned blue. It was a porn site. Disaster narrowly averted.
I have used images and video clips while teaching, but they have all been available through subscription sites such as netTrekker, a kid-safe search engine on which Creative Commons is not available. If I can be comfortable with the content at school, we will definitely use it with the students. It will be a good faculty resource.
As to who owns my teaching materials, I believe that our school claims rights to any materials created while at school with school equipment/computers.
This multicultural writing wiki was interesting to explore.There might be applications here for our school’s summer camps as well as for classroom participation during the school year.Overall the organization of the site is good, although finding the elementary level stories required more than three clicks.Perhaps a sidebar listing for the different age groups would be helpful.I was pleased (really) to see that the elementary pages reflected the student’s true work, spelling errors and all, and not a parent’s or teacher’s heavily edited version.The Online Safety and Guidelines section was good and clearly written. Grading students both on the quality of their work as well as the nature of the feedback they give other students is an opportunity to work on skills at many levels.
As a former 6th grade teacher, this site was interesting to explore.It was clearly organized and accessible. However, even though this site was created in conjunction with a class learning about the human body, I would be leery of posting some of the links.If you get deep into some of them, you can find yourself tiptoeing a fine line regarding sexual content.Perhaps in a school some of these links would be blocked, but at least a few parents would have concerns, especially if students were accessing the site from home with no filter.I do realize that filters are a whole different topic of conversation in the library world. Also, I would prefer to see images credited in appropriate format rather than just listing the source.It’s not that hard to do.
Seeing this site at an AATE meeting in the fall and a referral from 2 librarians who previously took this class are what sparked my interest in learning more about wikis and Web 2.0 technologies. I like the organizational structure of this wiki and the descriptors of student roles.The Creative Connector links text-to-text, -to-self, and –to world, which I think is a powerful tool for helping students understand what they have read and to create a context for it.Giving the sentence from which vocabulary words were taken as well as the definition for these words would be helpful.I also liked the links to other wikis, particularly the summer reading wiki.Participating in this way might be one more way to make summer reading palatable to reluctant readers.
I prefer the structure of this wiki most of all.Good job, Shelley et al.The cluster map is interesting. The section About the Project answered several of my questions and gave resources which I will further explore.The Language section including the Idiom Dictionary, Figures of Speech, and Soldier Dictionary was particularly interesting to me.Go, Woodward!
