I have to admit that I am a total Facebook addict! I joined this summer… invited by another friend who joined because it was her 20th high school reunion and they had a facebook group. Well, it was my 20th high school reunion too, and I reconnected with a jillion people I went to high school with on FB… and many of them I never even liked when I was in high school! (haha!) One really interesting thing that came of the whole high school reunion on FB was that I reconnected with a friend who has the exact same job as me, but in NJ. We’ve shared a lot of stories, questions and ideas via FB, and that’s been fantastic. I have to admit that I even have an iPod Touch with the FB application so I can just easily surf my friends’ statuses. Many of the Decatur teachers are on FB and we catch up and make instructional plans all via FB instead of email! Lastly, the night of the election was truly amazing… my husband was at work (CNN) and I was alone watching the election coverage while on Facebook. So the hours I spent watching that monumental night, I spent with 20+ friends as we all updated our status, I experienced this amazing event with friends…. even though there was only me and my sleeping son in the house!!
Enough about Facebook…. (man, it’s obvious I love it!) I thought Classroom 2.0 was great and had to join. I thought the Forum was an excellent resource- we’re supposed to know all the answers and we just need a place to go and ask questions! I also joined the Mac Classroom 2.0 which had threads and posts relevant to our technologies.
Ning has great potential- I thought the add-free, fairly secure environment for 7th-12th graders made it a great resource for middle and high school teachers. Let’s teach them with the tools they use- and like using!
This is really such a cool tool. I began by searching for one of my favorite books, A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, and found that there is was a book club in Pickens, SC discussing this book. As a matter of fact, many of the books that this particular book club reads look right up my alley! I immediately thought of my husband because he is a voracious reader… each week he jots down in a little notebook titles he finds in the newspaper or Entertainment Weekly and reserves them at the local library (thank goodness- he used to buy every book and we were running out of space in our house!) The great thing about Library Thing is keeping track of your list of books and the ability to read others’ lists to get ideas for the next good read. This is a great web 2.0 tool, although I’m not sure I will definitely use it (the only thing I read these days is my google reader 
, professional journals, and picture books to my 5 year old!) Ah… I know summer is coming soon… right???
I love this cool- it will certainly be helpful in my work. My delicious page includes sites that I use in preparation for teacher trainings, and I look forward to adding more! I particularly liked copying text so that it automatically pastes into the Description field.
Another post from one of the forum feeds on Promethean Planet alerted readers to the contest “webquest” going on now through January 7th. Perfect timing because I’m teaching a class on Promethean Planet and ACTIVvotes tomorrow, so we’ll be doing the Planet Quest contest at the end and maybe one of us will win!
Wow! I definitely see this being a great solution for high school research projects and will definitely share with the high school media folks (they probably already know about it though!). The Darfur pageflake was amazing. I have to say that after working all day on catching up on all my things, I think pageflakes was a bit of an overload for me. I’m embarrassed to say that it was just too much for me- too busy and some of the feeds on the Darfur page were inappropriate (someone tagged “darfur” for a video that was clearly not). I’ll try again though! I think I just love my igoogle page- it’s clean and neat and has all the gadgets I need. Am I getting old and crotchety?
I will definitely be using these tools more! This is a great way for teachers to share lesson plans, for students to create a group slideshow, and for teachers, parents and students to all help plan for a pending field study (particularly overnight field trips!). My favorite theme in presentation was “grass”- I look forward to using these free tools more! We have a grant project going on that will put refurbished computers in the hands of some of our most poorest families. We plan to have six classes for them- at least one being tools they can use in the business world. We don’t have enough money in the grant to load the computers with Microsoft licensed products, so teaching them how to use google docs is a great and free alternative!
There are so many great videos on YouTube… the frustrating thing is when a teacher finds an EXCELLENT video when she’s planning her lesson at home, but then gets to school and finds out that YouTube is blocked (surprisingly, not everyone is aware of this!). This actually just happened to a second grade teacher who wanted to show an Apollo 11 video during the second grade’s Friday night lock-in/sleepover where they focused on all things to do with the 2nd grade solar system science standards. She realized this at 3:30 on that Friday afternoon, frantically called us, and we actually unblocked YouTube for 5 minutes so I could help her convert it with Zamar, and then one of our techs turned the block back on! (These are the teachers’ perks of working in a small school system… we bend over backwards for them!!)
I particularly love the help videos on YouTube. Like you said, Jerrie, you can find how to do anything technologically on YouTube! I recently got an iPod Touch for my birthday and we purchased a set of them to use with the after school program at 2 schools, so I’m particularly interested in some of the applications- especially the free ones- we can download on the iPod Touches.
This video shows how to download and use the Google Earth app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. As soon as I’m finished with all my “Things” I’m going to do this!
I had to choose Radio Willow Web (found on EPN) for a discovery task because I fell in love (in a purely digital sense) with the students’ original teacher at Willow Elementary in Omaha, NE— Tony Vincent— at GAETC in November! I think I went to every session he had! He is the podcasting guru, and a particular guru of using handhelds- especially ipods- in the classroom. He rocked! We have a few teachers who will have their students post their podcasts on the class iWeb webpage, such as this one from a first grade at one of our K-3 schools (below). I plan to help teachers learn how easy it is to create a podcast like this. There is an RSS feed feature in iWeb, so I’ll have to make sure that the teachers learn about this function. That way, families can subscribe to the class podcasts.
http://www.decaturteacher.org/beyer/beyer/Animal_Podcasts/Entries/2008/12/11_simon_Plishka.html
I tried mixbook.com and the best thing about it was the ability to share the book with the world or with only friends. I’ve made several photo books using Shutterfly and iPhoto, but this was the first book that could be published on the internet- a cool tool! Another great feature is the ability to leave comments for the author as well as imbed the book as html code as I did below:
I think that the 5th grade wiki from Woodward- Turn Homeward, Hanalee- was just about the best example of a digital collaborative student project I’ve seen. I just love how each group was responsible for their content, but then as I read each page, the story pieces were put together so effectively that I could see the big picture. I thought the different pieces were so appropriate and meaningful for the students- recording their readers’ theatre, creating artwork and then slideshows for examples of idioms, a great example of timeliner. I was very impressed and will share with the media specialist and teachers of our 5th grade. They could definitely use some help defining great project-based learning, and this wiki is a terrific example of a culminating project.
