To Infinity…and Beyond!

Oh, how I wish I had something to contribute to Library Thing.  I love to read and used to be an avid reader.  Once I had children, my reading habits began to ebb, although I still belonged to a book club that kept me in the loop on the latest and greatest.  Once I went back to work last August, however, my reading habit came to a complete halt.  If it didn’t directly pertain to my job, it just wasn’t a priority.  I even had a hard time keeping up with my two weekly magazine subscriptions.  Forget the newspaper!  My hope is that sooner, rather than later, I will ease into a more relaxed routine with my classroom and find more time for pleasure reading.

That being said, once I start my reading habit again, I can’t wait to use Library Thing.  What a fantastic way to find great reading recommendations!  With so many different ways to search for your next book (I especially enjoyed Zeitgeist), I will have no trouble starting up again.  I plan on starting by entering all previous books I have read and enjoyed (no matter how long ago I read them) and then find other readers that have the same tastes that I do.  It will be my own virtual book club!

Delicious is absolutely scrumptious!  As I am a Mac user and a subscriber to MobileMe, I love the idea of cyberspace clouds of information that can be accessed at any time.  To have my bookmarks accessible from any computer at any time is ingenious!  I was house-hunting this week and even found myself saying, “I should have bookmarked this listing to my delicious account instead of my computer.”

In the same way that our classmates have tagged their bookmarks “k12learning20,” my colleagues and I can tag websites we want to share “wntransition.”  We could then pull them up during our weekly lunch meetings with our program director.  When completing a class project, my students can come up with a class/assignment tag and we can share information through delicious accounts.

This Web 2.0 tool excites me and I look forward to using it for both personal and professional use.

While skimming and scanning my Google Reader today, one post immediately caught my attention.  ”Guess the Wordle and Summer Vacation Wordles“, found on Free Technology for Teachers, gave me some great ideas for a classroom activity during my homeroom period.  The post talked about the website Guess the Wordle, where three times a week a wordle is posted and the student has to guess what the topic of that wordle is.  What a great start-of-the-day activity for my students during homeroom!  I encourage everyone to visit this site and use this activity with their students.

For this task I played around with two Web 2.0 tools.  The first one I chose was Blabberize.  This tool allows the user to upload a photo and make it appear to talk.  It was extremely user-friendly, easy to learn, and very fun.  Please visit my wiki page to see my finished Blabberize product.

The second tool I played with was TaDa Lists.  This website allows the user to make to-do lists that you can share and later check-off as tasks are completed.  As I’ve been house hunting recently, I made a list of the properties that I’m interested in.  This tool was also user-friendly and easy to learn.

Blabberize can be used socially (as I have done), or in the classroom.  Students can use this site for novel characterizations, biographies, and many other applications.  TaDa Lists also have both social and professional uses.  You can use them for personal use (again, as I have done) and share the URL so that others (spouse, friend, etc.) can also view them.  As for classroom application, I am considering using TaDa Lists in place of our daily homework agendas.  If each student has his own account, he/she can make a list at the end of each day with all their assignments, and materials needed, for that evening.  When the student gets home, he/she can then log in and access their list.

Professional conferences on the web–what a great concept!  I chose Chris Botcher‘s session entitled “I Like Delicious Things:  An Introduction to Tagging and Folksonomies” and was quite excited about attending his conference session in my pajamas.  While I was familiar with the term “tagging,” I knew it in terms of naming people in photos on Facebook only.  This session gave me a chance to learn all the other “tagging” applications.

Tagging is, for lack of a better term, a filing system.  It allows you to file photos, documents, bookmarks, etc. according to labels you apply.  What is fantastic is the ability to tag these items several times, thus placing them in several different “files.”  For example, if I tagged a photo of the Statue of Liberty I could use the following:  statue, statueofliberty, newyork, ellisisland, vacation.    This way, if I was looking for vacation pictures, this photo would appear.  In the same way, if I was looking for picutres of statues, this photo would appear.

