Week 5-Web 2.0 and Tokbox

I thought that making the Tokbox reflection this week was very nice. The thing that I’m finding frustrating or challenging about oral reflections is that you can’t go back later to edit. I planned the topics that I wanted to discuss, but then as I watched it again, I realized that I went a bit off topic in one part. It wasn’t bad enough to warrant redoing it because I liked the rest of it. Because of what we were using, I couldn’t just redo that one part. Whereas with a written reflection, I could have fixed it when I edited it. I’m not sure if that was for lack of planning or just how oral reflections happen.

I enjoyed looking at the Web 2.0 tools that were not covered in class. I used picnik.com to edit photos that were taken at my church’s VBS. You can see the end results in the previous post. The other tool I will be reviewing is polleverywhere.com which was to focus of my screencast. I haven’t chosen the other two yet. I hope that we get to discuss them in class on Wednesday because I want to know what everyone else found.

Merging of Worlds

Using the photo editor picnik.com, I was able to edit pictures taken at my church's Vacation Bible School. Check out the fun they had this week.

Week Four-Screencasting and Wiki Making

This week I went about the homework in a different order by doing the projects and then reading the chapters. I personally do not find Audacity and Jing as easy to use as Richardson, but they are good resources to know and understand.

I really enjoyed making my screencast. It is my hope that I can do a lot more of them in the future for professional development of the staff at my new school. I am very happy with how my first one turned out:

The time limit forces me to plan on only the specific/most important details that I need to show for instruction. It think most individuals like to play around with sites once they get the basics down to figure out what features work best for them. While I agree with Richardson that some people can sound robotic/un-natural when reading from a script, having a lot of “ums” distracts me from the message. If I was having students create, I probably would have them submit a script to me and have them read from it until they get comfortable enough to compose “on the fly.”

There are several free podcasts that one can subscribe to on iTunes. One of my favorites is GrammarGirl. She gives a daily lesson in grammar about grammatical questions that her readers/listeners ask about. There are others that I used to subscribe to, but it became overwhelming, so I had to pare down.

With the Wiki that I created, my goal is to use it as an example for other teachers next year to show them what they could create to promote communication within their classroom. I think parents could find this especially helpful so that they know what’s happening in a classroom and where they can go to find resources, especially if their student forgot their homework at school.

The Globe Theater

These images of the Globe Theater in London were taken in 2001. It is very useful to show students these images during an introduction to a Shakespeare Unit so that they can get an idea of what the area looked liked where Shakespeare's plays were preformed.

Week Three-Google Reader

There was a theme in last week’s blogs on how my classmates do not like Twitter. This week, most of them seem to like the RSS feeds. I am the opposite. I like Twitter much better than the RSS feeds. I think part of my problem is that I like to look at pieces of information in their original format. I would rather go to the blogs to read the entries than read them in Google Reader. Part of it seems redundant as well to have both a Twitter account and RSS feed for information. Most of the blogs/people that subscribe for RSS I’m also following on Twitter. So, they will tweet that they have a new blog post, so I go to it that way rather than looking in the RSS feed. If I’m following them on Twitter, I don’t really feel the need to follow them on RSS. To make items public in Google Reader, one has to star them; this seems the same to me as re-tweeting. I’m not seeing a big difference, just that I like Twitter better. I’m glad that there are several ways to keep track of the information so that everyone will be happy. I think that I will most likely stick with Twitter in the end.

The Flicker account was pretty easy to set up. I’m not a big picture person, so this is going to be more of a struggle for me to get into this.

On a side note, I now know why my students hate when I assign them to justify the name of a chapter.

The World of Wikis

You know what I would like to see, someone’s blog failure. Typically, one doesn’t want to publish their mistakes, only successes; however, some of my greatest lessons learned have come from my failures or the failures of other teachers. I would like to see a list of things to avoid when blogging or making a wiki. The only things that I have come across so far are protecting the students from “the evil blogs and internet” and to have expectations/rules. What are some other things that didn’t go well and should be avoided?

I made a wiki for my class this year. I only let the students be readers, and I used it post information. Now I’m wondering what projects I could have had them post on the wiki. As a LMS, I feel comfortable helping another teacher set up a wiki, and the readings have given great examples. However, as I start going through each piece in my head of how to start a “well used wiki,” I quickly get overwhelmed.

The points about Wikipedia have been very interesting this week. I honestly didn’t know there were so many advocates of Wikipedia. I think I’ve turned a corner, but it is very challenging to take Wikipedia as a credible resource. This might just be one of those things that will take a long time for me to change my thinking. I’m open to it, but it will just take time.