Can blogs and wikis be searched?

I went to the Wikispaces homepage, and started to experiment with creating a new wiki from scratch. A suggestion came up to go experiment in the "sandbox" wiki first, so I did that. Somewhere in the Sandbox, I read a post where someone said that blogs can be searched by search engines, but wikis can't. This doesn't make sense to me, since entries on Wikipedia come up in Google searches. Does anyone reading this post know for sure whether blogs and / or wikis can be searched by search engines, and if so, whether that can be blocked (other than by paying for a private wiki, that is)?

Characteristics of a 21st Century Classroom:

In response to the Kiva Math article, I have to say the one thing that struck me the most was this idea of a global learning community. Isn’t that what 21st century skills are all about anyway?

For someone that is pretty technologically savvy, I’m not as digitally savvy…but my students are. The problem we face as educators is, how do we teach these students, who are so digitally savvy… literally taking in the world via the filter of computing devices: the cell phones, handheld gaming devices, PDAs, and laptops they take everywhere, plus the computers, TVs, and game consoles at home, to be media literate? to be global citizens?

If 21st Century (and frankly any century) learning is supposed to be interdisciplinary, project-based, and research-driven; curriculum should be connected to the community – local, state, national and global. The classroom is expanded to include the greater community, and this is where the use of digital technology comes in. The only issue here is that most students are not using the technology for this reason, but are using it for entertainment and social networking….which is great, but this alone is not enough.

I agree with Ruthie that we cannot shortchange ourselves or our students by getting too wrapped up in the “cool tools” the internet has availed to us. Best practice is still best practice. The curriculum and instruction should still be designed to challenge all students, and provide for differentiation.

I guess I’ll have to play around a little more with some of those “cool tools”…

21st century learning

I'm seeing many different concepts thrown into this idea of 21st century skills. Many of the important ideas regarding student learning are much older than the 21st century. For example, Socrates was looking for critical thinking! But some of the other ideas come from best practices from the past twenty or so year. (Although if we spoke to a teacher teaching for 40, I'm sure he or she would say, "that's not new at all!")

The "best practice" ideas stressed again and again are that curriculum must have a purpose other than test prep or memorization for it's own sake. The most effective educational experiences are connected to the world or an authentic experience. This also means that the students work collaboratively with others and have an opportunity to develop their own understanding or what is being learned through dialogue with other learners. The point of the technology is not that it is electric. The point of using technology is that it helps us to connect to the world, collaborate with each other in new and effective ways, and gain access to a wealth of current information. It also allows us to process and present our learning in new and creative ways.

If I had to pick a classroom with just the best practices or a laptop for everyone without the best practices. (ie, connect the kids to on-line work books, essentially. Plug them in!!), I would pick a low tech best practices classroom. I think "21st century skills" can be misintepreted and turn into "land 'o on-line worksheets. " Early in the class, I read the wrong article by mistake and read about an on-line literacy program by scholastic. While they managed to get all of the proper buzz words into the abstract, the number of times they mentioned on-line assessment began to hint at a program filled with drill and kill. I kept thinking of the individualized SRA reading programs that were all the rage in the 1960s and 70s. They kept us quiet and self-correcting--and definitly not collaborating. Parts of the abstract sounded a lot like SRA on line.

Luckily, we don't have to make this choice. We are encouraged to connect our curriculum, use collaborative projects, and encourage critical thinking--and we have access to technology. True, we'd like more access and less technology breakdowns, but this gets better all the time. We'd also like, (or at least I would), to see a curriculum that allows the pace to slow down a few times a year to allow for really authentic and student directed projects. But we don't have the type of schedule that allows for no deviations or creative pathways--we just don't have the luxury of getting carried away. I've always felt in Sharon that coordinators and administrators want us to explore and try new things. They want to see the children moving and thinking and creating. We're lucky, because this isn't true in some places.

That's it for now...

After responding to a bunch of people's posts on the Kiva article on Saturday, I finally remembered that we were each supposed to use that article to spark a reflection on what teaching and learning would look like in a 21rst-century classroom. Oops, now I've already said most of what I would have said in my own post, in my comments on other people's posts.

To summarize briefly without repeating everything: The thing that most struck me in that article was very similar to what Joe and Steve wrote about -- that the ultimate goal is not primarily for us, the teachers, to use "cool tools" to present content in more and more interesting ways; it's for them, the students, to engage in authentic real-world projects that are made possible by web 2.0 tools.

