Well, this class has finally gotten me around to look at all of those extra buttons that are listed at the top of my gmail account. The two that I like the best are Google Calendar and Google Drive. The advantage of Google Calendar is it interfaces so well with so many mobile devices and it can be shared with one or more individuals. My wife and I have now integrated our calendars so we can better organize and coordinate our time to prevent conflicts. It operates in real time so there is no lag from when you update it to when your shared parties (my wife in this case) will see your updates. I also like how you can color code your time to categorize your activities. I have work, school, and personal/family time commitments on my calendar. This could easily be used in education to have several school categories to organize your day. You could divide your day up by subject material or administrative versus teaching activities.
Google Drive looks like an amped up version of Google Docs, which I have used in school to fascilitate group projects. This tool also allows you to have your work always backed up, and you can access your files anywhere there is an internet connection. Now, with Google Drive, you can include video and audio files to your personal cloud, and it allows for better management and organization of your data. As a teacher, you could have lesson plans or PowerPoint presentations on your Google Drive as a backup system or in case you forget your thumb-drive.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Crane's Thing #11
With all of the blogs to be accessed, I can certainly see the need for a search tool to find appropriate RSS feeds. I found the Google Blog Search the easist to use as far as a search tool is concerned. Maybe I'm just used to using the google search feature that made it seem so natural to me.
As good as Google Blog Search is to search for specific terms, I didn't find it as helpful if you were looking for a more general category. I preferred Technorati to perform this type categorical search. You could still perform a text search, but they had drop down menus from very general categories to fairly specific categories. I also liked the rating guide that Technorati provided that let you better evaluate the quality of the blog.
As good as Google Blog Search is to search for specific terms, I didn't find it as helpful if you were looking for a more general category. I preferred Technorati to perform this type categorical search. You could still perform a text search, but they had drop down menus from very general categories to fairly specific categories. I also liked the rating guide that Technorati provided that let you better evaluate the quality of the blog.
Crane's Thing #10
I always wondered what that orange icon was on all of the websites I frequently visited. Well now I am officially on Google Reader! The main thing I like about RSS is that it saves my valueable time! Instead of searching at each site individually, Reader is doing all of the work for me. I have initially signed up for:
- 2 cents worth
- dangerously irrelevant
- The History Blog
- Free Technology for Teachers
- Miami Dolphins Blog
Crane's Thing #9
It's time to jump into the world of image generators. I decided to start off my image generating journey in a happy mood by creating the smiley face below. The link to generate this is image can be found at http://www.images-graphics-pics.com/signs/smilies/sign-generators.asp?page=1 . The process is really simple. All I needed to do was find the smiley face I wanted to use, then type in the text that would be displayed in the sign. The website clearly explains that you only need to right-click and select "save image as" to save the image to your computer.
I also used another image genearator called "word mosaic" that can be found on http://www.imagechef.com/ic/word_mosaic/ to create the grim picture located below. This image generator allows you to pick the temlate that the word art will use. After you enter the one to two words for your text, you can modify the background and text colors. You can even select certain words to "higlight" in the mosaic by making them a different color.
Besides being fun, I can actually imagine using both of these image generators in a classroom. You could add these images to PowerPoint presentations to draw students attention to certain facts or prepare them for the next set of facts. In my history class, my smiley face image could be used to discuss early american exploration, and the skull image could introduce a lesson on the bubonic plague.
I also used another image genearator called "word mosaic" that can be found on http://www.imagechef.com/ic/word_mosaic/ to create the grim picture located below. This image generator allows you to pick the temlate that the word art will use. After you enter the one to two words for your text, you can modify the background and text colors. You can even select certain words to "higlight" in the mosaic by making them a different color.
Besides being fun, I can actually imagine using both of these image generators in a classroom. You could add these images to PowerPoint presentations to draw students attention to certain facts or prepare them for the next set of facts. In my history class, my smiley face image could be used to discuss early american exploration, and the skull image could introduce a lesson on the bubonic plague.
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Crane's Thing #8
Well, this is my introduction to mashups! I decided to start out simple and try one of the mashups listed in the APSU 23 Things. I figure it was like trying to walk before running. So, below is my use of the Spell with Flickr mashup. This mashup was very easy to use, and I especially liked that you could click on a letter image you didn't care for until one came up to your liking.
