chardtimes

After looking at many of of the wikis, I found Tim Fredrick’s ELA Teaching Wiki to be very user friendly.  It also contains a ton of useful information and is easy to navigate.  I like how each section has objectives, procedures, and assessments.  This is a great example of a wiki to show other teachers how wikis can be used.  There are many applications that would work well with a wiki.  I am currently using a wiki for students, in my web design class, to post their tutorials.  Wikis can be used for instructional purposes like sharing tutorials, or sharing lessons like Tim Fredrick’s wiki.  They can also be used for share student’s work.  students can post papers, poems, short stories, projects, etc. on wikis and other can leave comments about a student’s work.

I decided to to comment on Week 3, RSS and Google Reader.  These are two tools I have used the most.  There are many ways I would use wikis, one way is mentioned above.  Our tech department is thinking about starting a “tech” wiki for our school.  We could post useful tech hints and tools for the staff to use. 

Google, Google, Google.  They are going to take over the world.  Why???  Because it is so easy to use.  I just sent a google doc to another teacher.  All it took was a couple clicks for the mouse.  The only downside is that google now has rights to that document.  Google docs would work very well with schools.  Since students do not have access to their documents stored on school servers, they need another way to share their docs.  Google docs works for this type of sharing.  However, Google accounts are blocked at school and the teacher needs to set a special account through the district.  This one little step is too much for many teachers. 

Ahhhh Del.icio.us.  I tried using this tool last year, but found it easier to go to my favorites in Explorer than log-in to Del.icio.us.  I could see how it would be helpful if you do not have a laptop that you use at work and at home. I haven’t gotten use to creating tags.  I like the tags set up on the Academy2020things’s bookmarks.  Once the tags are set up, I could see this being very useful for teachers and students, if it was unblocked.  A teacher could set up a list of pages for students to research.  This would assure teachers that students have access to viable sites.

TagCrowd and Wordle are both great tools.  I enjoyed playing with both of them.  I upload my mid year eval to each word cloud generator.  You can see the results below.  I like Wordle a little more than TagCrowd.  Wordle gives you more freedom to edit and change your word cloud.  The one aspect of TagCrowd I wish Wordle had is the word count.  Either one of these tools would be great in the classroom.  It doesn’t matter what level or subject your teach.  Kindergartners could use it to learn the alphabet.  High school students could use it to analyze any piece of writing.

TagCrowd:

Wordle:

Steve Hargadon’s Classroom 2.0 social network is pretty amazing.  There is a wealth of information on this site.  I would love to sit are read all of the posts in the forum, but that would be a never ending task.  I liked cursing through the discussions about philosophy/pedagogy.  There are a ton of ideas out there on the use of Web 2.0.  I also like the fact you can leave a comment and the poster will get back to you. 

Web 2.o means so many things to me.  I think it is a bridge from Web 1.o to the next phase of the interactive web world.  The changes that have taken place in the last 5 years are mind-blowing.  It is hard to keep up with all of the advances.  Once you learn a new technology and comfortable to teach it to someone else, it has changed.  Anyway, since I said Web 2.o is a bridge, I going to run with that idea.  It could be a bridge to nowhere without an end. However, there are many tools on this bridge we can use as we journey across it. These tools make the web interactive and help increase student participation.