Learning Web Options

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I found the “Did You Know” video by  Fisch on Teacher Tube.  I have wanted to share that with our faculty for a long time.  Now I can have it playing when I have an opportunity to host a faculty gathering.  Last year we had large flat screen tv’s installed in our classrooms.  Many are already using Teacher Tube to enhance their lessons.  I think I am going to put together a list of “fun things” for our staff to explore over the summer.  Teacher Tube will be on that list.  Perhaps some will accept the challenge.   

Click here to see my awesome slideshow.

This has been a fun task though it took a long time to finish it.  Working under pressure is not my strong suit.  I am still having fun. 

So many possibilities!

For those of us who want to be a social networker Classroom 2.0 seems like the place to start.  In searching around I noticed a post by Schuchi Grover, “The Ideal Technology/ Curriculum for Middle School.  It happens that we are thinking about our middle school curriculum and planning for technology to fit in.  She also had some interesting thoughts on technology taught “stand-alone as a separate subject”.  Adding computer science to the mix instead of just learning software applications is also something to discuss.  I did appreciate her list of tools and suggestions of appropriate grade levels to be taught.  Something else for me the ponder over the summer.  I am open to social networking but I have many other items on my checklist first.  This is a valuable site.

Flickr has been a bit overwhelming for me.  Our school blocks the site, and I have have been somewhat split trying to get the discovery and task completed.  The quantity of photos would be unusable if not for the organizational tools.  I am still a little confused about which are CC and which are not.  I did find some great shots of one of my favorite breeds of dog, the German Shorthair.  I am not sure the link below will work since our firewall blocks it.  Anyway, the  photographer is Payanasa, and he must be a short hair fan as well.

If our kids have access to Flickr at home they could surely use it on many projects.  The 7th grade does a religion PowerPoint presentation each year requiring photos of different countries and religious artifax.  Another class does a plant presentation.  I have never seen such beautiful exibitions of flower photos.  I am sure this will be a useful tool, if only for the faculty with their lessons.

http://flickr.com/photos/25059617@N07/2367691764/

The session that I chose was Anne Davis presenting Classroom 2.0 “Putting the Pedagogy into the Tools”  I particularly liked some of her attributes of blogging.  Giving the students confidence and a voice in a place where they might otherwise have limits seems very encouraging.  She says that “Many students that would be hesitant to speak in a classroom will share their ideas on a blog.”  She also gave attention to the fact that students are more motivated to write if they know that they may have an audience other than the teacher.  They often feel as though they need to do a better job and put more effort into their work if there is a possibility many others may read it. 

The sidebar was full of many great tools I had not heard of.  I liked Animoto, MindMeister and the Newspaper Clipping Generator.  Social studies classes and language arts classes could all make great use of these tools in current event studies, writing and video making.  Again there is so much information for us to sift through.  I am thinking I will spend my summer trying to absorb all of this and pick some of the best ideas for our program here at PCA.

A huge world is effeciently accessable to us with the use of the feeds.  It is quite a time saver.  I have had our 7th grade Art class in my lab this week using PhotoShop for their final projects.  Some great information I have been reading from The Tech Savvy Educator about another program with a painting simulator, is Art Rage.  Ben Rimes has used that with his students for an end of the year project and I am thinking that younger students would learn from this program without having to learn so many PhotoShop skills.  His 4th graders created self portraits–perhaps even younger grades could easily use this program.  I could use this with the 3rd grade in an “All About Me” project.  The students would paint their portrait or follow Ben’s idea to enhance an imported photo.  The students could paint on different hair colors or even add features or hats. 

I have decided to share several of these tools with our teachers for their summer “fun and exploration”.  Perhaps many will come back in the late summer with some great ideas to use in their classes.  For personal use I am going to go to Picnik, Mixbook and LetterPop.  I have tons of pictures of grandchildren to test out the usefulness of these tools.  However, I can see our lower school teachers making class year books or field trip books with Mixbook.  Of course then they could share them online.  Surely, I will have some takers with Quizlet, ToonDoo and xTimeline.  I have already had several requests for timeliners and cartoon tools.  In the Ta-da List, I believe the backpack feature would be a valuable tool for grade levels to use as an organizational instrument.  If people can overcome their fear of using the internet I believe these tools will be quite helpful.

Thank you Shelley for giving us the template for Pageflakes.  I was able to have more time to actually explore all the things I could use instead of creating the page for the first time.  I think I can do that another time.  For teachers I can immediately see how to  use Pageflakes in a number of ways.  I have even sent some information to 2 of our teachers to begin their own investigations.  I really like the discussion opportunities and the ability to embed presentations.  It seems to be an easy way to listen to a podcast–connecting quickly and simply.  Our 7th grade keeps up with current events so here is an easy way to do that.  Another grade studies Greece from ancient history to cultural recipes.  Pageflakes would be excellent for that topic.  Our teachers take a lot of pictures so this would be a great way to manage and use them.

I am once again amazed at the free tools available to us on the Web.  I am including a link here to my published document. 

Each week our teachers send home a lesson aims document communicating the following weeks academics and activities for their class.  I can see that we could possibly use Google docs for a good bit of that communication.  The collaboration could be in planning events, trips or lunches for the class.  Another use would be to assign students a discussion question and ask them to leave their comments and responses there.  What a great way for all of the students and parents to be in on a topic.  I would not always use this method, but I would like to try it to see how it would work.  The presentation option in Google Docs seems a bit limited, however, when slides are imported other options are available.  I was delighted to see that documents could be saved as PDF documents.  That would seem to be a valuable tool when needing to create a PDF document. 

This is a lot of fun–just in case I have not mentioned that earlier.  Its one of those experiences that make me want lots of time to “play” with the computer.  I can see many uses for Evoca.  It is so easy to do that I think I can convince some of our teachers to use it.  I did have a little trouble with the microphone, but that may be my machine here.  I ended up using the phone option which seemed to work just fine. 
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