I also looked in the Flickr App Garden and found an interesting app called where, what, when. It shows a google map of the earth with areas highlighted where Flickr photos have been tagged. You can click on a geographic are (like Japan) and several images from that area will appear. You can have recent Flickr addtions appear or "interesting" Flickr photos. The link to this site is below.
http://whatwherewhen.jgate.de/
I think Flickr is an easier way to share photos online. I think it is an interesting way of connecting with people from other cultures by communicating through images. In a classroom, you could use the where, what, when flickr app to look up images from a geographic area being studied for a Geography class. Other mapping mashups would let you use your own tagged photos to superimpose on a google map. This could be use to track and share a vacation or a school trip.
I also looked in the Flickr App Garden and found an interesting app called where, what, when. It shows a google map of the earth with areas highlighted where Flickr photos have been tagged. You can click on a geographic are (like Japan) and several images from that area will appear. You can have recent Flickr addtions appear or "interesting" Flickr photos. The link to this site is below.
http://whatwherewhen.jgate.de/
I think Flickr is an easier way to share photos online. I think it is an interesting way of connecting with people from other cultures by communicating through images. In a classroom, you could use the where, what, when flickr app to look up images from a geographic area being studied for a Geography class. Other mapping mashups would let you use your own tagged photos to superimpose on a google map. This could be use to track and share a vacation or a school trip.
Crane's Thing #7
I opened a Fickr account and uploaded two photos, and then I "shared" them with you below.
The top photo is of my daughter's bed made up before bedtime. The bottom photo is of my son's bed made up for night-night. Did you think he has enough stuffed animals? And yes, he requires them to all be in bed with him before he will settle in for the night! When I check on him it reminds of that scene from E.T.
Flickr is pretty neat and very easy to use. The only other site I have used to share photos is Facebook, but I do like how easy it is to set who can see your photos on Flicker. As far as education is concerned, I'm not sure if I would use it for my classroom. Any photos I would share with my class, I would have on my computer, jump-drive, or google docs. I suppose if I went on vacation or a class trip to a historical site, I could share the photos with the whole class using Flickr. That would allow me to keep my Facebook account separate from school.
The top photo is of my daughter's bed made up before bedtime. The bottom photo is of my son's bed made up for night-night. Did you think he has enough stuffed animals? And yes, he requires them to all be in bed with him before he will settle in for the night! When I check on him it reminds of that scene from E.T.
Flickr is pretty neat and very easy to use. The only other site I have used to share photos is Facebook, but I do like how easy it is to set who can see your photos on Flicker. As far as education is concerned, I'm not sure if I would use it for my classroom. Any photos I would share with my class, I would have on my computer, jump-drive, or google docs. I suppose if I went on vacation or a class trip to a historical site, I could share the photos with the whole class using Flickr. That would allow me to keep my Facebook account separate from school.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Crane's Thing #6
I selected the eHow (http://www.ehow.com/) website/tool from the list of Web 2.0 award winners because I have seen links to eHow in the results of Google searches. I wanted to further explore the site itself and see its potential use in a traditional education environment, like my future classroom.
eHow is a resource that links users to over 2 million instructional posts created by experts of that respective field. This resource is an education forum at its foundation since it is basically a How-To-Do-It-Yourself website. You can search directly for a topic through the text search box or browse through a multitude of content topics. Although I like and use Youtube as an instructional video source, I see the value of trying eHow first. eHow will inherently filter out any noise that you would have to search through on Youtube since it only shows instructional or educational content. If your toilet breaks with guests on the way to your Superbowl party, you need a source that directly gives you step-by-step instructions to diagnose and fix your toilet in a hurry! Youtube has many videos on this, but you will probably have to filter through all of the toilet jokes and bored kids blowing up toilets. eHow will take you right to several posts by experts with many of the newer posts including video for you to follow along. Each post also allows users to make comments to the instructions or help out other struggling viewers, thereby making a community of eHow users. The downside to eHow is the instructions on a specific topic that you are looking for may not have been posted, yet. Also, I think a more advanced Search engine would prove helpful at narrowing down many of the topics. As of now, you have the choice of viewing results with everything, just articles, or just videos.
