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I thought that both Ning in Education and Classroom 2.0 were really interesting. I can definitely see expanding my use of these sites as I grow more comfortable with everything we have been learning. As I try putting into effect blogging and wikis, and all the rest, I can foresee the need to communicate with other teachers about challenges and better ways of doing things. I liked how you could watch videos of conferences, much like our online conference “thing” while feeling very personal.

The Social Networks in Education wiki is phenomenal. I look forward to accessing these resources as I widen my experiences in the classroom with Web 2.0 learning. One of the sites on the list was for international collaboration with students around the world. I think that The Epstein School is an ideal environment for that kind of work. It makes the pen pal letters of our childhoods seem very small. Waiting all that time to get a response to a letter you probably forgot about.

A recurring idea for me, and this relates to social networking , is to see an interest or a task to explore and retain the focus of the task, so to avoid swimming in too much information.

I followed a link from Vicki Davis’ The Cool Cat Teacher blog to a page called TPCK. It shows a venn diagram of how technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge intersect. I found the diagram strangely comforting. It is easy to feel overwhelmed with all this infusion of technology we have been exposed to in this course. Seeing it balanced by pedagogy and content made me relax. We have to learn how to use technology in the classroom to teach 21st century thinking, but we still need to know how to teach, and we have to know our subject matter. I think using a venn diagram like this can be practical in lesson planning to keep the balance in the forefront of our thinking. Otherwise, it is quite easy to imagine technology taking over all aspects of the classroom environment. We have to remain cognizant of what our goals are from the beginning and try to remain true to them as we bravely try more and more technology based activities

More information keeps raining (or should I say snowing) down on us. Pageflakes is like RSS on steroids. Having said that, it’s quite fun! At the very least, now I am beginning to understand how much of what we see online is created. I copied Shelley’s template, deleted some things and added others. It was more of a personal pageflake page than a student one, just everything being on an adult level. It’s definitely not a great tool for someone who is ADD/ADHD. I think I’m heading in that direction myself.

I can see creating a pageflake page around leadership for 5th grade. Combining Pageflake with a wiki for students contribute their work as they engage in experiences related to leadership. I’m beginning to tire of learning so much about Web 2.0 in such a short amount of time. I think I am ready to get practical and find out about how teachers are going to be supported while getting this going for the first time.

I had started receiving Google Docs this past spring related to my son’s football team. The first time I got one, I was just paralyzed, not knowing what to do. Now, of course, I know what to do. In June, I created a word document as an itinerary for a trip to NY. I knew that my family (with the exception of my 17 year old nephew) would not know how to use it but I pretended anyway.

For this assignment, I created a table in word for participants to add a book they have read over the summer. There is one column for writing how you connected to the book personally. I want voice to be present whenever possible in student work.

I explored the spreadsheet and presentation areas, and was quickly flooded with ideas about how to use them. I think that after we have the students trained on how to use this, we should enlist them to train their parents. Just imagine: if you want to have a particular document signed by parents, why not have them visit Google Docs and “sign”. Then, I can go to one place to see all the signatures instead of going through a pile of papers and using a checklist.

Asking students to put a homework in Google Docs is another way to go. Worksheet type homework can be a Doc to be done online. How easy to check everyone’s homework in one place. No pile of papers without names to go through. No more checklists. Hooray!

YouTube has an amazing range of material. I am familiar with what my kids like to watch, and some of the popular political videos from Jib Jab. I decided to search with broad topics. First, I searched “democracy” and found quite a bit. Most would be over the heads of 5th graders. I decided to go for more current event type of topics and searched form global warming. The video embeded above is from the Blue Man Group. It is very entertaining but it is persuasive at the same time. I found other videos related to global warming and decided to watch one that promoted the need for humans to change their ways, and one that promoted the idea as media hype. I thought it would make an interesting study to look at the way ideas are presented in the media and identify the persuasive arguments.