I think that's very cool!! Other than wanting to find and read about lots of neat examples, my biggest question, at this point, is how teachers make sure to truly teach the "incorporated" standards TO MASTERY, as much as possible for ALL STUDENTS. I have, sometimes, read accounts (of both online and offline projects) where it sounds like teachers are sort of "checking off" standards that they have "covered" through the projects. I'm interested in how you build in enough practice for the average and weaker students to master the incorporated concepts and skills, without interfering with the energy of the project or undermining students' belief that the project is the reason for focusing on those areas in the first place.

Skitch Support?

Hi everyone.

I've registered for Skitch so that I can take snapshots of websites/ my screen, but all that I see when I login is my page: no tools, etc. How do I actually use it? Is the problem that I'v operating with Windows Vista?

Help! ---Thanks, Lauren

Kiva article

After reading Jen's article, I was struck by how she created an atmosphere of global connectedness and change in her classroom. I show Pennies for Change about microlending in Bangladesh when we study South Asia. It is so important to open the curriculum for the students so that they can access it in a meaningful way. Her curriculum decisions have taught children about AIDS, GDP, and small ways to make big differences in the world. She has done this in a math classroom with relatively young children.

I wish all of us had the vision, determination, and time to incorporate more curriculum like Jen did.

21st century classroom

My impression of the 21st century classroom needs to have technology seamlessly available. Differentiated instruction is available in variable forms where students can choose the means that fits them best, be it technological or traditional. Having gone through the grades with the use of computers woven into their academic lives, they view these advances as their allies, without the phobias some of their elders feel. The concept of performing digital tasks is a natural form of expression for them and they are able to take advantage of a vast array of resources, creating professional projects that are beyond what could have been imagined 10-20 years age. Students are able to think of their teachers as not just those that stand in front of them in the class, but those resources to which they are electronically linked. Their classrooms and working groups may involve children from various parts of the world, allowing for a richness of dialogue across cultures. The students are able to communicate with other students whose lives are polar opposites and they are able to work together on projects. The struggles I have had with diigo, wikis, blogs, etc. are nonexistent for them and just as my children have embraced their electronic means of peer communication, that same comfort level will exist for other academic tools. Of course, to personalize this, not only will these students understand their technology well and be able to trouble shoot with ease, back up equipment will be readily available within their classrooms so they never have to feel paralyzed when their equipment fails. And of course, they have no need for technological support, because they "get it" and are able to help themselves.

Creating a 21st Century Classroom

After reading "Math Made Compelling: The Kiva Renaissance," I have a clearer picture of how global learning and technology use can be integrated into the 21st century classroom.   I was inspired by Jen's use of Kiva and really making math come alive.  As a math teacher, I am often revisiting the question "How can I prove to students that they will need these math skills in real life?"  Through Kiva, Jen truly took this concept to a new level and made her students 'emotionally connect to numbers,' a feat that is difficult to reach in an elementary mathematics curriculum.

The students I have in front of me this year are a great group--they have personality, they are responsible, they are self-motivated, and they are usually well-behaved during class.  Because of this, I think that I can try new things and plan more intricate, involved lessons than I have in the past.  This leads me to the question: Will I be able to come up with an idea as profound as the Kiva Renaissance?  I'd like to, but where do I begin?

What are the features of a 21st century classroom?

In all reality - It's impossible to say. At this moment, students in schools like Sharon have access to more information than any students, at any time, in the history of learning. If knowledge is, in fact, power, then that makes our students among the most powerful people on the planet.

What will they do with that power? Do they know their own potential? Imagine all the time and energy put into facebook, myspace, or twitter, being redirected in a much more meaningful direction. Instead of just using the internet to "check in on friends" or to commit other forms of "cyber voyeurism," imagine using the net to become engaged, to discover, and to involve themselves in worlds beyond their own.

Do they have any idea where the net can take them? Just think of how many times you have logged on to the internet and safely surfed the same sites over and over again. Do our students do the same thing? Maybe the most important feature of a 21st Century classroom is a simple exposure to the possibilities.

21st Century Classroom: Kiva math

A 21st century classroom should feature some of the following elements:

- lessons should enable students to make decisions and solve problems

- students should have opportunities to connect to people in the "real world" beyond the classroom

- teachers should strive to connect traditional lessons to other disciplines.

