Blog Blog Blog

I liked this “thing.” The items were user-friendly and practical. I looked at all of them for a few minutes, and found two that I can definitely see using in the classroom. The first of those is ToonDoo. It has a lot of options for creating comic strips. I may have some of my students experiment with it this week on their Romeo and Juliet wikispace. The other site I can definitely use in my classroom is xTimeline. We often study biographies of our authors as well as the periods in history, and I can see this being a valuable tool.  The other one I like, which I will use more as a personal tool, is the Ta-Da Lists. It only took a minute to learn this and it’s awesome. I must confess that the picture of the iPhone on the first page of their site is what enticed me. As a new owner of an iPhone, I had to explore. I added a list, and then logged into my phone to check it out. It’s there, and is now one of my icons. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve left my grocery list on my kitchen counter as I head to the store, but I never go anywhere without my phone!  

I just finished viewing my instructional video - not quite in my pj’s - but in comfy clothes with a cup of tea. I found a presentation from 2006 (at first I thought that would be outdated, but then realized that’s about where I am in the world of technology! )by Mark Wagner, a former high school English teacher turned educational technology director. AND it’s about wikispaces, so I couldn’t resist. The name of the presentation is 
Download. I can see myself using both of these spaces as resources in my own teaching and attempted development of a class wikispace. I have been practicing using the wiki as a place to further engage students on our literature topics, but these two gentlemen also incorporated vocabulary and grammar into their pages. The practicality of the video wasn’t THAT helpful, however. While they mentioned and talked about ways to use the wiki, in my opinion, they did not do enough to actually show what they did. I suppose that’s a drawback of watching from my own living room. I will be checking out their sites, however, and hopefully incorporating some of their ideas. 

I love this! I did a “grammar mistake” slide show, which wasn’t the best for the assignment because the pictures move too quickly to read and find mistakes. BUT, it’s so cool and I can see uploading my own photos and adding cool music. It was easy to upload and add music on the Animoto site. Very cool. I see myself using this frequently. In fact, I’m thinking of a student project next week. Anyway — check it out, and prepare to be entertained on my wikispace!

I am exhausted. I just spent a LOT of time on Flickr. A LOT.  Once I started exploring, I just kept looking and looking and looking. I couldn’t believe all of the photos. At one point on the bottom of the screen, it said something like 4000+ photos had been uploaded THAT minute. For real? Some of the photos were really interesting. Some of these photographers are so talented! Mine never come out like that! However,  once I was given a task - Part 2 - to find images for my students, I have to be honest, my search kind of became tedious. I was looking for some pretty basic photos for a symbolism project for Romeo and Juliet, but I found it difficult to find what I needed. For example, I searched “dagger” and found myself wading through a great deal of pictures uploaded by the same photographer about a band named Dagger (I think–?), and cats named Dagger, and things that seemed completely unrelated to daggers. Eventually, I found some satisfactory pictures, some even better than satisfactory, but I couldn’t help but feel that Google images would have been a whole lot quicker - but now I wonder - legal? I think I just need more practice on Flickr. I like the ideas I’ve read about and hope to come up with some more of my own to use in my class. I like the idea to use pictures to help kids remember vocabulary. I like the idea of finding a unique photograph for various writing prompts. And I’m going to attempt to do some sort of symbolism project with the photos I found here. I found these pictures by Dimitri B to be interesting because I am plannng a trip to England next summer and these pictures are just amazing. The first one, “Night London Panorama With Full Moon” — how did he do that?  And I love the lighting and the depth in this one, “London’s Best.” He caught so many famous landmarks in one photo. Amazing! Can’t wait to visit!

I think my first thought was oh no, I’ve been breaking copyright rule for years. I have always assumed that if someone put something up on the web, it was fair game. Interesting. I have never noticed the CC before on anything, but I think I will start to look for it…?? I’m honestly not sure how it will affect my teaching. I am, however, glad to be aware of it and will become more consciously aware of people’s work than I was before.  

I just finished reading Vicki Davis’s Wiki Wiki blog post about Wiki pages, and I found it interesting. At first, and again, I was overwhelmed, but after reading hers and a few others,  I’m kind of getting the idea of how I can use a Wiki project in the classroom. What I liked about the the Wiki Wiki page is that she seemed completely new to the process, yet seemed to be able to apply it successfully in her classroom. Her idea was good, as well, to make a study hall page and a study guide… and have the kids in charge of it. This seems very do-able if your student groups are chosen wisely. Another Wiki I enjoyed was the Discovery Utopia Project. This is a neat page/project completed by middle school students, in which the teacher posted a project - in this case the students had to develop their own utopia - and added the template and rubric (”youbric”) to the Wiki space for all students to find it no matter where they are. They included links to books about Utopian societies, the rules for their own Utopian societies, and an ongoing discussion on their own and others. This part was particularly interesting because it seems as though the students took the project and added to it - going off in their own directions. Something I really like about this page is the teacher posted a page on blogging rules.  This is something I would NEVER have thought of ahead of time and would’ve spent a LOT of time going back and fixing things. I also liked the Room 15 Wiki. This one was more pleasing to the eye. A bit less busy, complete with vokis and other graphics, and it still has links to book reviews, tutorials, and other links. Now, the big question… how could I use it in my classroom? I guess I could “borrow” the ideas of those I read — I could create a study guide page. That would work. Last year when we read the book Night by Elie Wiesel, we did PowerPoint projects. THAT could definitely use an update and I could develop a Wiki project for it. We are currently finishing up a unit on both comic and tragic love stories and we do an end-of-the-unit project - I could develop something Wiki-ish.  It all seems like a great idea, but to be honest, it also seems like a great deal of work. Not that I don’t want to do the work, but sometimes the work we as teachers do greatly outweighs the benefits the students get. I am about to do Thing 8 - so I guess I’ll find out!   

