Lesson 23 Reflections

Wow, I can't believe I'm done. It's been quite an experience for someone who is not very comfortable with technology. When all is said and done, however, it was a very worthwhile trip. It gave me a whole new view of the web and more specificully web 2.0. It's a place of social, work and interest interaction and collaboration. It's a place to have fun and, at the same time, to be serious in the pursuit of knowledge. Given all of that, the 23 things course was really just an introduction. I will need to go back over the material in a more leisurely way this summer to better evaluate what I can use and what is just not relevant to my students, my material or even my style. I do look at the overall course as a fine reference tool which I will refer to over time.

No matter how much I use or don't use of the 23 things, it has opened the door for me into the new world of communications for the current and furture generations. Before the course, I really didn't appreciate the revolution that was and is going on. I would go on and say that I am heartened by the both spoken and unspoken code of conduct which says that the web is to be used constructively, with sensitivity and concern for others. In closing, thank you for your support and patience. I feel that this has been far and away the best developmental experience I've had over the years and feel that it is something that every teacher could benefit from sooner rather than later.

Lesson 22 Reflections

As has been the case with a number of these lessons, I made this one more complicated than it needed to be. Once I listened closely to your tutorial, it fell into place. A wiki really is an interesting, easy, productive way to collaborate with others, be they students, colleagues or like minded strangers. It seems to me that a blog is really non-collaborative; it is more of an alternate discussion format, I speak/you speak, where one individual controls the topic and the others follow. With a wiki, there is substantially more freedom once the initial interaction takes place. If allowed by the creator, what is said and what then happens to it is totally fluid and potentially directionless. In my case, I put together a wiki for a class assignment which assumes a cetain amount of restraint on the part of my students, but one that I believe could be be both fun and interesting.
Check it out at http://sites.google.com/site/coolvictorianladies/.

Lesson 21 Reflections

I'm not really sure how a wiki totally differs from docs word, because in both, as I understand it, you can interact with the document in a collaborative way. From the tutorial, however, it does look like a wiki can be easier to use and has greater flexibility, having been developed for collaboration, whereas word was not. There were two wikis that I thought were especially powerful. The first, from a professional point of view, was the Hanalee Book wiki. What they started out to do was develop, as a class, the whole picture that the book was trying to depict. So when Hanalee went from Georgia to Indiana to work in a mill during the Civil War, their intent was to describe the mill, the soldier's vocabulary, etc. Unfortunately, the wiki outline never got much past the chapter summaries much less completed, probably due to time constraints. I would imagine, in the classroom environment, this is a typical obstacle. There is so much to do and so little time to do it.

The second wiki that I thought was really neat, one that I want to share with my husband, is wikiHow. What a clever use of the collaborative concept. It's a live how to fix it log.

Lesson 20 Reflections

Like so many of these lessons, my first reaction is "WOW, what a neat tool." The reality is, however, that I will have to experience this a lot more than simply in this lesson. It does seem incredible that all of these are free and terribly easy under itunes. I also installed the aggregator, juice, which should be useful for anything outside of itunes. At least that is my belief. The fact that some of these podcasts are ongoing where you can receive additional feeds as they happen seems amazing. I can't believe how easy itunes make it. To me, itunes is the key. It's central, everyone uses it and it's easy. This is definitely something to use with my students depending on the content of the various podcasts. Also, as you suggested in you comment on 19, reading/hearing is probably a fertile area in which to develop podcasts in class, where we can develop a library of how pieces should sound.

Lesson 19 Reflections

Admittedly, I've just gotten started with podcasting and it sounds very powerful, especially when you see what some of these first graders accomplish. I don't feel, at this time, however, that I've got my arms around how to apply it to my teaching situations. I do appreciate the power from a development perspective and have listened to two podcasts which I share with you below. The first addresses the increasingly relevent subject of how you evaluate a teacher. The second is about the equally controversial subject of the value of the liberal arts experience and how to make it more meaningful. http://learningmatters.tv/blog/podcasts/race-to-the-top-podcast-how-to-judge-a-teacher/4360/. http://learningmatters.tv/blog/podcasts/podcast-liberal-arts-in-this-job-market/3962/.

Lesson 18 Reflections

If I understand correctly, Slideshow is in the same venue as Zoho Show from the last lesson except that Zoho is about creating and Slideshow is about sharing and distribution. There does seems to be a certain amount of overlap with the former being more sophisticated than the latter. I can see this being of use to my students by letting them search out relevent presentations and wrtie about them. Being that this is springtime, I couldn't resist the flowers. The photos are exceptional.

My flowers

View more webinars from sejtanka.

Lesson 17 Reflections

This lesson was fun and eye opening. I was amazed to see the extent to which various tools exist on the web and are available for free. bubbl.us might be useful to demonstrate logic flows and to have student map out story lines. Zoho is powerpoint online in a shared environment, allowing collaborative powerpoint development. Dabbleboard might be used in my web site to help explain assignments. I could see using Library Thing both with my fellow teachers as a text book site and with my book group as an online discussion and review vehicle. As a note of feedback, Knowtes has been shut down. All in all, this lesson, like all of the various lessons taken together, has really expanded my horizons. I wish I had more time to ingest all of this.

Lesson 16 Reflections

I'm starting to realize that it's going to take me some time to really appreciate the real power of some of these capabilities. Google Docs is really a powerful tool. Collaborative editing and creation is a fantastic capability. The ability to upload files and then make them collaborative can be very useful for peer review. I'm finally really starting to get into all of this.

Lesson 15 Reflections

I don't mean to sound negative, but reader and delicious seem to be enhancements to email, which depend to a certain degree on your need to be able to interface to items of interest from different computers. In delicious, I can share easily and I can tag for easy recall, but I can share on email and I can store in folders using outlook. Also, with outlook, I don't have to be jumping between two different web sites. Alerts are something else. If I understand them correctly, they're really something along with tags tied to reader. I'm going to have to watch this to make sure that I'm understanding this, but essentially this means that I have an automatic researcher working for me gathering material on my subjects of interest even while I sleep. This powerful for me, my colleagues and my students.

Lesson 14 Reflections

http://delicious.com/penbrooke55

Above is the URL of my delicious web page. I finally abandoned my own computer and account name and password and worked out my problems on my husband's computer. Yahoo was having noone of me. That having been done, I can see how delicious could be useful for me for remote access, security and to use in collaboration with other teachers and researchers and possibly with some very serious students. Like so many of these lessons, commenting on its true relevance is like trying to quench your thirst by taking a drink from a firehose. It's overwhelming.