Kiva Response

The key piece to all of these types of student projects is finding things that the students see as being meaningful. Whether it is Kiva or anything else it is all about student buy in. If the 21st century classroom is about creating communication and interaction opportunities with people outside the classroom. So if we are trying to find ways for students to be excited about the curriculum, continue to learn content, and engage with people all over the world there are lofty goals ahead of us. It also should be a goal for kids to begin to monitor each others content knowledge much like you see on wikipedia.

One of the great things about this Kiva project is the idea of global citizenship. This will hopefully allow students to see themselves as part of a global community and expand their universe of obligations.

Clueless

Forgot to tag my wiki and blog so not sure that they showed up over the past few weeks. Tried to go back and fix that tonight.

Kallin Biology Blog

Hey all,

Please take a moment and visit my blog. Just click on the above "Kallin Biology Blog." Feel free to comment, and if you have any cool links to good Biology content, please include those!!

Happy blogging!

At a loss for words

My very first blog and I don't know what to say. I spend all day facilitating oral communication with sixth graders, yet I'm at a loss for words for this blog. Perhaps I could ruminate on the lack of social skills displayed appropriately by middle school students and the adventure I live everyday as interact and teach social skills. It seems as if everyone else is talking about technology. I'm drowning in technology terms and how to navigate and tag websites. I was enthused to see tutorials which would be my saving grace; however, I couldn't see what was on the screen. Lots of instructions, but no visuals. I guess I need to have auditory information supported by visual aids. My other plan to get up to speed in this class was to have have a personal tutorial with my youngest daughter when she was home from college for her fall break, but she ended spending the weekend sick with the flu. Today my computer was misbehaving. I'm hoping that practice in class today will shed some light on this dilemma that I find myself experiencing.

I created my own blog:

My own: i3cs21s09......i think i did it correctly....i tagged it with the i3cs21s09.....let me know if you can find it....

Our role in student technology use

Great thoughts Steve and Andrew!  I completely agree!

I've always been somewhat frustrated that some teachers get labeled as "technology savvy" just because they use powerpoints.  As we are all discovering, there are many forms of technology out there. And although we do not need to master every tool, it's great to expose students to new tools and be able assist them while they navigate.

Especially in 6th grade, it also seems that it's our growing responsibility to teach students how to appropriately use technology.  I have had several students whose parents allow them to create Facebook pages but don't monitor how they use it.  We have also had some students in 6th grade discuss Facebook with teachers and think it's appropriate to friend-request a teacher.  I recognize that many students are excited to use technology but do not know the appropriate parameters.  I'm sure there will be other instances in the future where new boundaries will need to be defined, and we need to continue our efforts to enforce these boundaries and promote appropriate technology use!

Cool tools for schools

This is a helpful site in organizing many web 2.0 tools. Wish I could say that I found it, but someone sent it to me.

Makes Sense

After reading Steve M's post and Shelley's I did some reflecting about some things that I had not considered. Steve mentioned using 21st Century skills as more than just a form of 'presentation.' I completely agree with this thought. Recently I've had students complete research projects and offered the option of creating a video. Many students chose the video option and I was quite pleased with the results. Students either emailed me their projects or gave me flash drives....a far cry from the traditional 'paper and pencil' that Shelley talked about in her post.

I realized that not only do I need to incorporate these skills in my presenting, but to some degree I need to become more comfortable in offering these types of assignments to the students to see where their creativity takes them.

still struggling

I am trying hard to embrace this as a learning method but can't get over how paralyzed we then become when technology fails us. My computer has died and is off being repaired for a couple of weeks. I am now using my school computer which is pathetically slow so each task I do takes an incredibly long time....not conducive to time efficient learning. I know I will be very frustrated until my computer returns and I fear I will be so far behind at that point in time that I may never catch up. It's hard for me to get past the iceberg effect of technological failure and how we then are unable to do things "the old fashioned ways". Pencils never failed us like this.

Lightbulb Moment

Joe C. and I were talking this afternoon about technology in the classroom and the concepts being introduced in the 21st Century class. It dawned on me that teaching a 21st century learner is not so much about the teacher being able to use the technology in presenting the content (through Powerpoints and such), but rather that students are being encouraged and allowed to utilize the technology themselves in discovering and mastering the content.

In essence, our job continues to be preparing the students for the world in which they will work and live. The content and core skills we teach remain as the foundation of that work, and they can be taught in a traditional classroom manner.... Or in a way that promotes not just mastery of the information, but also a mastery of technology as well.

