The Social Web c.6

It’s crazy how the internet has connected so many people over the last decade. It has expanded with many useful tools that can possibly be integrated into the classroom in the near future.     

 I thought that the twitter section was really interesting. I have always heard about twitter and I have even recently made an account but have never really got all that into it and understood what benefits it can bring.  The book even calls twitter “a network at my fingertips.” There are many ways twitter can be beneficial, from keeping family updates to posting questions in a classroom.  I felt that using twitter in the classroom would be one of the best ways to keep students active during a lesson, weather this involves discussing or answering questions through tweets. There are many fantastic ways to involve twitter in the classroom; with this tool teachers can gain more resources through other teachers and community members can view what is going on in their local schools. When the community gets involved in what the students are learning, it always is a huge benefit.

 Another main section in the chapter was social bookmarking services. Before I enrolled in this class I had absolutely no idea that there were websites that helped you control and organize your favorite pages.  If you’re like me, then you have over 200 favorite tabs and it takes forever to search for the one you want, but with websites such as delicious it is an easy task to search and locate a specific location that you had previously bookmarked. This is such an excellent tool to use to not only save time and make your online experience more manageable but it also helps you share resources with other professionals in your field.  This helps minimize time that you have may spend researching different websites that could contain average information, and maximizes the excellent resources that other people have already found to be superb.

The best thing about integrating these different online tools in the classroom is that it helps get the students involved in the lesson and keeps them active in the learning. This benefits the students to be able to view different resources and ask questions without having to speak in class.

Exit Slip 10/7

I am really looking forward to using many of the tools we have talked about in class. Although I wish we were given a little more directions on the tools were using. I'm excited I finished my Smartboard lesson and am looking to improve it! Today in class we went over our Scratch iRLO assignment and viewed a few examples. I'm looking forward to working on mine and feel that it will be useful in my teaching career. I'm not so great at computer stuff but if elementary students are able to use Scratch... a 22 year old should be able to.. Right?!

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Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology… and my future! C.4

After reading this chapter it makes me think… should I just switch majors now?! It was explaining how in the future we probably don’t even need schools, just technology. This is something I strongly disagree on, although technology is great and all it’s not able to do many of the things that teachers can do. I agree that schools should be integrating technology much more that what they are and there are simple ways that we can start.

In this chapter there were many things I never really thought about. It was interesting to come across the establishment of universal schools. It’s crazy to think that once upon a time there were single room schoolhouses with only female unmarried teachers.  

This chapter did make me mighty proud! One of the first public universities was established in our favorite, good old state WISCONSIN, but wait… that’s not it, also Wisconsin opened the first public kindergarten in America. Finally Wisconsin’s known for something besides serial killers and cheese.

The section Evolution of a School System probably caught my interest the most in this chapter.  It made me understand what problems may occur in some of the systems used today.  I felt some areas are rather ridiculous, but others made me open my mind to changes.  The textbook area made me realize how much of a benefit it would be for students to use online textbooks.  This benefit doesn’t only stop at the students; teachers using the same materials could share the same resources and possibly could interact with other schools. This could be a huge benefit alone and anything we can do to improve the environment is a major plus on its own.   Another system that the chapter touched on was comprehensive high schools, from my point I feel that there are many more positives than negatives in this area because it allows students to explore many different areas and allow for many more options., although, I could be a bit bias on this topic because I did go to a comprehensive high school.

This chapter had great incite on things I haven’t even thought about prior to reading this, But it makes me worried about my career. Should I really be going into something that won’t even exist in years to come?!  I do feel that schools should concentrate more on integrating technology in the classroom because it will untimely be more beneficial to the students futures.

Really Simple Syndication

I found chapter 5 in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms to be very interesting because prior to reading this, I had never heard of RSS before.  RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is, to my understanding, a personalized pool of information in which you can pick and choose what information is fed to you on any specifically website.  After reading only a couple sentences of this chapter I realized RSS is a tool that seems to have huge potential for in the classroom and in my personal life.  I am always searching the same things on Google or checking the same websites for updates all the time.  With an RSS, I wouldn’t have to do that so much anymore and can focus on reading the important and relevant information that is flooding into my aggregator.

                 The title of the chapter says it right when it states “The New Killer App for Educators”.  This tool could be so helpful for students doing research projects, sharing daily updates on a news subject, or even just searching the web for info.  It helps narrow down the vast amount of information on the web and organize it into a less scary, more satisfying experience in which you get all of the useful information into one place.  This program can also help children learn about the Read/Write web as place that can be used to find any information their heart desires and it is not the scary place where bad things can happen to them like can be portrayed on the news sometimes.  RSS can also help students keep up to date on things they are learning in class as well as blogs about what other students their age are learning about as well.

                All in all I find this a very useful tool that I am sure I will find myself as well as my future classroom using.  It will save time, effort, and lots of useless information from piercing its way into our searches and allowing a classroom to see how useful the web can actually be if used correctly.

Wiki - Wiki

               Chapter 4 in Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms was all about wikis and how you can integrate them into your classroom. It was interesting to find out that term “wiki” is actually short for “wiki-wiki”, a Hawaiian word meaning ‘quick’.  Throughout out the chapter, I found out more and more ways possible for me to use wikis in my classroom. They are an excellent resource for acquiring information as well as sharing it with others and they are becoming in important tool in our global society today.

                It’s great to see more people are benefiting by using wikis in the world today. It is good that the majority of their users are actively working to keep them accurate and helpful rather than having false information. For example, the chapter talked about a college professor who created multiple errors on a variety of Wikipedia pages, only to have them corrected within a couple of hours. I was also amazed to hear about the Wikipedia page containing information on the tsunami, after on entry of only 76 words it grew to 6,500 and had been edited over 1,200 times within 48 hours of the first posting.

                I think it is crazy that people are talking about in the future there will no longer be traditional textbooks and it will be online. I feel this is a definite possibility because of where we are at now, with the popularity of Wikipedia as a vast source of the world’s knowledge as well as other wiki’s that are being created by even the largest of corporations, McDonald’s, Sony, and Disney all included.

                As important as wikis are in the world, it is vital we realize their potential use in the classroom.  Wikis have a lot of potential as a great classroom tool and if we start using them now, we can have our students ready for using them in the future. A good way to use wikis would be to use it in the classroom as an online text or curriculum. It would be great to utilize them so parents and students could be involved in the process. Students could have discussions online about things they enjoyed in their daily classes.