Aside from these drawbacks, I think eHow is an excellent resource that can be applied to a formal education setting. Not only can teachers find instructions on how to create different lesson plan formats, but eHow could be used as a source of differentiated instruction. For example, I searched for "Quadratic Equation," a topic I assure you I remember very little about. I found articles describing how to solve these equations or teach the topic. I saw videos that did the same, as well as videos describing the everyday applications of quadratic equations, such as in the creation of contact lenses (who knew!). As for a classroom, sometimes a teacher cannot get through to a student no matter how hard a teacher tries. Why not direct that student to another format to receive step-by-step instructions on a difficult topic?
eHow is a resource that links users to over 2 million instructional posts created by experts of that respective field. This resource is an education forum at its foundation since it is basically a How-To-Do-It-Yourself website. You can search directly for a topic through the text search box or browse through a multitude of content topics. Although I like and use Youtube as an instructional video source, I see the value of trying eHow first. eHow will inherently filter out any noise that you would have to search through on Youtube since it only shows instructional or educational content. If your toilet breaks with guests on the way to your Superbowl party, you need a source that directly gives you step-by-step instructions to diagnose and fix your toilet in a hurry! Youtube has many videos on this, but you will probably have to filter through all of the toilet jokes and bored kids blowing up toilets. eHow will take you right to several posts by experts with many of the newer posts including video for you to follow along. Each post also allows users to make comments to the instructions or help out other struggling viewers, thereby making a community of eHow users. The downside to eHow is the instructions on a specific topic that you are looking for may not have been posted, yet. Also, I think a more advanced Search engine would prove helpful at narrowing down many of the topics. As of now, you have the choice of viewing results with everything, just articles, or just videos.
Aside from these drawbacks, I think eHow is an excellent resource that can be applied to a formal education setting. Not only can teachers find instructions on how to create different lesson plan formats, but eHow could be used as a source of differentiated instruction. For example, I searched for "Quadratic Equation," a topic I assure you I remember very little about. I found articles describing how to solve these equations or teach the topic. I saw videos that did the same, as well as videos describing the everyday applications of quadratic equations, such as in the creation of contact lenses (who knew!). As for a classroom, sometimes a teacher cannot get through to a student no matter how hard a teacher tries. Why not direct that student to another format to receive step-by-step instructions on a difficult topic?
Crane's Thing #5
What does Web 2.0 mean to me? From the perspectives I have read, I have come to understand Web 2.0 as being socio-platform that acts as the foundation for a new digital infrastructure. School 2.0 is just an extension of this idea that is specific to how we can use the Web 2.0 platform for education. Before Web 2.0, people had to learn how to code HTML, or rely on someone else, to post information on the web. Web 2.0 democratizes access to our global network by separating the content from the coding rules of the format. Now, anyone with access to the internet can tap into digital infrastructure.
The best summation of School 2.0 that I ran across is coined by Chris Lehman, who said School 2.0 "... is about pedagogy." I find viewing the education application of Web 2.0 through this lense of pedagogy very enlightening. It liberates educators from being constrained by proprietary software tools to the freedom of mass access, or even the freedom to re-think the meaning of effective instruction. As a social studies teacher, I can now incorporate the idea of Web 2.0 into modified Behavioral Objectives, whether in the cognitive, affective, or psyco-motor domains of learning. For example, having students create a digital collage of comparing the civil rights struggles of the Progressive Era and the 1960s transcends this from Bloom's Analysis to Synthesis. Have the students add commentary reflecting their thoughts and judgements about these eras now increases the cognitive level to Bloom's Evaluation and Krathwohl's Valuing. All of this pedagogical flexibility simply by allowing students access to the same web platform they are already mastering through social-networking on their personal time. This helps bring relevancy, not just of context, but of application and access of information.
The best summation of School 2.0 that I ran across is coined by Chris Lehman, who said School 2.0 "... is about pedagogy." I find viewing the education application of Web 2.0 through this lense of pedagogy very enlightening. It liberates educators from being constrained by proprietary software tools to the freedom of mass access, or even the freedom to re-think the meaning of effective instruction. As a social studies teacher, I can now incorporate the idea of Web 2.0 into modified Behavioral Objectives, whether in the cognitive, affective, or psyco-motor domains of learning. For example, having students create a digital collage of comparing the civil rights struggles of the Progressive Era and the 1960s transcends this from Bloom's Analysis to Synthesis. Have the students add commentary reflecting their thoughts and judgements about these eras now increases the cognitive level to Bloom's Evaluation and Krathwohl's Valuing. All of this pedagogical flexibility simply by allowing students access to the same web platform they are already mastering through social-networking on their personal time. This helps bring relevancy, not just of context, but of application and access of information.
Crane's Thing #4
How does commenting on other people’s blogs develop a
community? Well, if no one ever
commented on blogs, they would only serve as open journals for people to
read. One of the main purposes of a blog
is not only to share thoughts and ideas, but to create a far-reaching forum
where people can respond and contribute.
