chardtimes

Slideshare is very overwhelming at first.  It takes time to find what your are looking for.  I wasn’t a big fan of the regular slide-shows.  It was difficult to figure out was each slide was about.  I loved the slidecasts, however I found it hard to search for a specific topic.  It seems you have to browse of 300 slidecasts, too much time.  I did found two I liked and will use with my staff.  You can find both of them below. 

Again, Google is trying to take over the world.  I love playing with Google Earth, however some of the images are way out of date.  For example, I looked at my mom’s old house in Lodge Grass, MT.  The current owners added and addition over two years ago and the image shows the original house.  I have used Google earth to help me label photos of places I have been but forget to name of the place. 

 
Two of the Web 2.0 tools I played with are Travel IQ and Last.fm. Check out my score below. Last.fm is great is you like music. This class has been great. Like anything with Web 2.o, it takes a ton of time to explore the tools. I will keep on looking and sharing. Thanks for all of the great ideas.

The great world of YouTube.  I wish I was paid for every hour I have spent searching YouTube for videos.  I chose the video titled “Top 10 Reason’s to Use a Blog in the Classroom”.  I chose this because blogging has been our main way of communication for this class.  Also, I thought it would be good to show teachers to help spark an interest in blogging.  I like to video because it is from a student’s perspective. I like the auto fill-in tool when typing a search phrase or word. This lets you see what others have used to search. I also like the related videos section when you watch a video. I can see YouTube as a useful components of a library website. Students could watch the news and/or videos instead of reading about them. This would be beneficial for today’s learners as long as the information is coming from a trusted source.

Podcasting, Hmm.  I can hear the difference.  I listened to one podcast given by two teacher. It was called ”Show 88″ from the The Tech Teachers Show.  Show 88 talked about free graphic editing, iPhone apps, quiz maker for blogs, plus many other educational  and non-educational technology tools.  Teach42.  I tried listening to other podcast, but didn’t get very far.  I would like to find short 5 minute podcast about some tech tip in education.

VoiceThread has many great video.  I liked the one titled “Classroom 2.0“.  I could use this with my staff to show them the power of VoiceThread.  I make my own VoiceThread, see below, for my family.  They loved it.

Flip Video Cameras are awesome.  I haven’t made a video for students yet.  I have been working on getting the video from the Flip Camera to load into MovieMaker.  For some reason, it won’t accept the video from the Flip Camera and I haven’t had the time to troubleshoot the problem.  I have talked with a science teacher about recording the dissection of a cat and sharing it on VoiceThread.  He will start the dissections early next semester.  I cannot wait to see how this is going to work. 

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.

I like RSS feeds because I only have to go to one spot to preview the news.  I was going to many different websites to look for technology news.  I use RSS feeds to keep up with technology news.  I have also set up a Google Reader on my phone so I can check my feeds while I drive home from work.

I added a comment to the Students 2.0 blog.  This blog is written and managed by students.  I commented on the post titled “Where have all the students 2.0 gone?“.  I wrote a responce because if the students aren’t using Web 2.o tools, why should teachers learn how to use them.

Here is a link to my wonderful picture titled WATER.  I took this picture with my cellphone because I didn’t bring my connection cord for my other camera. The was an exciting experience. How many accounts are we going to have to create? I am going to have an extremely long list of user-names and passwords.

Creating the Trade-Card was fun.  I can see this a being a great activity to kick off the year for the students.  A teacher could take their pictures and the students could make cards about themselves.  Or the students could make a card about their favorite animal, person, hobby, sport, food, etc.

My additional blog about technology is how Google is trying to take over the world.  Any comments?

From the Web 2.o class, I hope to gain much wisdom and knowledge about Web 2.o applications.  I will share this wisdom and knowledge with the students and staff of LHS.  This is my goal.  I also want to create a create the father of all avatars.