On TeacherTube, I found this video about the 21st century classroom. It’s really a slide show you read. It emphasizes three main points about learning: competition, cooperation, and collaboration. It was very inspiring and gave me many ideas about how to facilitate learning. The first step is perhaps most simple – organize the classroom for learning to foster competition, cooperation, and collaboration. Interestingly, the competition presented is both within the classroom, but more importantly, with students in others places in the world. The real competition in their future in the 21st century.

This was so easy. I didn’t write out what I was going to say because I like the idea of being able to use this technology in a direct and simple way to communicate. I actually was able to embed the podcast into my blog on the second try which is very good for me!

I really tried to manage my time when I sat down to do this task. I watched both videos and then, got started listening to podcasts. I listened to two student produced podcasts: 1)6th graders explaining Canada’s Federal Election, 2)5th graders in a podcast called Willowcast on the American Revolution which included narratives, poetry, and vocabulary theater. Another one called Muggle Cast #153: Life from Portus was like a radio program with multiple cast members discussing Harry Potter and anything having to do with J.K. Rowling. The personalities made it interesting. I also checked out Grammar Girls Quick Tips which is more for aspiring professional writer’s than elementary students. Lastly, I listened to someone on the History Podcast read a paper he wrote on Langston Hughes during Black History Month.

I ended up subscribing to at least 4 podcasts on itunes. It was a mixed bag but I’m looking forward to listening to them once I get them on to my device which is not an ipod. I’m very excited about this because I love listening to this kind of stuff in the car.

This was fun! I signed up for an account straight away because I know I will use this tool. I started to add Cynthia Rylant books to my library and gave them tags. I am becoming more comfortable in general with how to use tags. I even did the power edit to add and remove tags from several books at a time. I need to spend more time exploring the group function. But since this is my first year in 5th grade, I figure I will be adding many new books to my repertoire. I am relieved that my computer skills are improving. I am using the tabs in Firefox much more efficiently, and del.ico.us really is helpful instead of going to Bookmarks. This was a good “thing” – useful and not too difficult to get a sense of how to use it. I hope to be back on track with the 23 Things by this weekend.

Delicious is delicious but very fattening in terms of time. In our “culture of distraction,” it is a fine mind that can stay focused on the original task while swimming in the sea of information. I tried to stick to the task at hand. I explored delicious and got comfortable with various tags. I tried to limit my browsing of sites so I could get back to the task at hand. I’ve gotten somewhat better at right clicking to open links in a new tag which is very useful. I signed up for a delicious account, and imported my bookmarks from Firefox. I even deleted my husbands sports sites from my delicious account. I added sites and tagged them, and even copied descriptive text from the site and pasted it into the descriptions. I created a bundle for Web 2.0. I added the shared tag k12learning20 to several sites. I also added several people to my network (i.e. Shelly, Vicki Davis and just about all recommended. I think I am off to a good start. I will continue to refine as I put the site to practical use in the classroom.

In Random Acts of Journalism, Andy Carvin attends a conference for journalists and ponders what skills need to be taught in schools for citizens to participate in our democracy. The following question sums up his post:

“How many people have within them the knowledge of how to form a local group and us the group to change the structure or their society?”

Now, that is a great question! He continues to think about journalist and citizen journalists. Anyone with a camera phone and an active online presence can be a citizen journalist. The idea that random acts of journalism is or should be a part of our culture. What kids are doing today online in social networks as citizen journalists is not taught in schools but instead comes from their desire to interact with their peers.

I think teaching our students to be citizen journalists is a great idea. Any learning that plugs into peer interaction has great potential.

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• Recently Written

  • Thing 22: Ning in Education
  • Thing 7C: RSS feed
  • Thing 21: Pageflakes
  • Thing 20: Google Docs
  • Thing 19: YouTube
  • Thing 18: 3 Uses for Podcasts in the classroom
  • Thing 17: Podcasting
  • Thing 16: Library Thing
  • Thing 15: Delicious
  • Thing 7C: Random Acts of Journalism