Emma's Blog

I chose high and low comment numbers on conferences as my selection process. Interestingly and by accident, I wound up in 2006 with high scorer Using Web 2.0 Tools in the Grade One Classroom. This teacher impressed me with the number of tools she uses (since 2006! – and she’s in Saskatchewan!!) with her first grade students; blogs, Flickr, Bubbleshare and wiki’s. As a newbie to 2.0, I found her ideas valuable and her instruction simple and clear. As Shelley had warned, the older conference postings are not as techno savvy and, as an audio-only posting, the audio speed makes her voice very interesting.

My second choice was Skateboard and the lonely comment on this wondered why it was part of a 2.0 conference, which made me curious. This teacher constructs skateboards from start to finish with his 6th grade students. He is very process oriented and the students are proud of their final products. Near the end of the video clip he states that the students  blog every day about the process. It would have been more effective if he shared some of their postings. He also quickly goes through some of his other courses as he describes his technology showcase, all of which seems amazing. It would be interesting to see what he does within his courses using 2.0.

I wish that I had created this slide show in a flicker of an eye, but I am sorry to say that it took me far too long, and in the end, it isn’t quite what I had hoped to create. I used Photopeach to create my slide show and figured out how to edit but I had entered my captions out of order so had to rewrite them all. I also had copied some of the pictures as thumbnails because I could not send them to the right folder when I sized them in Creative Commons. I’m sure there are simple answers to these problems and that is the drawback of working alone.
Nature’s Fashion Show on PhotoPeach

Butterfly Photos

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bestrated1/52666376/sizes/o/ Monarch by Creativity and Timothy Hamilton

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bestrated1/51321909/in/set-72157594362517512 Painted Lady by Creativity and Timothy Hamilton

http://www.flickr.com/photos/annkelliott/3750077519/sizes/o/ Viceroy by Anne Elliot

http://www.flickr.com/photos/95274920@N00/1497079441/ Red Admiral by jomike

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dg_pics/2637772082/ Tiger Swallowtail by +David Gunter

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dg_pics/2599124716/in/set-72157607680075945/ Red Spotted Purple by +David Gunter

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fuzzball2/4851871616/in/pool-butterflies Spicebush Swallowtail by fuzzball

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gregfoster/3365801458/sizes/z/in/photostream/ Transparent by Greg Foster

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluebird72/3852145371/ Peacock by Cj Roberts

http://www.flickr.com/photos/majamarko/143860670/ Blue Morpho by marjamarko

http://www.flickr.com/photos/canadianveggie/89385332/ Butterfly Ladies by Canadian Veggie

Creative commons is pure genious but I am wondering how common it is. I will now look for the cc label and it will certainly help to identify images and sounds that I can use guilt free.
I was not aware of the change in law that stipulates that everything is protected. I am now confused about what it means when something does have the C showing that a site contains copyrighted material. In the past, I have asked students to use copyrighted websites to help them identify reliable sources of information. Is there any validity to this practice?

Thing 10 Stretch

Through the Open Education Resources (OER) site, I found some wonderful links to science inquiry resources. In particular, I want to use an archaeological dig to introduce students to scientific thinking while tying into their humanities course on ancient cultures. The American Museum of Natural History offers a fun interactive website for students called Ology and offers numerous resources and ideas for teachers – all creative commons material.

I think Wikipedia is an amazing feat of community information sharing. As to the reliability of information, it is always good to check with other sources. To review the reliability, I looked up kale because I recently did some research on this as source of nutrients. I am on a crusade to encourage family and friends, strangers too, to eat more kale and swiss chard!

The entry for kale has good information as a botanical specimen but was limited on the nutrient value as a food source. It did not explain the best way to obtain nutrients from this vegetable. This lack of important information was confirmed on the discussion page. The entry received a B for quality as a Wiki Project Plants post and a C as a Food Project. Wiki invites people through it’s discussion page to help out with a link to list of tasks that need to be completed to improve the kale entry.

