I am glad we had the chance to play around a little with both of these tools and to get a better feel for how these tools work. It was nice to learn about how the comment moderation settings and how those could be used in a classroom setting.
Tonight we learned more about a couple of tools that we have talked about in the past, Prezi and VoiceThread. I think both tools are great and have plans to use them in the future. I am especially interested in VoiceThread as a collaborative tools that teachers and students could use to share ideas and give feedback.
I am glad we had the chance to play around a little with both of these tools and to get a better feel for how these tools work. It was nice to learn about how the comment moderation settings and how those could be used in a classroom setting.
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Google Docs is another tool that can be used to create, share and collaborate on documents. This editing and sharing can be done live. Our experiment with Google Docs was a good one. I like the idea that multiple people could work on a project together and that each could make edits to the same document at the same time. We did run into problems, though when someone would edit or delete a piece of text, or a page break and it would move everyone else's work around. I think working on a finished product where everyone has separate assignments in the document would be difficult. Brainstorming, sharing ideas, and building a rough draft might be a little better suited to having multiple users editing a document at the same time. We also learned about Google+. It's a bit like Facebook and Twitter, where you can friend, follow, and share ideas with other people. It has a couple of cool features like the ability to create groups of friends, called circles, so that you can share information with the groups of people who you feel would find your post relevant/interesting. Another great feature of Google+ is called a Hangout. You can video or text chat with 10 friends, sharing documents or your screen. It seems like a great way to hold a video conference. Skype works great when there is only 1 person to connect with, but if you were trying to meet up with more people, Google+ might be a better solution. I'd like to try this out a little more before deciding whether or not I will use Google+ or Hangouts in the future. Finally, we had a guest teacher give a dance lesson via Skype. I was impressed with how well it went. Some good points to remember when hosting a Skype lecture or guest presenter:
This week we talked about using social networking tools in the classroom. I have to be honest, I initially thought that using twitter int he classroom would be a great idea. Now, I am no so sure. I still believe that the more teachers who use twitter, the better behaved students will be when working with these types of tools. But, I have seen students create dummy accounts so that they can anonymously post anything they think, without consequence or fer of repercussion. We read a couple of good articles outlining how to use twitter in the classroom. I really like the article outlining 50 Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom. So of these ideas have real potential and left a lot of room for personal adaptation. We also watched a video called The Twitter Experiment about a college class at UT Dallas that used twitter to help students share ideas and have discussion that they wouldn't be able to have in the limited time allowed during a traditional class. I really like this idea. However, in the video, several of the student twitter usernames where shown. I looked up all of the accounts that I could read clearly from the video and found that not one of the accounts is still being used. They have all either been deleted or their last tweet for for this class (which ended in May of 2009.) If we are teaching with these tools because they are "native" to these students, then why would ALL of these accounts be inactive or deleted? We worked in a TwHistory project to reenact some of the events of the Pearl Harbor. We worked in teams to create a list of tweets that were scheduled to be posted from their twitter accounts on Sunday morning. I thought this was a great experiment and commend the instructors for taking on such a difficult task. I enjoyed watching the tweets as they were posted on Sunday. It was great to see all of the different perspectives and voices give accounts of the events of Pearl Harbor. I don't think I'll ever do a project like this, or encourage other teachers to do this on this scale, but I think there are variations of this project that would be great to work on with teachers and students. We ended class with a review of Wikipedia and how it can be used in class. I like Wikipedia, I use it all the time and I don't mind it when students use it as a reference for some of their work in my class. But I do think a distinction needs to be made between just looking something up and doing academic research. Academic research requires deeper sources and learning how to use the databases where primary documents can be located. Wikipedia's list of references are a great place to start, but they are almost always internet references whose credibility isn't always confirmed. The bottom line is that Wikipedia is a great reference for a wide variety of subjects. But students need to learn how to do research beyond Wikipedia. This week we discussed copyright at great length. I am interested in how to better teach this concept to other teachers that I work with. I think the most important part of this concept for me is helping teachers to understand that modeling respect for copyright law speaks much louder than any plagiarism lectures or red marks on student projects. In order to expect students to respect the work of others, we need to model that respect in our own teaching and presentation materials. Here's a great video that was shared in class explaining copyright law and fair use: http://youtu.be/CJn_jC4FNDo As a side note, I wrote this post using the new Weebly app for iPhone. I am very interested in seeing how well this works.
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Blog HomeJared Ward
Ceramics and Sculpture Teacher, Artist, Web Designer, Education Technology Specialist. I am still learning. Archives
January 2013
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