I am amazed. I am amazed at the resources available to educators on the internet via this little machine we call a computer. Not only is there a wealth of information out there in cyberspace, but now there are also innumerable ways for us to interact with that information and to interact with each other about that information. Therefore, human beings are presented with a fresh, new reason to be involved in the learning process via technology. It’s social. You don’t have to be a computer “nerd” anymore to love doing something on the computer besides playing games or searching for facts. It’s not just about an individual interacting with a machine. It’s about creating slide shows and viewing the slide shows of others; it’s about designing wikis or responding to other people’s wikis; it’s about conducting interviews or book reviews via a podcast or enjoying the product of somebody else’s podcast; it’s about making a video about something you’ve just learned or watching countless productions of other talented, eager videographers; it’s about blogging about a stimulating topic or responding to somebody else’s blog because that person really made you think . And whatever students or teachers produce via the technological tools now readily available to them can be viewed by any number of people from one to dozens to hundreds to thousands, even millions, depending on the size of audience they want or command. Yes, I am amazed. Web2.0 learning is social, academic, creative, challenging, broadening, and endless in its opportunities for teachers and students. It throws open the door to life-long learning. It promises to stimulate and energize the learning process. It certainly isn’t going away. It’s already well on its way to revolutionizing education, and any school or educator who doesn’t come along on this voyage will be missing out on a whale of a ride.
I have applied and been accepted for membership in Classroom 20. I have looked at individual members and forums and watched several videos. I found a great site on vocabulary from one of the videos. It’s called WordAhead. It would be a fabulous way to do a word of the day in homeroom! I found the tags to be quite useful. If I wanted to review a concept I’ve learned, I could access the information easily on this site by using the tags on the right hand column. I did review several things, just to see if I could learn something new. I did a review of GoogleDocs, for example, and podcasting. One of the reasons I want to join this site is that I think this would be a great place to get resources, and it would also be an easy way to stay in touch with what’s going on in classrooms across America. I found several teachers asking for other schools to collaborate with their schools on various projects involving blogs and wikis. I hope to do some kind of collaborative project this year. This would be a great way to connect with other places, even other countries. Finally, I think I might have found a social network worth my time! Facebook has seemed to me to be a waste of time, but Classroom 2.0, I think, would be interesting and beneficial.
I found a great video of students singing “Living in a Digital World” on the NCTE (National Council of the Teachers of English) ning. This video was shared by member Karen Rose, a third grade teacher from Melissa, Texas. Having been a member of NCTE for many, many years, I was interested in visiting their ning. I joined it because I noticed that there are many aspects of this site that could benefit me as a fifth grade English teacher. It’s not just for high school. As a matter of fact, there is a national conference for elementary English teachers to be held this November.
On the ning School2.0, an international site, I found under Photos a great picture that might help answer my burning question posted on my wiki, “What will the classroom be like in 2020?” This picture, entitled “Future Clasroom 2,” was taken by John van Dongen, an educational advisor in the Netherlands.
Ever heard of Wetoku? It’s a a free service for quickly conducting, recording, and sharing video interviews using your webcam. I watched a sample. It seems to work best if you remain relatively still in front of the camera.
Under Free Technology Today, I went to a site that led me to a YouTube video introducing Picasa 3, which is free sofeware from Google. This was important to me because I have had some trouble in the past importing digital pictures that were the right size. After watching it, I saved this video to Delicious for future reference.
After visiting various pages that use Pageflakes, I began to see the convenience of having a homepage with many quick references to frequently visited sites. I added Shelley’s template and embedded my slideshow. I noticed that it was not centered, and that bothered me. I deleted flakes that didn’t interest me and added some that did. Then after spending time on Pageflakes, I noticed that Google has a page that does the same thing. I went there and was easily able to apply what I had learned from Pageflakes to make a homepage on Igoogle. I found it to be user friendly. Upon my return to school next week, I will experiment with using either Pageflakes or Igoogle as a homepage. I liked having both dictionary.com and wikipedia in one gadget on Igoogle. I didn’t like the fact that if I wanted to view a Youtube video, it took me to the Youtube page. I would prefer getting only the video and enlarging it to fit the whole screen. So that is a negative. I can see that using one of these homepages would save a bit of time, but it’s all so fast anyway. For example, there is a Google search in the corner of any homepage and I have Delicious appearing on my menu. I do like the concept. I will continue to experiment with it. The idea of having a personalized homepage is appealing. The types of flakes that I found most useful professionally were Dictionary.com, Wikipedia, Google research, Grammar Girl podcast, Google Earth, and Rss feeds. For personal use, I like having the headlines, weather, and directions on hand as well.
