SJS Teacher

My delicious link: http://delicious.com/arlenec

I presented a nice online diagramming software called Lovely Charts. It was of interest to me because of the possibility of making flowcharts and organizational charts and stuff.

The conference that I listened to was “It Simply Isn’t the 20th Century Any More Is It?: So Why Would We Teach as Though It Was?”

After browsing through the conferences listed on the site, I was really captivated by the title because it is something that resonates quite loudly with me, as a teacher and student in instructional technology. I look at education as something that should adapt to the kind of learners we have in front of us. And if we cannot captivate our audience, we have lost something along the way.

I like the idea of online conferencing (like the instruction said, you can attend in your pajamas!) but like everything in life, there are advantages and disadvantages. Online conferences like this one, are not live but are presented after the fact. I am sure there are “live” conferences, though, which will offer the added advantage of having a Q&A at the end. In a F2F conference, you could get answers to your questions not just from the workshop presenter but probably from someone in the audience who is well-versed with the topic. On the other hand, it is very convenient (especially for a working mother like me) to attend when it suits me. I can send my questions in and can have the benefit of a digital reply, whether through an email, a text message, or whatever —- it just makes it easier to remember their responses. And the list goes on of course…

I would surely recommend something like this — maybe even start one at our school! More often than not, our workshops and professional development schedules are so ill-timed as most of them are after school (when teachers should be grading papers or preparing for the next day’s lessons) that it makes more sense to have your PD’s online. Yes, it IS the 21st century — we should conduct our conferences as befits the technology of our time.

I created my first Flickr account and I see the similarity between that and Picasa, which I am more used to using.

I am not sure how this could be used in my classroom. A quick answer would be probably a way of showing parents some pictures of lab experiments, field trips, etc. that our students have participated in. Other than that, Flickr for me appears as a big giant repository of pictures, much like a photo album.

I used Creative Commons once before to create my webpage on googlepages as an assignment in one of our graduate school classes. We also had the same discussion about copyright laws and how blurry those laws can sometimes be. It was also emphasized in the class that “educational use” was, more often than not, more loose than “personal use”.

In my opinion, copyright laws are more “reactive” as opposed to Creative Common laws being “proactive”. Creative commons tell you what you can use versus copyright laws telling you what you cannot. For an educator, this gives shows me opportunities to use something that you have been given permission to rather than being told what I cannot do.

That being said, it is of course important to emphasize to our students that intellectual property is something that needs to be respected. Sooner or later, they themselves will be musicians, poets, authors, etc. and they will be at the other end of the table, with other people downloading their products. I just hope that some of them will use the “some rights reserved” of CC rather than the “all rights reserved” of the C.

The conference that I listened to was “It Simply Isn’t the 20th Century Any More Is It?: So Why Would We Teach as Though It Was?”

RSS and Google Reader is probably my most favorite topic in the Web 2.0 class. I knew of RSS and how it theoretically works and even used a type of reader (bloglines.com) in one of my graduate school classes. Its use for me kind of “faded into oblivion” after the class ended, though.

Now that I have resurrected its use again, and after populating it with my favorites, I see the advantages of being “fed” the news rather than actively “seeking” for it. It saves me time (for me, the most expensive commodity) while being kept informed and updated on anything under the sun.

How would you use these with students/parents?
I guess if my students kept a blog of their work, then I could be kept abreast of the recent updates of their blogs.

How about for your own professional development?
I see a lot of possibilities with RSS feeds and professional development. I have actually already subscribed to several educational blogs and news services that might be of help to me as a high school science teacher. Again, it’s the advantage of getting the latest news that is the greatest asset of using these feeds.

What types of RSS feeds did you search for?
It ran the gamut from educational and scientific blogs to favorite recipes and such. Like I said, I plan to use Google reader extensively not just for my professional but also my personal development.

What is your favorite/the most interesting feed you found?
That would be the Dilbert cartoons. I plan to add more of my favorite comic strips and/or crossword puzzles to make my “newspaper” complete.

What was easy to do with RSS? What was difficult with RSS?
RSS was pretty easy to use. What I found frustrating was that some of my feeds would not run on my PC but did on my Mac. Oh well…

No blog required.

I created my first wiki page yesterday. It was just a simple page within a larger wiki site (sjsweb20-sandbox) but it was a good experience. It was no different from setting up a website in googlepages, say. Unlike googlepages though, multiple users could edit and manipulate the information on the page, as long as that permission is granted. I think googledocs does the same thing as well. The main difference is that google docs are not sites that non-users could visit. Wikipages are viewable by non-users and editable by permitted users.

I am already thinking of a good use for wikispaces in my classroom. Since I teach chemistry as well and the students often do research and presentations, we could set up a classroom wiki site where all their research and presentations will reside. They could be arranged in groups and collaborate/comment on each other’s wikis — a form of peer evaluation that they are used to doing anyway.

I guess wikis would be a more useful thing for me in my science classroom. Blogs… hmm….I don’t know… maybe let the students use it to detail their experiences — more like the Conclusion and Evaluation part of their reports.

What is Web 2.0 to me? Why is it important in education or in the classroom?

Web 2.0 to me is an essential tool for an educator to use in his/her classroom. Because it is called the “read/write web” it gives teachers the ability to create, collaborate, share, innovate, and advertise to the rest of the educational world all the wonderful things that happen in the classroom. And most importantly, it gives their students the chance to do the same. Web 2.0 allows its users to be interactive and users and manipulators of information rather than being mere recipients of it. It allows education on the web to be two- or three- or poly-sided. The receiver of the information can also be its editor, and vice versa. For me, this is what education is all about — in the 80s, we were told that a teacher should not be merely a “sage on the stage” but more so, a “guide on the side”. It makes for education that is student-centered rather than teacher-centered. This philosophy of education IS Web 2.0!