We are graduate school students at Appalachian State University. Our group, App to the Fifth Power, is taking a class called Telecommunications in Technology. We are going to discuss a book by Will Richardson called
Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms.
The first chapter brought up some interesting topics/facts...
ReplyDelete- "blog" is short for Weblog
- the presidency this year was immersed with blogs, videos, podcasts, and what they called a "YouTube Campaign"
-we are creating a "society of authorship", where every teacher and student will have the ability to contribute ideas and experiences to a larger body of knowledge that is the internet.
-kids develop hypertext minds, they leap around as though there thought structure is parellel not sequential
-be careful what you write on the interet,"what if someone finds this piece five or ten years from now?"
Chapter 2, Weblogs, was very thought provoking. The suggestion of an online filing cabinet/E-portfolio (p.22-23) was one of them. It suggested that every child post/turn in all their work online in one place from Kindergarten through 12th grade. What an idea! It could even change the graduation project to include proof of growth from K-12. There were some issues though that I thought could squash this idea:
ReplyDelete-ALL students would need access to a computer with internet and that would be very expensive
-Students would need either a scanner or electronic writing tablet to turn in math homework b/c it's too difficult to do the calculation (especially in higher math) on the computer.
-You would need buy in from teachers K-12, a lot of expensive training
-colleges would need to consider adding a course in this to prepare pre-service teachers for this type of assessments.
In addition, creating a blog seems intimidating to me. It's something that I definately need to try but the organization and maintenance of it seems overwhelming.
The last thing that spoke to me was on p.35. "All students had their own blog where they reflected on their process and had conversations with readers, and their sites were open for anyone to read and comment on." When I let my students use gaggle to discuss a book, I blocked outside people and only allowed our classmates to respond. I realize now, that defeats the purpose. Students will learn from comments from their parents, and anyone else that stumbles upon it. As long as I cover what they should do if something inappropriate comes up, or set the setting to where I have to approve any post, there's no reason they can't benefit from others seeing their blog.
This chapter was very informative regarding blogs.
Chapter 3
ReplyDeleteThe first thing from this chapter that our group thought was very important was if we were going to be teachers of this technology then we should also be users. The second thing was to start small. To try everything described in this book at once would leave a teacher overwhelmed.
We were impressed at how easy it is to get started with blogging using Blogger. Students can start their own blogs and teachers can monitor each student blog using an RSS feed. Customization of each blog is easy as well.
Some issues we would have in our school system would be getting permission to use the Blogger service since most things Google are blocked. Second, expectations for use would need to clearly be laid out ahead of time and involve the teacher, students, parents, and administrators. Third, the teacher will have to make a modification (using HTML) to Blogger to prevent users from accessing random blogs.
There are some other blogging solutions that allow more control but these may not be free and/or may require installation and support on the local school server (not likely to happen in our school system).
The first three chapters have been very eye opening, especially as a teacher. I guess because of the fact that they see so beneficial to students and teachers, but are rarely used (at least in the county that we work in). I'm very thankful that the first chapter broke all of the definitions down for me and gave examples of web sites and blogs to refer to. This really helped me understand how they were being used in the classroom. I think that I saw a blog as more of a journal, but the way Richardson explains it, they are more of a "higher order thinking" activity. But, I think that in younger grades they could start out by journaling on a blog....as long as they didn't give out too much information about themselves. I like the idea of students having a computerized-type of portfolio that follows them throughout their entire school career. What a concept! I would love to start a blog this upcoming year, but I need a little experience with it. Like all good educators, I need to know my tool before I teach the tool.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading chapter four! I didn't know that the word wiki was short for the Hawaiian word wiki-wiki. Why didn't I ever put that together???
ReplyDeleteSome of my fears of allowing my students to use Wikipedia as a source have been softened. I have always worried about what other people have told me about this website (being unreliable because anyone can add or take away from it), but I haven't really investigated it myself. I took the opportunity to compare some of the information on Wikipedia to information in an encyclopedia that I had at home, and the information was unremarkably similar. In fact, Wikipedia has a more updated version of information. So, I agree with Steve Jobs when he said that "Wikipedia is one of the most accurate encyclopedias in the world." To prove this, I googled Michael Jackson and only four days after his death, his Wikipedia page had been updated, and that's only when I checked it. More than likely, it was updated the day of his death. It even gives a detailed account of his last moments with rescue workers. I feel a lot better about allowing my students to use WIkipedia now that I have done a little research, myself.
I really learned a lot about how to put a wiki together (or get one started) from this chapter. I can see putting my students in small groups, giving them a topic, and having them start a wiki. It would be really neat to monitor the wiki to see if anyone edits their work. We would really have to be careful about vandals getting into the site. They would have to become experts on their topic (just like a blog) to ensure that misinformation does not appear on their site. Also, a site that further helped me understand wikis is one on Teacher tube entitled "Wikis in Plain English". Check it out. I think you would find it very interesting.
I think wikis show great promise for collaboration in the classroom. Any project that requires the gathering of information, the construction of knowledge, and collaboration among groups or individuals can be used with a wiki. Some advantages of wikis include: collaboration (on many levels), gathering of various sources of information into one location, simple to use and free. Some disadvantages with wikis: the wiki could possibly be changed by unauthorized users (although there are some controls teachers can use to prevent this), the information on a wiki cannot always be verified for accuracy, teachers have to be vigilant to check the wiki for inappropriate content. As with other uses of technology in our school system, we are limited by the number of machines available for student use and permission for the use of web based applications by directors in our central office.
ReplyDeleteSocail Networking is going to be so very important to our children and younger students as they grow up in today's global society. They are going to be able to learn so much from collaborating on a social network. Unfortunately, in the county in which our group works, we have restrictions on some social networking sites. It would be so nice for our classes to be able to talk with people from all over the state, country and world, but the "good" sites are blocked. I can see, in a way, that they need to be blocked for out student's safety.......but, it is our duty as teachers, to show and teach students how to properly use these social sites. I do like the idea of social bookmarking, and we are free to use some of these in our county. This is a great way for small groups to collaborate and gather quality sites for topics of study. I plan to use more of these in the upcoming school year. I am even going to set up a few on topics that I know that we are going to be teaching.
ReplyDeleteI am very excited about trying to use flicker in my classroom next year. I went on the Flicker website and played around a little and can surely see how this site can benefit my classroom. I love the example that the book showed entitled "Roll of the Die." What a great way to practice skills simply by adding a visual for the students to refer to. I think it would also be fun to publish field trip pictures. There are endless possibilities for the use of this site in the classroom.
ReplyDeleteI already teach my students how to make podcasts and THEY LOVE IT! One of the projects that we did was about rocks and minerals. I divided my class into small groups and assigned them a rock or mineral. After they spent several days researching their rock or mineral, they wrote a script and created a podcast. Then, they went from computer to computer (a carousel) to listen and comment on podcasts. They learned so much. I heard comments like, "I didn't know that!" and "This stuff is in my yard." It was very exciting for them and for me! During the school year, when my students had a choice of a project they wanted to do, a lot of them chose Podcasting.
ReplyDeleteOverall, this book just reinforces what enhances learning in the classroom. I love how it provides relevant information on how different web tools can be used effectively in the classroom. The examples were very helpful. I can't wait to try some of these in my classroom next year. I'm glad that I have this book to refer to.....it will surely be used as a resource in my classroom.
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