I have spent some quality time working with Google Docs because I know so many people who use it for everything. I copied and pasted a Word document into a “word” document in Google. I also uploaded another document from Word. I created a spreadsheet for a summer reading book tally so that we can see how many students read each book. I’ve been wanting to do this for years but was too scared of Excel. I still have questions, but at least I did it. I explored with color and fonts and adding and deleting cells. The printed version looks really nice and it will facilitate our tallying of novels read. I will share the document with my peers upon their return to school, and we can all three use it! Collaboration, that’s the key! I also took Shelley’s survey and made one myself to be used early in the school year. I asked some really interesting questions and used a variety of types of questions. Some of the questions were related to my students’ understanding and use of technology. I shared both of these documents with Shelley and Debbie Stephens and Susan Jack. I also made folders for my documents. I will always save things on Google Docs that I want to share with the other fifth grade teachers. We all teach reading, and it will be easier to share through Google Docs than e-mail as an attachment. I love Google Docs! What a great tool!
What I don’t quite understand yet is how I can use Google Docs for editing student writing instead of having them turn in their writing on paper. I want to discuss this with Debbie. Don’t I need a paper trail for grading? I’m sure I’m just not seeing this clearly yet.
I did make a podcast today using Audacity. I didn’t realize that the bare bones podcast would be limited to 60 seconds, and I had planned to do a podcast of a story that I wrote in a simplified version so that I can play it for my English classes when I assign them a nonfiction narrative. Every spring I ask the students to write a story about an animal, and then I tell them a story about a dog that I had when I was their age. This year I want to let them listen to the story by listening to my podcast. Then after they write and edit their stories, I plan to have them do podcasts of their stories and include music and sound effects. My story, entitled “The Story of Chip,” is not k12learning20 worthy. I didn’t know that it would be published for this class. In my ignorance, I thought it would be for my personal use only! Oops! Oh, well, please don’t listen to it. It’s very melodramatic. This experience does show to go you (good spoonerism, eh?) that it takes much preparation time to make any presentation worthy of publication. You never know who could be listening! I have learned that podcasts can be as simple or as sophistocated as one chooses to make them.
In addition to having my students do podcasts of their nonfiction narratives, I also plan to have each of my three English classes record several of the grammar songs that I have written. I have wanted to do this for YEARS! Now I know how–at least I know enough to get the job done with a little help from my friends. Debbie Stephens helped me use Audacity today. Thank you, Debbie! I am looking forward to learning how to use the many facets of Audacity, now that I am no longer afraid of it.
YouTube is my new best friend. Yes, I spent the entire day on it exploring and having a marvelous time. Yes, I will use this unbelievable resource next year much more than I have in the past. I am grateful that Woodward makes this resource available to teachers. It’s simply a matter of giving us as teachers access through our computers and blocking the student computers. The following videos will become part of my classroom presentations:
This is a great “how to” video of a fifth grade student explaining how to write an effective persuasive paragraph. I definitely will use this video before I assign a persuasive piece. Here ’tis:
I viewed an interesting video showing “how to” encourage students to rid their writing of overworked words. This video shows students carrying tombstones of ordinary words to a graveyard and conducting a funeral service for these words. What I especially liked about the video was that on each tombstone are listed the survivors to the deceased. They are effective synonyms for the overworked words. Showing this video would be a great way to introduce the need to upgrade language in writing by selecting powerful word choices. Here’s the video for anyone who has the patience to attend the funeral.
Another effective YouTube video that I came upon is a book review of a picture book entitled The Magic Violin with music playing softly in the background.
I could use this YouTube video as a way to introduce book reviews to my reading students. Because they read AR books each week, they are regularly finishing books and recommending them to others. I want them to write reviews for one another, and I want to be able to use their reviews from year to year by posting them on my class reading wiki. This embedded video could be used to illustrate an effective way to write their own book reviews by following the example above. The students would first introduce books they have read by enticing readers into the stories and then asking questions about the books to provoke their classmates’ curiosities.
I found a teacherTube video called ABCs of Writing, which is a group of early elementary students reading a book about writing.
In the video students pronounce each letter of the alphabet in alphabetical order and read a writing-related word that begins with that letter. I have actually done a similar exercise with a novel we have finished reading–dividing the students into groups and allotting a certain amount of time for the groups to generate their own words related to the novel, thus having a friendly competition to discover which group can devise the most words. This activity provided a great way to conclude our discussion of the novel. This time, however, I could add technology to the lesson by having the students think of words related to writing, write the words in cool fonts and colors on a word processing program, and then make their own slide shows. They could draw or take pictures or find pictures on Flickr to illustrate the words they select. Then they could upload their pictures and make videos narrating the word choices they made. If time permitted, I could have the students provide an example of each word as the picture book in the video does. For example, if the word is edit, the picture book shows an example of a page being edited with proofreading marks. I plan to do this activity after studying the traits of effective writing and/or the writing process. I could show this video from teacherTube to introduce the assignment. My activity would require much more time, effort, and thought than the model, which is quite elementary and simply entails students reading a book aloud. The students would also need to know how to produce a video. I don’t know how to do that yet. How much harder is it to produce video than it is to make a podcast? Of course, I don’t have to know it all this year. Perhaps a parent or student would be adept at producing a video. This is something I would like to learn how to do, maybe next summer! I just realized what I can do. I can divide the classes into groups. Each group will be responsible for six or seven words, which is a much more manageable project!
