Last week, we learned about a neat way to share your work in public called creative commons. This type of copyright allows a creator of a work to share parts of it that they want other people to use. I loved the idea of this because it connects people together creatively allowing them to collaborate and expand on each other's works and ideas. Creative commons allows you to create your own free license for your work which could include a blog, a website, a song, an online piece of writing, and much more, and let the viewer know which parts of it they can use in their own work or expand off of.
We also explored Flickr, an online photo sharing website which allows you to upload personal photos and organize them, and also search for photos and download them to create your own personal gallery. Although I am having a rough time setting up my Flickr account, I am very excited to start using it to find photos that I am interested in and set up a gallery for many people to view. I love personal sites like this that you can create and be creative with, and I am very excited to post my pictures along with interesting ones that I find online.
One more thing we looked at last week was Google maps and Google earth. I really enjoyed using Google maps and I loved hearing about all of the different ways that a teacher can use it in their classroom. I especially liked the idea that was mentioned about using it to locate all of the places that Shakespeare has mentioned in his plays. Integrating Google maps into history and language arts would be a very effective visual for students. You can also type out a description to each location that you mark. I did a Google Map on my Study Abroad strip to London this Summer. It was neat to see my routes drawn out on a map and see where the countries that I visited were in relation to each other.
All of these technologies are very fun and useful, not to mention FREE! You might have to play around with them a little to get used to them(like I am still doing with Flickr and Google Earth), but once you master them the possibilities are endless.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Friday, October 5, 2007
The Advantages of Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a great way to get organized and have a convenient way to access all of your favorite web pages and resources. I am very excited to begin using social bookmarking myself. Right now, all of my favorite websites are listed under my "bookmark" tab on my web browser, and to find one that I want to look at I have to scroll down and find it amongst a wide variety of websites. I have a lot of pages listed, so picking one out of this long list is rather time consuming. With social bookmarking, I can tag my websites and organize them in a way that will be easier for me to go to the ones I want. For example, if there is a specific recipe website that I want to look at, I simply click on the tag marked "cooking" and there they are! I don't have to scroll down my long list of websites and finally find the one I am looking for smashed between a page on Amazon that I bookmarked, and a UTube video. Also, if I am on a different computer, I can easily access my bookmarks by simply logging into my del.icio.us account instead of waiting until I get home to be able to see them on my own computer. It's very convenient!
Social bookmarking can also be beneficial in education for students. Through social bookmarking, users can invite other users to browse their websites. If students are doing reports on the same topic, they can bookmark certain web pages pertaining to that topic, and invite their peers to access them too. That way, the students are getting double the information. Although some of the websites might be the same, there is a good chance that students will have at least one website that other students did not find.
Parents can also use social bookmarking to simplify their online lives, but they can also use it to stay in tune with what is going on in their students' lives and how they can stay involved themselves. In my future classroom, I could have a tag that is especially for parent resource pages that could range from information on disabilities, behavioral problems, ways to get their child involved in the community and the school, and future school and community events that they should be aware of.
I think social bookmarking is a great tool to use to share favorite sites and information. It is also a great way to organize your online world. I already cannot wait to clean out my "favorites" section on my bookmark tab and transfer them into my del.icio.us account.
Social bookmarking can also be beneficial in education for students. Through social bookmarking, users can invite other users to browse their websites. If students are doing reports on the same topic, they can bookmark certain web pages pertaining to that topic, and invite their peers to access them too. That way, the students are getting double the information. Although some of the websites might be the same, there is a good chance that students will have at least one website that other students did not find.
Parents can also use social bookmarking to simplify their online lives, but they can also use it to stay in tune with what is going on in their students' lives and how they can stay involved themselves. In my future classroom, I could have a tag that is especially for parent resource pages that could range from information on disabilities, behavioral problems, ways to get their child involved in the community and the school, and future school and community events that they should be aware of.
I think social bookmarking is a great tool to use to share favorite sites and information. It is also a great way to organize your online world. I already cannot wait to clean out my "favorites" section on my bookmark tab and transfer them into my del.icio.us account.
Monday, October 1, 2007
My morning at the Technology Conference
This past Saturday morning I attended the Technology Conference at Erickson Hall. From it, I took a lot of good ideas and resources involving technology that I can hopefully use during my internship year and in my future classroom. The first hour was a general introduction about different ways that you can use free technology resources in your classroom. It covered a lot of the information that we have been covering in CEP416 including Blogger, Wiki and del.icio.us. It made me very thankful that I am actually taking the CEP416 course this semester because it was very hard to get the full affect of the resources just through the presentation in that short amount of time.
The first session I attended was called "Using Technology to Promote Authentic Learning." To be honest, I didn't get much out of this presentation until the very end. The point that the presenter was trying to make through the activity that he was having us do was that you can do that activity or other activities with your own class and take pictures of them as you go. Then you can upload the pictures into a presentation and study them, looking at what each student is doing and how they are engaged in the activity. From studying these pictures, the teacher can then decide how they can change their strategies to fit the engagement levels of the different students, and how they can promote the best learning possible for each student as an individual. Basically, he was telling us how the teacher can use this particular technology to improve their teaching.
The second session that I attended was very informative. It had to do with integrating technology into language arts and social studies. The different sources of technology that were presented were podcasts, Google maps, classroom wikis, digital stories, and different types of literacy software. I especially enjoyed the ideas of the podcasts and the digital stories. Using these resources, students could actually create a version of a historical event or story that is their own while also showcasing their creative and imaginative abilities. By doing this, I believe that the students would better absorb the information and be able to retrieve it more effectively in the future by thinking back to this activity.
For the most part I enjoyed the technology conference, and I am very glad that I attended it because I got some great resources and ideas that I can hopefully integrate into my future classroom. It also made me even more happy that I am in CEP416 and that I have a whole semester to experiment and learn about some of these different technologies more in depth.
The first session I attended was called "Using Technology to Promote Authentic Learning." To be honest, I didn't get much out of this presentation until the very end. The point that the presenter was trying to make through the activity that he was having us do was that you can do that activity or other activities with your own class and take pictures of them as you go. Then you can upload the pictures into a presentation and study them, looking at what each student is doing and how they are engaged in the activity. From studying these pictures, the teacher can then decide how they can change their strategies to fit the engagement levels of the different students, and how they can promote the best learning possible for each student as an individual. Basically, he was telling us how the teacher can use this particular technology to improve their teaching.
The second session that I attended was very informative. It had to do with integrating technology into language arts and social studies. The different sources of technology that were presented were podcasts, Google maps, classroom wikis, digital stories, and different types of literacy software. I especially enjoyed the ideas of the podcasts and the digital stories. Using these resources, students could actually create a version of a historical event or story that is their own while also showcasing their creative and imaginative abilities. By doing this, I believe that the students would better absorb the information and be able to retrieve it more effectively in the future by thinking back to this activity.
For the most part I enjoyed the technology conference, and I am very glad that I attended it because I got some great resources and ideas that I can hopefully integrate into my future classroom. It also made me even more happy that I am in CEP416 and that I have a whole semester to experiment and learn about some of these different technologies more in depth.
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