week 3

Where do I begin with this week.

There are a few things I would like to use in the future from this week. We watched a discussion about where schools will go with the added research we now have on brain activity and memory. I was intreagued by the conversation we watched and the opinions of the pannelists on where our school system is going to be in 40 years. After viewing the program, I went on and watched the 2 million minutes youtube video. I plan to use that link at our spring staff meeting right before I start my presentation on wikis.

A very useful thing that we have been using in class is the Etherpad. I found it to be useful and now my brother is going to be logging in on it from San Diego during one of my classes. The students will then be able to ask him questions on the etherpad about the neuroscience that he does for a living. I look forward to using this demonstrate the way people can collaborate online being far from eachother.

I am still learning more about the RSS feeds and started my list of interesting ones. I have done away with the newspaper and plan on using the computer for my news from now on.

This week we also started a chess blog. In our chess club, we now have a small grade level tournament. I have been doing the brackets by hand but now I am going to post them on the blog so that students can see the results online. I wonder if the students could even challenge eachother to chess online to play their games??

So much to learn, so little time.

Blogging in school, week 2

I learned a lot about blogs this week. I have never really spent any time reading people’s blogs and I now find it a great source of information on just about anything. I am inspired to start my own personal blog about school and what is going on each week. When I saw the one that Bryan created, I was inspired and felt like I could actually do one myself. I feel that I should know how to blog successfully before I require my students to start blogging. Something that I worry about is how critical a parent could be about anything I might put in my blog. It would be an easy way for a parent to find fault in a teacher. If I had a few misspelled words or inaccuracies, it could blow up into assumptions that I am not a great English teacher or something like that. With that being said, I would really like to start a personal blog and then become more comfortable with it before I make it public. Once I have done that, I will think about having student’s blog. As of right now, I am very satisfied with the wiki sites we created through PB works.

Cedu 534 Digital Media Day 1

We started the class by going over the syllabus briefly. The next thing we did was to locate our wolfmail accounts and passwords. Once we were all logged in, we examined a few video clips.
The first one was "When I become a teacher". It consisted of a number of teachers with either bad attitudes or worst teaching practices. It made you think of teachers with those attitudes. What we need to do is learn best practices and to pursue them with every subject.
After that, we watched the shift happens video. It makes you think about how schools and countries are changing. It makes you think how rapidly things are changing in our world. The jobs we need to train students for do not even exist yet.
The thing I enjoyed about the class was that we spent time on the computer actively researching. I was able to find some good blog sites I could use for my science classes. One I found was a blog called wired science. There were a lot of cutting edge science discoveries and I could include a link to this site on my web site. Prior to class, I had never heard of Technorati.
One more thing that we did was to examine a blog called WOCSD Tech Talk. The blog was made up of fictitious remarks that teacher who is not susceptible to change might make about technology. We all know those teachers who are not interested in change, and who will do what they can not to change.

Class 1