learning about web 2.0

Wow!  I can not believe that I actually completed all 23 tasks.  I had virtually no technological experience before this class.  E.mail, word processing and a few Internet searches were the extent of my technological exposure.  Shelley’s course was amazing.  I know that I never would have been able to complete it without the meticulous instructions that she provided and the incredible amount of support and feedback I received from my coach, Patty.  Web 2.0 exposes you to a lot- more than I was able to fully digest in that period of time, but as the next few weeks pass and I have an opportunity to go back and “dabble” in some of the tools that Shelley introduced, I feel confident that I will become more comfortable and then begin finding ways to translate all of this into exposure in the classroom and web 2.0 learning for my students        . 

Our world is changing at lightning speed.  Our students need to be prepared for how the world operates in the 21st  century.  It is up to us as teachers to prepare them.  This course opened the door for me.  It is now up to me to continue learning and preparing my students to become responsible and effective 21st century learners.

I really enjoyed searching  Classroom 2.0 and Ning.  Classroom 2.0 reminded me a lot of facebook with its comments and posts.  I found lots of interesting and valuable comments and ideas.  One person posted a comment looking for another classroom teacher who might be interested in collaborating with his classroom on their experiences throughout the year.  I thought this was a great idea.  It would be a fabulous way to have students connect with other students their age in other parts of the country or even the world.  One idea was to have students from different classroom talk about their experiences on the first day of school and compare them.  This would be great for an elementary classroom.

I also found that classroom 2.0 is an amazing resource for getting ideas on how to use technology in the classroom.  The video section had some “adds” for different apps on your ipod that you could use for teaching math and reading skills.  It definately got me excited and motivated to try out some of these things!

Creating my very own “bare bones” podcast was a great experience.  I do not like speaking into microphones or hearing my own voice, so I had to get over that.  But otherwise, it was a very positive experience.  I was thrilled to see how easy it was to create a podcast.  I can definitely see many uses for it in the classroom.   You could use a podcast to give homework instructions or instructions on anything that students who are more auditory learners might find helpful.  You could do a podcast of your classroom lecture for students who are sick for extended periods or are otherwise unable to come to school.  In first grade, we could use it to record each child saying one thing or reading one sentence about something we have learned or are learning.  in preschool, teachers could do a podcast of reading favorite stories that students could access and listen to at home.

In my google reader I recently found an interesting blog from Successful Teaching which listed several great websites for various apsects of education.  The article is called “Useful Information In and Out of the Classroom” and gives a great link to a fun math/baseball website.

I have now been introduced to page flakes.  It is a very interesting concept and a little overwhelming to me.  I can see it having a tremendous amount of usefulness in the classroom.  A teacher could set up a page flake for the class with a calendar of events on it, homework assignments, bookmarks for good age- appropriate books and then a note or message board for students to leave comments about different books they have read.  There could also be links to math websites and games.  You could have an RSS feed to some current events that the class is studying.  The list could go on and on.  I am looking forward to getting more comfortable with pageflakes and hopefully using it in my own classroom someday!

This week I explored Google Docs.  I have to say that I do think it is great to be able to have several people have access to a single document simultaneously, but I had trouble working with the document and did not find it as easy to use as I had hoped.  First, there were not as many font options as I would have and then I was unable to change the font size on certain lines.  I also had trouble inserting a web address.   Otherwise, it was relatively easy to use.

But I did think of several ways to use google docs in the classroom.  One idea was to use it in first grade for creating a story.  Each student could go online and add a few sentences to the story and see where is leads us.  For Social Studies, it could be used to make a graph of how many people we know in all of the states in the country.  Each student could go on the document and list a person or persons they know is each state.  We could see if we could cover all 50 U.S. states.  It could also be use for a history lesson to research how schools or anything have changed over time.  Students could interview their parents and/or grandparents and ask them ways in which school was different when they were growing up.  There could be certain categories such as recess, cafeteria, subjects studies, etc.  Another ideas was to make a classroom “poster” for the beginning of the school year and have each student upload a photo of him or herself and write one thing about themselves on the document.  You could then print it and put it up in the classroom as a way that we could all get to know each other.

I have just been searching youtube for the first time- believe it or not!  It is an amazing site with lots of useful videos for just about everything!  I concentrated on searching for videos relating to first grade and found some funny ones, useful ones and some that were not very helpful.  I would say that the only real problem that I have with youtube is having to search through all of the useless stuff in order to find things of value.   I found two teaching related videos that I was very excited about.  One was called “Modeling Guided Reading” and was more for teachers than for students. But it gave lots of good insight into how to help struggling readers as well as emphasized the importance of guided reading for these students. The other video I want to mention is a video of a young boy who is starting his first day of first grade.  It has a very “catchy” song that goes along with the video and some cute clips of the young boy getting ready for school.  I thought this would be a great video to show my class on the first day of school.  I thought it would be funny and help them to relax and get excited about the new year and ease some of the jitters that all first graders seem to experience on that first day.  Here is the video to view.  I thought it was very cute!

I have just been introduced to pod-casts for the first time.  I must admit that I found it extremely frustrating at first.  This is mostly due to the fact that I need a new computer.  Every time I clicked on a podcast to “view”,  I got an image of a dancing sheep.  This sheep is actually part of a video that I had downloaded for my daughter several months ago.  It will NOT go away!  Anyway, all this got me very frustrated with pod-casting and then I found a great podcast on education from NPR and now all is good.  I enjoy listening to NPR the very rare chances that I actually have a moment to listen to it.  Now I can download and listen to it whenever I want!  This is great!   I listened to a podcast on Barack Obama’s plan to tie teacher pay to student performance and found it fascinating.  I subscribed to this feed and am looking forward to hearing more pod casts in the future!

I have just spent the morning investigating Library Thing.  I do happen to love books and so especially enjoyed the website.  It has given me a way to find books that will interest me based on the books I have already read.  The comments on the books were very insightful.  I am now extremely eager to read several new books! 

I think this could be great for students to find books that interest them as well.  I hapened to spend my time searching for books of personal interest to me, but I did see that there were posts about several children’s books.  It could be a great resource for teachers to help students find books that they will enjoy and this keep them reading.

I have just been introduced to the delicious website for social bookmarking.  It is a great tool and I am looking forward to using it more in the future.  For now, I have just tagged sites for education, but I am looking forward to using it personally for tagging recipe websites, shopping websites, etc.  The website is very user friendly which is great.  Here is a link to my delicious account.  http://delicious.com/jswohlberg