Ilene’s Web 2.0 Blog

I am using the blog format to fulfill the requirements of my database for Children’s Literature – ELMT 7250.  Here is a link to the blog.  My instructor has used the the “Comments” section on many of the entries.

Our school’s use of Accelerated Reader forces teachers, and therefore students, to focus on using the reading level of a book as a way to make a selection.  As the media specialist, I have been struggling with this because I don’t think it is doing a service to the students.  At a minimum, all of our books do not have levels written in them so that book selection at library time becomes very chaotic.  The bigger issue, however, is that we are not teaching the students to be able to select books independently OUTSIDE of our library where AR is the not predominent focus.  I have been researching the various techniques to teach book selection.  The five fingers test is popular and I was recently introduced to the Goldilocks method which I think will be especially appropriate for the younger children that I teach.  I am hoping to do a bulletin board that will explain this process using characters from that story.  This clipart is a little scary but I am in search of a modern-looking Goldlocks.

I also found this selection technique called IPICK performed by second graders in this YouTube video.

I enjoyed the links for this past week’s lesson about blogging.  In our school district, we have just upgraded to a new system for our school websites.  This will also give teachers a readily available format for developing their own websites and/or blogs.  It is a system that is integrated with our email and should be very easy for teachers to use.  I am already using this format as the school’s webmaster and have found it to be very easy and accesible.  The link from the class readings – http://www.sometechsense.com/?p=99 will be a good website for teachers to read in preparation for this.  Although this will be a useful form of communication for some parents, it still presents a challenge for communicating with families who do have a regular and reliable way to access the Internet.  Or, for those members of our school community for whom English is not the primary spoken language in the home.

I also think student blogging in the classroom is a great use of technology.  It is an activity that is focused on the content rather than the technology.  The technology becomes a vehicle for communication.  The use of a blog also does not require a large amount or high investment in technology; it can be done with one computer in the classroom.  The information presented in this week’s material from Discovery Education about student blogging was particularly helpful in understanding how this can be done.  You can find more about this here.

With regard to Internet authoring and communication, the following cartoon from The New Yorker remains one of my all-time favorites.  Although it was written about the Internet in general, it can specifically apply to blogging.  It is interesting that some bloggers are utterly self-promoting and reveal themselves while others thrive on being incognito.

Mo preparing to work on his blog.

I am continuing this blog to meet the requirements for a graduate course at Georgia State University.  Since initiating this blog for the “23 Things” professional learning online course last year, I am now finishing my graduate degree in the Library Media Technology program.  I have passed the GACE and am working part-time as a Media Specialist in a public school serving kindergarten through third grade students.   At the time I started the blog, I was working at The Friends School of Atlanta as an Instructional Technology Specialist, hence the blog’s name.

Below are the comments I posted on the final Voicethread for the course.  I thought the course was great and a “must” for educators K – university.   Although it was time-consuming, I could have spent 10 times as much time.  The hardest part was staying on task.  As you started to experiment with different tools, it was easy to get distracted by an idea or thought about something related.  Before I realized, it was 30 minutes later and I hadn’t progressed with the task at hand.   I also have a list of things that I would like to do as a result of learning about some of these tools.  I will be coaching a group of teachers at my own school in January and am looking forward to helping them discover and apply some of these tools as well as having discussions(yes, face-to-face) about the relative utility of the tools.

The world is changing for all students K – 12 as well as at the university level with regard to Web 2.0 and technology in general. Administrators, schools and teachers must consider and address these shifts by truly integrating these tools which have dramatically and fundamentally changed how we communicate. By embracing the tools and exposing students to them in real and practical ways, we can teach students to become responsible digital citizens.

There were so many great tools that it is hard to say which was the most useful. And, different tools were useful for different things. I think the most useful tools were the ones that were easy to start using with immediate results. I have already begun using LibraryThing, Delicious and Google Docs. As I start using these and other tools, I begin to see new uses for them and ways that they can connect to each other as well as to other tools. It becomes an iterative process. Using all of these tools has put me in the habit of creating tags and thinking about useful descriptions. PageFlakes seemed to be limitless in its potential but also one that will take time and thought to develop practical applications. Creative Commons with its anti-copyright stance was also useful – I could go on and on.

Write a blog post reflecting on your exploration of Classroom 2.0 and any other Educational Ning network you explored. What were your overall impressions? Did you find any discussions or resources of value? Do you have any ideas for using social networking in your own professional or personal learning, or in classroom learning? Please include “Thing 22″ in your post title.

Although I am very skeptical of the value of social networking, I did find some useful information for professional learning and curriculum ideas on Classroom 2.0.  However, the problem I saw was that many of the posts were outdated.  I would assume other teachers are like myself – it is a great idea but hard to keep up with.  I liked the idea of using it as a way to request support or information for a specfic topic and then whomever happends to be visiting the site at that time can respond.  I’m not sure if any of the sites – including the other Ning network sites actually had posts going on with extreme regularity.  Perhaps something related to a current classroom project would be more likely to be active more frequently.  However, I work in a small private school and the opportunity to network in this fashion is ideal and very useful.