Now that I think about it, however, it might be a better idea to relate this project to a novel. It would require a significant amount of “recess” and “after-school” time. If I do the project on a novel that we study, I would have only one class to do this project instead of three (which is the number of English classes I have). Doing a video with three classes is a bit much, I think. In my dreams, maybe. . . .
Now a brilliant musical composition with four amazing violinists, and some magnificent nature images of Israel in a remix of Vivaldi’s, Winter Four Seasons:
I spent much time learning about podcasting today, mostly by listening to podcasts and quite a variety of them. Some are outstanding and can be used as models for podcasts I would like to do. For example, I found through EPN (Educational Podcast Network) a website for Mr. Cosand’s 5th grade Kennedy Elementary School in Medford, Oregon, that includes a podcasting section, which I subscribed to on my RSS Feed. I listened to his students conduct their own podcast about a Sharon Creech book, Love That Dog. For two weeks the class had done a collaborative study of the book with a class on Long Island.They analyzed some of the poetry that is in the book. One such poem they discussed in their podcast is entitled “Dog” by Valorie Worth. They used that poem as a springboard to write their own animal poems, which, of course, several students recited on the podcast. The poems were delightful, full of rich, colorful words and figures of speech. There was soft music playing in the background as the children read their poems. This class teacher, Mr. Cosand, really has his technology and reading curriculum acts together. Imagine all of the things going on in this class for a production like this to occur! I was impressed with the collaborative, creative, and technological aspects of this lesson plan.
I also went to i-tunes and downloaded it to my home computer. Then I downloaded subscriptions to several podcasts on i-tunes and listened to them. That took a while! I listened to Grammar Girl’s podcast, “Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing,” on the use of “which” clauses in a fragment for dramatic effect. I also downloaded a subscription to “B&N Meet the Writers” on i-tunes. Today’s interview was with C.J. Box on a recent novel. I’ve not heard of the author, but I liked him on the interview. I also got a subscription to “Meet the Author” and heard a really fascinating interview with Mary Pope Osborne on the history of her Magic Treehouse series as well as her plans to make #29, Christmas in Camelot, into a musical.
I had a lovely day in the world of podcasting. I long to add this dimension to my students’ English/reading experience. I know it will be painstakingly tedious to do it the right way in order for it to be of high quality, but oh how rewarding it would be for my class to be as involved as the one I referenced at the beginning of this blog. I did hear many others which I did not subscribe to because they were ordinary. Students simply took turns reading reviews of school events, news, or concepts they had studied. I didn’t find any of that interesting; but to collaborate with another school in the reading of an exceptional book and use a poem in the book to encourage the students to write original poems themselves and then discuss the book and the poems on a podcast–now that’s something I’d like to emulate!
Wow! I could live at this site all day! I joined, of course. I’ll probably become a life member for a mere $25. I went to Zeitgeist and to the cloud of authors. It was a trip down memory lane. The authors are in alphabetical order. I noted many children’s authors in the cloud. A few I saw are Roald Dahl, Katherine Paterson, Lemony Snichet, R.L. Stine, and even Laura Ingalls Wilder. Then there are a few of my favorite authors from every decade of my life and every genre: Umberto Eco, Hermann Hesse, Hemingway, Homer, Henry James, C.S. Lewis, Carolyn Keene, Sue Monk Kidd, Jack London, Flannery O’Connor, John Piper, Chaim Potok, Eugenia Price, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Thackery, Thoreau, Twain, Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Wordsworth, just to name a few. What fun! I visited some of my favorite books and read reviews of them because I’d forgotten why I loved some of them. It was like visiting old friends. Then I visited the tag cloud. That was interesting. I went to groups and joined the Children’s Fiction group, went to their accompanying website and signed up for the newsletter and put them on my RSS Feed and added the site to my Delicious account. I will definitely benefit as a teacher from reading this newsletter, and I plan to involve my students in the website. It has book reviews, latest books, books made into movies, and many other topics very interesting to fifth graders. The table of contents at the top makes it very user friendly. I plan to put this up on my wiki as a great place to visit!
Of the Highly Effective Life-long Learning Habits, I find #2, accepting responsibility for my own learning, to be the most challenging. When given an opportunity to improve my teaching by taking an on-line course, I seized the day–the first time! Then I tried again and couldn’t do it! Finally, three’s a charm. I will do it, no matter what. I know that technology is the means by which many children prefer to learn, and I know that today it is crucial that we teachers become as adept in technology as we are in our teaching fields. And, of course, I want to make my subject one that students will look forward to each day; technology will help me to do just that. The easiest habit will be to create my own learning toolbox because I know that it will be invaluable later on when I need to apply all that I have learned. The most important habit is #7, to teach and mentor others. I want to be able to integrate technology into all of the concepts that I teach because I believe that students will be able to learn more information at a faster pace by learning to use the technology that is now so readily available to them! I also welcome the opportunity to help other teachers incorporate technology into their lessons.