Movie Trivia

1) What was the name of the bar Dalton worked for in the film "Roadhouse?"
2) What was the name of the necklace Rose wore in the movie "Titanic?"
3) The students featured in the film "21" were from what New England college?
4) What color dress did Vivien wear to the polo match in "Pretty Woman?"
5) In what film does a Hillary Duff character try to find mister right for her pastry-chef mother?
6) What song do Miley and Billy Ray Cyrus sing together in the movie "Hannah Montana?"
7) What type of car did every James Bond prior to Daniel Craig, drive in the 007 movies?
8) What actor saw dead people in "The Sixth Sense?"
9) In the Pink Panther film series, what was the Pink Panther?
10) Adam Banks was transfered to the Mighty Ducks from what team?

Minds on Fire article

I didn't have time to read this article once I located it online, so I bookmarked it in Diigo. (Okay, first I bookmarked it in Firefox, then in Diigo). I've had an account there for a while, have bookmarked a few things, but that was it. It was just someplace where I could access my bookmarks regardless of the computer I was using. And to be honest, that was more in theory than in practice. Now I see the benefits of using a site such as Diigo, and how it applies to what was discussed in the article regarding social learning. Not only was I able to highlight material and add comments through the use of sticky notes, but what was really neat, was that I could see what other people had hightlighted and their comments. Part of the last paragraph in the section, The Brewing Perfect Storm of Opportunity, was highlighted already and there was a short "conversation," regarding the problems that these tools create as far as content is concerned. The response spoke of "fear based" decision making around trying to monitor content, commenting that students are out on the web already saying/doing who knows what, and that we need to engage students and help them have more productive, respectful conversations. This example struck me as a participatory medium in action!
I'm also wondering that as we become a more global society, are we also becoming a more isolated society? While our virtual world is expanding, is our physical world shrinking?

Things like Wordle

In a class I was in over the weekend, Wordle was brought up and then people began to share about Tagul and Word Sift. I wanted to share these two tools. They are similar to Wordle with a few different features. To be honest, I haven't really looked at them in depth.

Try out Tagul:
http://tagul.com/
This is a lot more complicated than the Wordle site, but wanted to share it as another tool out there.

Word Sift (http://www.wordsift.com) is another one. If you place text in it, it gives definitions and thesaurus connections. You can sign up for a more in-depth version with more features. Someone in the class suggested that this one is good to use with ELL students.

How to place a Text to Speech reader into your blog!

I was searching some excellent blogs and discovered a way to have my blog posts read aloud. The digital tool is from a company named odiogo. Is was very easy to install. All you need to do to get started is enter your blog url and your email. Click on the odiogo link above to get started. You can also see how it works on my blog.

Using Comments in Word

I just wanted to share a new thing that I've been doing this year with my students' work. I am trying to be as paperless as possible this year. All they do is travel back and forth from my house in my bag anyway, so why kill a tree and tear through my toner.

Instead of printing out copies of questions I wanted them to answer, I had them download the document from the online portion of my class in Moodle. Also, instead of them then printing them out and handing them in for me to review and comment, they are handing it in to me electronically as well. So this year, instead of writing the comments on the printed version, I am using the "comment" tool in Word to provide feedback and their grade. I then hand it back to them electronically for them to see the comments and receive their grade.

I have found more than just environmental benefits to this new method. I feel the students are taking the time to review my comments and many of them have worked on improving their work with out being asked. Before, I would hand back the work and they would look at the grade and toss it aside. Now I see them actually reading what I had to say and responding positively to this new method. It did take a bit to get into the swing of it, but I like it and wanted to share it with you.

Foliage

Hi all!
I have decided to use this afternoon to start my blog. My son is in track so I am going to hang at school if anyone wants to hangout and blog until 330. We can grab a laptop and work in my art room. It is nice to troubleshoot with someone.
Oh and I stayed up in Vermont last weekend! The foliage was beautiful! I can post some pics when I get home. The green mountain area was peak! The place I stayed at had a fantastic view! Check out the link.
DC
www.mountaintopinn.com

Feels like an online course

[This is another thing that I accidentally posted on my own blog but meant to post here.]