I checked in with Doug Johnson and his BlueSkunk blog and was referred to an article in the 11/21 Sunday NYT’s Magazine entitled, “Becoming Screen Literate” by Kevin Kelly.  After acknowledging the omnipresense of video and moving pictures around us, he began to address the implications of this both as viewers and creators.  He compared visual composition with the evolution of literature after the development of the printing press and how that technology changed how and what was read.  Digital video technology has changed the way movies are filmed and edited.  With this editing technology,  the video does not actually have to reflect anything that is real; it can be edited to create whatever the editor/director would like it to be.  This is similar to photoediting as video can be re-constructed literally at the pixel level.  He also spoke about a future ability to search by images in a video.  The example he gave was to search for an example of a “fez.”  With this yet-uncreated-technology, a picture from “Casblanca” would come up with a person wearing a fez.

Articles like this in the NYTs make we want to renew my subscription to the Sunday Times but then cause me to reflect on the pros and cons of this traditional method of news delivery.

After citing this article, Doug referred to something else on his blog which I found particularly useful as I begin my graduate studies in Library Media Technology.  He calls the post “Libraries for a post-literate society,” a most interesting perspective and one which I hope will offer academic discussion and consideration in school. I have bookmarked this for future reference.

Also through Doug’s post, I found a great resource in Kim Cofino’s wikispace, “Always Learning.” This gave me some great ideas for middle school and I will add her to my reader and website.

I think I have spent the most amount of time on this website and I don’t think I have scratched the surface.  The sample Pagecasts were very impressive especially the one about China.  It seems like that one took a long time to prepare and also required one to be very familiar with the tools.  There are obviously many classroom and general educational and professional applications many of which I don’t think I have imagined yet.  I will be coaching this class for a number of teachers at my school and I think it will be helpful for all of us to be familiar with this tool so that we can brainstorm some applications.  I would also help the teachers develop the applications but it would be more difficult to do so if they were not familiar.  I teach middle school Exploratories and I am thinking about setting up a Pageflake with each student having a page.  I would let them experiement with the Flakes themselves.  I could spend hours doing this and I know they could as well.  In professional practice, it is a great way to share websites and flakes that I find with our teaching staff.  The thing I have found most time-consuming and complicated are the podcasts.  I managed to get an RSS feed on my page but was not able to listen to it without it trying to connect to software that I didn’t have installed.  I will continue to try to figure this out.  Here is a link to my Pagecast.

Google docs is both practical and easy to use.  In general, I find myself using more and more web-based tools including Google docs and web-based email in addition to the Web 2.0 tools. 

Part I

I am using Google docs to work on an assignment for a class I am taking.  The task was to create a resource notebook on a special ed exceptionality.  I chose Autism.  Google docs is helpful for a number of reasons.  First, I can work on the document both at home or at school or anywhere else for that matter.  I don’t have to carry my laptop nor do I have to move the document around with a flashdrive or be concerned about tracking versions.  The assignment is supposed to be digital but that could have a lot of different meanings.  At a minimum, it could be a text-based document with live “links.”  Using Google docs, I can also make it a collaborative document whereby other people could add addition information on Autism and austism – resouces.  For example, I state in my resource page that private schools for children with autism are often small, specialized and not widely advertised.  By starting a resource page of such schools in the Atlanta area, a colllaborative page could be a growing resource on this subject.   If this were a group project, this would be the natural way to create a group-authored document.  As I begin my master’s program in Library Media with several online courses, I anticipate this being used for groupwork. 

Part 2 – I have started using the Spreadsheet function to track classroom technology both for inventory purposes as well as budgeting.  We are in the process of moving our school building so I was able to inventory existing technology, see what we needed for our staff, create a budget and recommend priorities.  After we move, I will re-evaluate and propose to maintain an on-going budget with our Technology Director.  This will be a great way to track and keep a budget.  It can be shared with our Head of School and whomever else  might be interested in viewing or contributing.  It could even let the Board see our budget in an on-going fashion rather than a presentation at a given point in time.  I have already started uploading and downloading documents.  I haven’t uploaded everything at one time but as I am working on an on-going document, I will move towards using Google docs exclusively.  The functionality is fine for most tasks.

Part 3 – Uploading, forms and publishing

I started using forms for the above-mentioned moving inventory.  I can see how they will be useful although I think the form options are not that flexible.  I haven’t investigated how flexible they might be. 

 This is my Autism Resource Notebook as published by Google docs.  I am also trying to post it directly to this blog but am having a hard time making this part work.  Maybe it doesn’t work with an edublog but I will keep trying.

I would like to try using Google docus for developing lesson plans in collaboration with teachers although I will need to give some thought to this tool versus the wiki.

This is supposed to be a video about Jamestown.   I am feeling very technically challenged at this point. 

I have seen some great videos and have started using some in my classes.  I am not a classroom teacher but do teach some Exploratories.  I embedded some YouTube videos for my Photography students which showed various techniques of picture-taking.  Of course  the students were quick to point out that one of the videos featured people smoking cigarettes which I hadn’t noticed.  I am working with a fourth grade teacher on technology integration.  We have already started a class blog and will continue to integrate more classrooms activites with it.  I would like to use it to embed some videos as well as plan for the students to make some of their own.  I think the planning of the project is most important as i can see how such a project might take on a life of its own.