When people regularly comment to a blog, they enable the discourse of
the blog topic to progress further than even the original author could have hoped
for. These individuals that regularly
return to a blog to share and interact with others truly form a community; one
in which people’s thoughts are valued, readers learn, and members of the
community help one another.
The two main points I found important from reading the blogs
on commenting are encouraging discourse and the proper etiquette in disagreeing.
First, if a blog is to work as a vehicle
to encourage community interaction, it is the responsibility of the author to
ensure this as the facilitator of discussion.
This can be a range of actions from responding to comments yourself to
asking open-ended questions to illicit comments, to knowing when to let others
lead the discussion. Just like in
teaching a class, I suspect this is a skill that takes practice in order to do
well. Second, I found it important that
the topic of proper etiquette when disagreeing with others on a blog was
addressed. It is only natural, and
sometimes desirable, to have people disagree with the author’s or other
commenter’s viewpoint. However, many
times the dissenting opinion is given in a very disrespectful way or the person
being disagreed with gets very defensive.
There is a body of research that concludes that schools often time fail
at teaching students how to disagree (or be disagreed with) in a proper
manner. Like all things, this is a skill
that must be learned and practiced, and the blogosphere seems to be a great
place for current students to practice!
Once again, this falls on to the blogger to intervene when necessary, or
even model proper responses to disagreements.
This is a blog by Elizabeth Paige Samples. I chose her blog because I think she is having the same type of experiences I am having in starting my own blog for the first time. Just like me, she had a hard time trying to come up with an interesting name for her blog. Unlike me, she actually succeeded!
In an effort to increase my own frequency of commenting on
others’ blogs, I have listed the blogs of five of our classmates and two
outside blogs that I commented on and why.
Vanessa Green 23 Things
I chose Vanessa’s blog because I recently met her as a
fellow GA, and I have always had an interest in fine guitar playing. I commented on her blog that I appreciated
her sharing her experiences applying the 7 ½ habits to her learning the classical
guitar. I think it is important to
remind students that are struggling to learn a difficult task that it is okay
to struggle. How else to do this but by
sharing your own experience with struggling with a task.
EDUC 5540-81 23 Things
This blog is by Jeri Thomas, and I chose to her blog because
I like her sense of humor. I commented
on her blog that describes how she would like to use a blog to help her
students learn a foreign language. I
commented that I thought the process was very similar to how my wife assists
her violin students. By creating a video
of themselves practicing, it allows them to not be as nervous and better focus
on their practice session. I would think
the approach described by Jeri would be very applicable to providing one-on-one
instruction across many disciplines.
Wordwhiz23things
This is a blog by Miranda Coots that I chose to comment on
because I liked her approach and enthusiasm for teaching English. I also thought she has a great name for her
blog! I commented on her blog about how
I thought her enthusiasm for the English language will serve her well as an
English teacher. Being able to
effectively communicate is often overlooked by students, but it is a vital
skill that employers actively look for.
Samples of Learning
Adventure in Learning
This is a blog by Jessica Miller that I chose since she wants to be a social studies teacher like me. I liked her ideas on how she planned to use her blog to communicate with her class. She also plans on providing extra resources to her class through her blog like video clips of famous speeches. That reminds me of how many professors provide additional material to students with D2L.
This is a blog by Jessica Miller that I chose since she wants to be a social studies teacher like me. I liked her ideas on how she planned to use her blog to communicate with her class. She also plans on providing extra resources to her class through her blog like video clips of famous speeches. That reminds me of how many professors provide additional material to students with D2L.
Dangerously Irrelevant
I chose this blog because it discusses current issues and thoughts on today's teaching climate. A recent post posed an open question and discussed why do we have separate teaching standards for every state. An earlier post discusses reasons that teachers may be resistant to incorporating technology into their classrooms. I can certainly appreciate a blog like this that takes a candid look at relevant issues and views in education.
I chose this blog because it discusses current issues and thoughts on today's teaching climate. A recent post posed an open question and discussed why do we have separate teaching standards for every state. An earlier post discusses reasons that teachers may be resistant to incorporating technology into their classrooms. I can certainly appreciate a blog like this that takes a candid look at relevant issues and views in education.
The History Blog
This blog just feeds you with stories that relate to history that often get lost in normal news feeds. It does not necessarily approach topics from a pedagoical stance, but does provide content that can enrich classrooms or help a teacher make a topic more relevant to students.
This blog just feeds you with stories that relate to history that often get lost in normal news feeds. It does not necessarily approach topics from a pedagoical stance, but does provide content that can enrich classrooms or help a teacher make a topic more relevant to students.
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