Another quick thing that I've been thinking about this course, is that it feels more like a very content-rich online course that I took (through Primary Source), than it does like any other in-person course I've ever taken. While I found the question-and-answer session at the beginning of our last class meeting very helpful, for the most part the place that I'm learning a lot is at home, reading articles and experimenting with the tools. Like the other online course that I took, there is way, way too much information to explore all of it within the time frame of the course (or probably ever), but when that doesn't feel overwhelming it's pretty cool to have been given so many new directions to explore. Thinking of it as a sort of an online-course-with-help-sessions makes me feel better about having to spend so much time outside of class in order to understand the tools.

"Minds on Fire" article and the structure of our course

[Oops, I accidentally posted this to my own blog first, but I meant to post it here.]

I've been thinking about how the "Minds on Fire" article relates to the structure of this course. When I read the article, some phrases and ideas that jumped out at me were:

"Learning to be" a member of a social learning community -- learning its norms, etc. -- tacit knowledge. On the Web you can do a lot of this even BEFORE becoming an expert in the particular content area or skill involved.

Collateral learning / peripheral learning

Access to rich practice-based learning communities

What I'm thinking (sorry if this seems too obvious) is that that's probably a lot of how Dennis is hoping that we will experience this course. He's set up a large array of different ways for us to participate in online communities (even if it's mostly all our course community), and different tools to begin to explore a little bit at a time. We're figuring out, bit by bit, what sorts of things to write where in all of the online community venues, and we're developing this perspective partly by reading each others' posts. With the tools, it's quite possible to start to do "real" things already even though most of us are nowhere near experts with any of these tools yet (as when I tried out that Spezify site that someone -- I think Suzanne? -- mentioned, and lucked (?) into something truly useful for the writing project that I'm doing with my class right now). . . . In other words, one goal / philosophical underpinning of this course is for us to learn the material by experiencing and exploring it in exactly the way that this article says the web is really good at providing: through social learning communities that (unlike, say, a discipline in traditional academia) we can contribute meaningfully to even as beginners.

Confessions of a blogging newbie

Does this ever become easier? It has taken me a ridiculously long time to come up with the few thoughts that I have been willing to post, and really, they've only been comments on other posts. I write, delete, write, delete. Is there a point in time when I might be able to break this pattern of frustration and uncertainty? On another note, I did try adding the class tag to one of my bookmarks in Diigo and am wondering if it "goes" anywhere, or do you have to go looking for it? One last question - Is this the course Learning Commons blog?

Hey - check this out - I added a picture to my blog! I took a bunch of pictures of me with my new make-up that my daughter bought for me for my birthday!
I think I've got it!

My weekend with the Theatre of the Oppressed

This weekend I spent three days in Boston participating in a workshop dedicated to the philosophy and training style of Augusto Boal. His son, Julian, ran the workshop, Oppressed: Forum Theatre Workshop.

It was fascinating to work with so many different people from all over Boston and surrounding area. Boal's goal is to teach people how voice their ideas in a public forum through acting and audience participation. He mainly works with people who are oppressed by their government, factory bosses, family, religion, etc. We played all kinds of fun games where one person was the oppressed and one the oppressor, and as we did this, we tried to find ways out of oppression.

Though I enjoyed the workshop, I came to realize that working in a group is difficult because there are so many opinions. If one person is extremely outspoken, she might bully the group into going along with her idea. Now I know how difficult it is for kids to work in a group and try to solve a particular problem - they must listen to one another and share ideas before coming to a conclusion.

I have been trying some of the warm-up exercises in my acting classes, and the kids are having fun.

Test run!

Hi-
I followed Dennis' video on how to post something on this Blog and it worked! Thank you so much for doing this for us, Dennis. It was very easy to follow.

Do I sign my name?

Interesting video

Where's the dashboard?

I can get from my own blog to here via my dashboard, but once here I can't seem to get back to my dashboard again.

i3cs21s09: How to comment? How tag a comment?

i3cs21s09: How to comment? How tag a comment?
Diana, I feel your pain. I think I just tagged Minds on Fire - with comments, but I'm not sure... I also don't know the difference between a public & private sticky note... Hope this works! - 2 minutes ago

How to comment? How tag a comment?

[I just tried to comment in response to a comment that Dennis made to something I had posted earlier. The site would not take my comment. I don't know why. Anyway, I'm putting it here, instead, since at least I know how to post something here.]