My first thought is that the getting these feeds is OVERWHELMING. When I first got a cell phone that had Internet access, I set up my email. I realized then how much junk mail I get every day. I found myself deleting, deleting, deleting, and finally, unsubscribing to many of the sites. When I first open the reader, I try to read everything. The first few days I actually was pretty well caught up with the five main sites we had to add. But now? I have the original five (because I like them) AND a bunch more. As soon as you hit subscribe, they come flying out. And, one word, like I said, OVERWHELMING. I was going to remove some of them, but then I talked myself into realizing that I don’t have to read every single one of them. Once my OCD self accepted this, I realized the whole experience can be really helpful. I need to work on the art of skimming and scanning, but I think I can eventually learn to find what is helpful to me. There is just so much out there!I did find a few really neat blogs, several that I plan to read frequently (daily??). The first is a writing workshop website. When I taught public school, we had three 90-minute language arts blocks a day. This was the perfect environment for a writing workshop, and workshop we did. Recently however, I have not had the time or the creativity to truly incorporate this into my teaching. I feel like blogging may be the answer…?  The blog to which I am referring is completed by two writing teachers — one in northern Indiana and the other in East Harlem. They blog, their students blog, and basically it’s a really cool website all about writing and sharing writing, and doing so via the BLOG. Another interesting blog is called Learning is Messy. It’s a pretty no-nonsense blog with titles like, Video Conferencing in the Classroom, Questioning Student Blogging, using iPhones in the Classroom, etc… all things I’d like to read more about. And last, but surely not least, in my FUN trivia of the day page, I learned that were he still alive, Knute Rockne would be 120 years old tomorrow, March 4, 2008. 

So, I loaded up my new feeds and spent some time looking through all of my new information. It does feel like an email account in which I JUST get news-y stuff. I started with the Grammar Graters, being an English teacher and all. I didn’t find anything SUPER exciting there, but then went on to find some interesting blogs on the Students 2.0 feed. I enjoy reading posts from students. I like to hear their points-of-view on education. I said this in my last post - I REALLY need to get with it when it comes to engaging my students better. I like this class for that. Although the more I learn, the more I realize there is to learn, and it kind of freaks me out. BUT, baby steps, right? THEN, I found the most amazing thing. I had a vague memory of my wonderful IT people telling me about a site called Google Lit Trips (Thanks, SP & DW). But I got caught up with the every day-ness of every day and never got a chance to explore it. Till tonight. I following the link called “A Great ‘Mash-up’: Mapping Literary Journeys” .I then followed the link to the actual site:  Google Lit Trips .  I read some of the testimonials and watched the video on the blog and sort of perused the site. I realized that they have a “Google Lit Trip” lesson plan for a novel we teach in the spring:Elie Wiesel’s Night. I am so excited. I downloaded Google Earth, and I am going to become familiar with it and DEFINITELY use it in my classroom. I am sure I am so behind the crowd on this one, but if you have not played with Google Earth at all, you HAVE to. It’s fun just to see what it can do, but more importantly, the lesson plans that they’ve put together are amazing. I can’t wait to show my students Wiesel’s actual route from his home in Romania through the camps and finally freedom. I LOVE this!

EDUBLOGS…  I am relatively new at the world of blogging, so my visits to the blogs on the Web 2.0 Thing 4 page were very interesting. The first thing I noticed is the format… fairly informal and somewhat opinionated. It seems to be a place to hear and be heard. I noticed that several of the chosen blogs were educationally controversial, i.e. The GREAT HOMEWORK DEBATE. A very interesting post, and very interesting comments. I think a blog can be a valuable resource for getting all sides of an issue. Many teachers tend to just talk with the people with whom they know will agree! Used in a classroom, I can see how blogs can be helpful to give students a voice, to allow a different format of discussion and even assessment. To see students reading and writing and connecting to others in ways they actually ENJOY and can relate to is fabulous. I read Mark’s edtechblog and can see how to use the blogs in my classroom to increase my students’ literacy.

There are so many things in our list of 23 THINGS that I have been wanting to try. Blogging for one thing really has the potential to change my teaching. I’m pretty sure my students spend most of their time in front of the computer (at least compared to their English books), so to think that I can access them and they can access and blog with ME is really neat. As an English teacher, I can think of so many things we do in class that can be video-casted, so many topics to add to a social bookmarking site, so much material to wiki about.I am learning — on the job so to speak — that the ENTIRE world can beconnected - like a giant puzzle!