Another wonderful aspect of tagging is the tag cloud.  Basically, this is a visual representation of all the tags you’ve used and each word is sized and bolded based on its frequency.  Fabulous!  A great example of tag clouds can be found viewing U.S. Presidential Speeches Tag Clouds.  This site has tagged the inaugural speeches of all the U.S. Presidents.  While viewing each president’s speech, you can clearly see what the important issues of the time were by focusing on the largest and boldest tags.  This site was a lot of fun to play around with.

Delicious is a website for social bookmarking.  It allows you to set up an account and have all your bookmarked websites in one “cyberplace.”  Where was this site when I really needed it?  I work on one computer at school and two computers at home.  When I began this course, I had to manually bookmark all my importants sites on each computer.  What a pain!  I wish I knew then what I know now!  Not only does Delicious aid in bookmarking, but it also allows you to tag your bookmarks.  This Web 2.0 thing is getting more user-friendly every day!

Overall, I learned that tagging is a bottom-up classification system and that all these systems together form folksonomies.  I thoroughly enjoyed this conference online, however, I still believe that these online conferences cannot take the place of live presentations, as you lose the question and answer periods that usually follow.  While this material was easy to grasp, some is not as easy and I would surely require that “q and a” with the presenter.

Growing up, my mother took ALL of her pictures on slides.  She never used 35mm film.  It wasn’t until a few years back that she made the switch from slides directly to digital.  As kids, we had to endure hours of slideshows.  They weren’t exactly exciting.  The clicking sound of the slides changing from one to the next will forever be deeply embedded in my memory.

It is now 2009 and we have a new kind of slideshow and a different form of embedding.  Children of this generation will gladly sit through mom and dad’s slideshows as they’ve become entertainment for all the senses!  And, with websites such as Rock You, Slide, Animoto, and BubbleShare, creating these presentations are as simple as Click A, Click B, Click C.  I was previously familiar with Animoto, as my daughter’s teacher would send us slideshows of classroom happenings.  I just was not aware how easy these clips were to make.

For this task I chose to use Rock You.  After uploading my five photos, I had another five clicks before my slideshow was complete (not including my extensive browse for the perfect piece of music).  I am really pleased with the finish product.  Take a peek on my wiki page!

I truly hope that the title of my post becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  With hundreds of thousands of photos published on Flickr, finding the perfect photo for a lesson plan, assignment, or project is now easier than ever.  What I found interesting while searching various keywords on Flickr, is that one photographer’s view of someone/something will completely differ from the next; thus, leading to many different points of “view.”

One of the novels my fifth grade class reads is The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle.  The author, Avi, describes the ship in detail and uses many nautical terms.  I believe photos, such as Masts of the Endeavour Replica published by Smiley Man with a Hat, would help my class visualize the specifics of the story.  Our class could also use Flickr to help with our vocabulary lessons.  We supplement our workbook activities with a computer-generated chart called “Learn the Word.”  The columned chart contains the word, part of speech, sample sentence and a picture to link the student’s memory to that word.  In the past Clip Art has been our go-to program for pictures; however, now that I am aware of Flickr, I will be directing my students to this site.

I must be honest.  Before Thing 10, I had not heard of Creative Commons, nor had I seen the CC logo on any websites.  In fact, I had to click on four of my bookmarks before I found a mention of Creative Commons, but alas, still no logo.  It took another seven or eight clicks on handpicked bookmarks before I found the logo on one of my favorite websites, The Lonely Island (some material NSFW).

I do think that Creative Commons (CC) will positively impact the way students learn and create projects.  CC will grant greater access to a broader range of material that was once considered taboo.  Now that students are producing so much of their work on the computer, whether it be a written report or an art project, having permission to use materials found on the internet will allow the students to have a broader knowledge base from which to create these assignments.