Dennis, thanks for your response. I'm STILL confused about tagging, though. (I had actually watched that video before posting the first time. It was interesting, but did not help with basic-level nuts-and-bolts issues of HOW to place a tag on a post. I understand that better for some things, now, but not for everything. I still wish that those of us who want to, could go through the various course blogs and wiki sites TOGETHER in class and practice placing a tag on a post at each site -- step-by-step, together, slowly enough to do it together and take notes on it. No need to make anyone participate who understands what to do and would find the slow pace frustrating, but I don't think I'm the only one in the course who would consider this a half-hour well spent.)

(Ack, now I don't see how to place a tag on this COMMENT! [Now that I'm being forced to make this a "post" instead of a comment, I see where to post a tag, at the bottom, as a "label". But, I still don't understand how to get the system to accept a comment to a comment, or how to put a tag on a comment.])

It wants me to choose a profile before posting this. [Again, I wrote this while trying to comment to a comment.] I have no idea what that means. I'm choosing "Google Account" just because I have one. . . [As stated above, this did not work. ???????]

Introduction

I am currently in my fifth year as a 6th grade math and ELA teacher at the middle school. I am trying to incorporate technology in both subjects, but it takes me a little while to decide what to share because I always want to feel comfortable and confident with a site before I share it with students in case they have questions. When I have used technology in the past (especially in math), I've seen very positive outcomes. It's clear that many students are very savvy with the internet and can easily navigate through sites and follow directions very well (often better than they do during day-to-day activities). It seems that they like how instantaneous the results are! However, I am wary about this because no matter how far society advances with technology, won't there still be the need for basic task completion, interpersonal skills, and offline executive functioning?

Introduction

Hello All,

I am currently a teacher in the Social Studies department at the High School. This is my third year teaching in Sharon and I have been working to increase the use of technology in my classroom. Even while moving to a more technology based classroom I still have concerns about whether or not the addition of technology is what is best for our students. Is this type of learning teaching them valuable skills for the future or should we keep pushing more traditional practices? Do the students actually learn and develop the skills or does our content just get watered down?

Introduction

I am currently a middle school technology teacher, but I began my career as a 6th grade academic teacher. I taught ELA and Math in Walpole for five years while I was completing my master's degree in educational technology. I loved what technology could do for my classroom and stepped into a role of technology teacher leader for my team of grade six teachers. I would work with them to develop lessons which integrated technology. I would also have the opportunity to co-teach with them until they felt comfortable conducting the lesson on their own. I miss that opportunity to collaborate with teachers and often feel disconnected from the core curriculum areas.

It is a challenge to keep current with the technology that is available today and that is infused in our students' lives.

Interesting Meta-Search Tool

I'm on a listserv that gives great links. I received this one today. It's called Spezify.
http://www.spezify.com

According to Kathy Schrock, Help for Busy Teachers, "...a very fun and interesting meta-search tool presenting results from a large number of websites in different visual ways."

New to Blogging

Hi all,

I teach Biology at the High School. I'm looking foward to learning more about incorporating this type of communication in my classes... Wikis, and blogs, and tags OH MY! See you all in class tomorrow.

Proper Introductions

I realized after reading everyone's blog that I was supposed to introduce myself - which I neglected to do in my first post. I teach 7th grade social studies at the middle school - world geography is our topic. I love using technology and look forward to learning new ways to use it with my students. See you all tomorrow!

Wiki Advice

Hello,

I teach English at the high school, and I would like to start a Wiki for one of my classes when they begin a new novel.

For those of you who have tried Wikis in the classroom, do you have a successful rubric to share for class discussion/participation? I've spoken to some teachers who have used Wikis in class and they said students often post for the mere sake of posting, but don't often have insightful things to say.

Any advice?

Introduction

Hello everyone. I'm a former classroom teacher and presently a technology specialist at Cottage Street School. In this role I assist teachers with integrating the latest technology into their academic curriculum. I also maintain the computers and troubleshoot any technical problems in the school. I'm familiar with many of the getting started tools, but there are some that I haven't tried yet. This course is motivating me to explore blogs and nings further. I'm also finally moving my bookmarks on-line with Diigo. Looking forward to trying out more web 2.0 tools.

Looking Forward to Tomorrow

I'm looking forward to reviewing some of this material, including the tagging, tomorrow. I liked the "White page" reading...some interesting ideas and good topics for discussion!