I am excited about wikis and plan on using one with my classes.  I tried using a wiki last year so my students in various classes could share data about our salamander survey sites. I now need to go back and clean up the wiki because I was not clear on how it should be designed so I let the students run with it. They did a nice job in a short amount of time, but needed more structural guidelines.

As I searched around for content quality, I was drawn to Mr. Lindsey’s Classroom Wiki, especially since I have added 4th grade science to my teaching duties and he is listed as a 4th grade teacher. Mr. Lindsay’s page is welcoming and easy to navigate for students.  His science links include some terrific animations on topics such as plate tectonics and weathering and erosion.

In addition, he has provided some great resources for teachers to use when publishing their own wiki pages and lists how to add some things to a wiki on his Ideas and Things to Do list. I did get a little lost in his links, though, and could not easily find a way back to the student page from the teacher page. Clearly, Mr. Lindsay is a teacher to all ages of students.

Codeblue is a wiki for 6th grade students to access information about the human body. While the site has many useful links that I appreciate as a 6th grade teacher who also covers the human body, it does not appear to be an interactive site for students. Perhaps another platform for posting links would be more useful than a wiki, which is meant to be edited my various members.

Finally, for an exhaustive list of tools and templates available via the web, go to UDL’s Tech Toolkit. The Universal Design for Learning mission is to help struggling learners. This wiki is easy to navigate and states upfront that it is edited by multiple users. It is a valuable resource for all teachers and parents. I found the CAST Science Writer a good literacy tool for helping students learn to write a formal lab report. It has a text to speech component which could be really be used as a proofreading tool. I plan to explore this site so I can add to my own toolkit.

Okay – it’s happened. I’ve just spent too many hours perusing the perennial pitfalls of the blogosphere. However, I can see that a more disciplined person than I could use blogs more effectively to create a discussion forum with a large number of people. I think it would be a good sharing tool for the faculty at my school to uncover people’s thoughts about ways we could make our school greener.

I did re-find a blog that I would like to use as a model for my science blog: Mrs. DuBose’s Adventures in Science.  I think it’s easy to navigate and I like her animated graphics.

My next goal was to find some instruction on how to set up more that just a basic blog.  Through my Google Reader my Instructify feed gave me a link to Learn it in 5. This website gives a 5 minute overview on how to set up the various Web 2.0 platforms. It did not really give me what I need to set up a snappy new blog for next year’s classes.  Please let me know if you have a suggestion for finding Beautiful Blog instructions.

The interactive web is a powerful and exciting  motivational tool that students are gravitating to in hordes. The challenge and the genius of it will be to ensure that students are posting their best work, whether it is a creative written piece or a factual persuasive communication to start a revolution.

My biggest concern with Web 2.0 is that it will become a digital version of talk radio, a lot of opinion but not always well informed.  A recent cartoon in The New Yorker says it best, “We have lots of information technology. We just don’t have any information.”

We need to support and guide students in the best use of the vast assortment of technologies available to them. Take a look at this video, Welcome to my PLE, to see how a 7th grader uses the web to create a personal learning environment that is rich and focused.

The 7 1/2 Habits of Highly Effective Lifelong Learners – a road map to my summer learning and remediation of all those years of highly ineffective habits…

Habit 1 – Begin with an end in mind. Know where you want to go. This is an excellent starting point for following a new road map in life. I may not reach the final destination marked by the big X, but I will definitely land somewhere. This is the most important habit for me as I take the Web 2.0 course because I want to balance time on a computer with so many other worthy endeavors. I especially want my lessons on the web to be effective  and  goal oriented as well as creative.

Habit 6 – Use technology to your advantage. This will be the most challenging habit for me because I think it involves a certain level of comfort with the variety of platforms to to be able to incorporate them into my every day life and lessons. I want to be conversant enough to know which is the right medium for what I want to accomplish.

Habit 7 – Teach or mentor others. This is not the easiest habit for me but it is the best option in the list. The best way for me to learn and retain how to do something is to teach it to someone else. So my family just may have to participate in the family blog this summer so I will remember how to work with it when the fall rolls around.