I have used audio and video clips in my lessons.  Most of them come from subscription sites such as BrainPOP.  I’m hoping that CC will open the doors to similar sites that do not require subscriptions.  Thus far I have not personally shared any digital material; however, as I learn how to create such material, I look forward to sharing with my colleagues and the world wide Web 2.0.

Is there a potential downside to CC?  The only one I see right now is potential abuse.  Remember, we’ve gone from “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved.”  There are still limitations.  I hope users can respect the work, and each other, so we can all continue to collaborate.  Isn’t that what Web 2.0, the read/write web, is all about?

To complete Thing 8′s Stretch task, I chose to look up Roger Federer on Wikipedia.  While the content was valid and surprisingly up-to-date, I found that it did not flow very well.  Instead, it read like many single sentences pieced together, like consecutive bullet points.  After the introductory paragraph, there was a table of contents, which I did find very useful.  This table consisted of links that would take you directly to your section of interest.  While visiting the discussion tab, I found the hot topic was the inevitable debate of whether or not Federer is the greatest tennis player of all time.  The history tab consisted mainly of Federer’s updated achievements.  Overall, this Wikipedia entry was informative, but not a good read.  I still believe, however, that he IS the greatest tennis player of all time!

I’ve often joked with my students that the word “wiki” conjures up an image of a DJ scratching a vinyl disc back and forth.  The resulting audible would be…”wiki wiki wiki whack.”  Of course this is all artfully acted out in front of the class.  It always brings a few chuckles.

This assignment, and wikis in general, did not thrill me as much as I’d expected.  While watching the introductory video, I was excited about the collaborative aspect wikis bring to Web 2.0; however, in my investigating, I found that too many cooks in the kitchen is not always a good thing.

The first wiki I visited was Westwood Schools Computer Science because I’ve become a fan of Vicki Davis’ blog.  I was overwhelmed (I’m using this word quite often these days!) by all of the information contained within this one wiki.  Ms. Davis included her four classes, an archive of previous classes, and her class schedule on the home page.  Each class then had it’s own page that outlined assignments, projects, assessments, etc.  I really enjoyed these pages, although I was unsure as to how the students participated.  It appeared to be more of a “read-only” informational piece for the students to follow throughout the term.  Beyond her classes, Ms. Davis also included pages for awards and news.  This is where the true confusion set in as I was unsure as to how they related to her class pages.  I feel that the awards and news pages may have been better served in their own wiki.

The next wiki I researched was Code Blue, set up by sixth graders learning about the human body.  The home page was not very engaging, as it was comprised of a list of websites on anatomy and physiology.  The left sidebar contained the collaborative information from the students, however, it was not organized very well.  An outline form or table of contents would have been better choices.  I was amused by the students’ work which included doctor biographies and patient histories.  Nice job!

Schools in the Past was very entertaining.  First grade students interviewed their parents and grandparents to find out what school was like “way back when.”  The answers were split into the following categories:  playgrounds, library, number of students in class, what was studied, school rules, and anything else that was different.  While I chuckled my way through many of the answers, the material itself was not organized well.  It was difficult to determine where one answer finished and another one started.  The font was not exciting and it lead to a harder read.  Overall, the wiki had great content that could have been presented in a more reader-friendly format.

One of my favorite wikis was the Thousands Project, published by a class of fifth-graders from Duluth, Minnesota.  Each month the students posed a question to their worldwide audience and their goal was to receive one thousand responses to each question.  Each person (or class) that responded then became collaborators in the wiki.  The home page was well-planned and easy to read.  The response pages were formatted nicely as well.  As I teach fifth grade, I look forward to introducing my class to Mr. Monson’s class this fall.

After reading Vicki Davis’ blogpost, Wiki Wiki Teaching, I thought about how I could incorporate wikis into my classroom.  The idea of having the students collaborate and create their own study guide really fascinated me and I am eager to try this approach with our first novel study.  Hopefully the results will be smoother than the DJ’s vinyl discs!