Tech

I have a smart board in my room and the projector broke today. I now have a white board and a broken projector. I just called the customer service number on the machine, and they told me to turn off the projector and turn it on again. Thanks, like I have not tried that yet!!!

Ride home to Mansfield?

Does anyone in the course drive to or through Mansfield to get home? I won't have a car on any of these Thursdays, and unfortunately the next train leaves pretty late. I live just off of Rt. 106 near the intersection of 95 and 140 (near the Mansfield train station). Anyone go anywhere near there? Any chance I could get a ride home with you, if you do? Thanks, if so!
- Diana Kinney

Intro. and how do you edit a previous post?

Oops, sorry, I didn't actually introduce myself. I'm Diana Kinney and I teach fifth grade at Cottage. I have previously taught sixth grade at Heights and at the Middle School, and for several years I was Math Specialist at Cottage. I'm most interested in learning about information-finding tools; less interested in social networking tools. Diigo looks potentially quite useful.

I would have just added this on to my previous post, but I don't see any way to edit a post after posting it. IS it possible to do that?

[Oh, cool, I just figured it out! You click on the pencil at the bottom of the post.]

Confused about tagging

Hi, folks. Hi, Dennis. I'm sort of confused about requirements. I joined Blogger a few days ago and started my own blog, and spent a while figuring out (I think) how to attach the course tag to my post, but now it seems we were supposed to be blogging here, instead. Do we need to tag these posts, or would that just be redundant? I hope we will spend some time really learning about how to attach tags. I feel like we were told to do it, but not shown how. I've tried reading help pages and introductory pages and watching an online video referenced on the course web site and just looking around the various sections of my blog page, etc., and it seems like I'm spending a lot of time only semi-successfully trying to figure out how to do something that I wish we could just be shown how to do. (For example, at the bottom of this window that I'm typing in right now it says "labels for this post". Is a label like a tag? Or like a category? Should we be labelling these blog posts? And, a few minutes ago the list on the right hand side of this course blog site listed me as a contributor, but I hadn't actually written anything yet -- so, why was I listed as a contributor? Does that have anything to do with my post on the OTHER blog that I set up, which I tagged for this course?)

VISIT MY WEBSITE!

Hello all!

I teach 6th, 7th & 8th grade Art at SMS.
This will be my first time creating a Wiki. I figure I better keep up considering my sons' charter school uses Wikis on edline and have worked with blogger.
We use laptops in art to research master works, multiple cultures and various subjects to aid our creations. I created a website on myteacherpages.com which has been very helpful to students and parents. I hope to find more fun ways to integrate technology in my classroom.

Dianne

It's Already Tuesday!!!

Hi all,
Just blogging for the first time. I joined Facebook on January 1st to see the first of my daughter's wedding pictures from New Year's Eve. I don't write on Facebook... just keep track of the family goings on. I'm looking forward to hearing about ways to use blogs etc. in my 7th grade social studies class.

Sue

Happy Tuesday

I teach social studies at SMS. I am excited to incorporate more technology into my classes. I created a Wiki last year but did not feel that I used it effectively. I do use "standard" technology like mobile laptops, overhead, ppts, etc., but want to expand my usage.

~Sally

More...

That wasn't much of an introduction! I teach ELA at the middle school and would love to use more diverse technology in my class.

I do plenty of powerpoint presentations and I use the projector quite frequently. However, I'd love to make use of this type of technology with the laptops in class.

-Andrew

Checking it out

Hi....just checking out the blog!

My first post...

Hi! My name is Jen. I teach social studies at the high school and this is my fourth year doing so. I am pretty comfortable with wiki and other Web 2.0 applications. I like that most of it has become so user friendly... no need for knowing html codes and other complicated tech items for creating straightforward wiki pages and such.

I have had a wiki for my classes for the past year or so, and I have found it to be a great tool for out of class student discussions, posting documents, and keeping an updated google calendar. I've been trying to teach myself new things, such as embedding different kinds of widgets that may be helpful and just taking advantage of new technologies in general... I hope to continue to improve my skills during this course. One thing that I have been wanting to learn how to do is have my students create podcasts. I'm looking forward to learning lots of skills that I can apply in the classroom during the rest of the course!

trying hard

I am confused but trying hard. Public speaking (and/or writing) is not my thing so exploring all these links and figuring out what it all means is getting me very nervous! Time to go out for some good Italian food and wine. Am hoping I eventually find my way to some info on gross motor development and PT in the schools.