I feel very proud of myself (and my classmates) for learning so much these past weeks. I’ve especially liked learning about blogs, wikis, and nifty online software programs. I really appreciate the help and encouragement I got from my colleagues. I can’t wait to synthesize the amazing amount of information that I took in over the course. Thank goodness for summer time. I’m looking forward to trying to incorporate some of these tools into my teaching.
So, here are the overarching questions from this class: As an early childhood educator, how does technology help students to learn the 4 rs: reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmatic, and relating? Or has technology become or will it become soon, so basic that young children need to be exposed to all this stuff? I guess this question has come up over and over in this class, but this week I was especially thinking about it. Like almost everything in this course, I see uses in social networking for professional development, connecting with others like me. But, do the students need to be able to connect to people like them when they are still learning to connect to the people right next to them in the classroom? Do they need to network/interact in the virtual space when they haven’t really mastered that in real space?
Is virtual reality actually the reality that our students will be living and interacting in?
As for Ning and Classroom 2.0, I really liked this thread in Classroom 2.0. It’s about making our classrooms digital and the point of it all. I could see joining another social network if I felt like I needed a support group or a hobby/interest group (lots of crafters and knitters on Ning). Again, I don’t know if I would use this with my students. But I might use it as a professional development tool or a personal interest/growth tool. I think this is another tool that I would like to explore more later.
WHOA! Information overload! I guess the best thing about Pageflakes is you can put all the stuff we’ve learned about connected into one page. But it’s too much for my brain. After reading other people’s posts about this Thing, I checked out igoogle. I liked it more. The layout was less overwhelming. And it matched the background to the time of day. I’m not sure this is a tool I’d use right now. I could create one to use as a homepage that comes up on the classroom computers and have links and such that are appropriate for the class. Just like with the RSS feed reader, I’m finding I’m not an all in once place kind of person. I really love outdoor markets where you get your oranges at one stall, your marjoram at another, and your fish at a third. I suppose that carries over to how I use the internet.
I really like Google Documents very much. I learned how to use them at the beginning of this year when my teacher partner introduced me to this amazing way of collaborating. We use Google to keep track in a spreadsheet of what reading work kids are doing, to work on professional development projects with our grade level partners and each other, and we have ambitious plans to keep our notes on kids online.
I guess my ideas for using Google would be: our ongoing kid-progress/note-taking documents, presentations that you’re going to present somewhere, but you don’t know what type of software will be available (I guess), and making a slide-show for a website.
It’s especially fun to be working on a Google Document when someone else is and see what they change as they change it. And you can chat about it online too.
YouTube is pretty fun. I’m not a youtubeaholic, but every once in a while I’ll look for something on YouTube. There are definitely a lot of possibilities for using YouTube and TeacherTube in the classroom. Showing reptiles moving or eating or fighting a mongoose would help present content. The hard part of YouTube is the at-the-moment searching can be really dicey. I wouldn’t want to search on YouTube with my students. I’d want to search by myself, find something and then show it to them.
While messing around on YouTube this time, I found a video on redoing kitchen cabinets, a bunch of videos on mongooses and cobras, a couple of videos about dinosaurs, and some clips from Thundercats, one of my favorite shows when I was little.
The privacy guidelines for posting videos at our school limit putting student presentations or videos of students on the web. But we have put up some slideshows with our kids singing songs as the soundtrack. We could also produce a video about building games, but we couldn’t have the kids in it.
Here’s a mongoose and cobra video from Britannica.com, posted on YouTube.
I thought that recording a podcast was surprisingly easy. Listening to my voice, on the other hand, ick! I can’t wait to see how we do podcasting in our classroom.
Podcasts - I love the idea. I think it’s a great thing that I should use. I listen to the muffled sounds of podcasts coming through my roommate’s door quite often, and I think to myself, “I should listen to podcasts.” But I don’t. And I don’t know why. Actually, I have a suspicion that I learn better through reading that through listening. So now I am blaming my learning profile for being to lazy to subscribe to a podcast. Until now! I am now the proud subscriber to two podcasts - one of them potentially useful for our classroom, a storytelling podcast. I hadn’t considered podcasts as an option for when we listen to stories at lunch. And I certainly hadn’t thought about PBS kids offering podcasts that could possibly be a rainy day recess time movie. But now I’m thinking that podcasts could be a great way to supplement the stories we already have. I thought that the PBS kids movie may not have been exciting enough to hold a kid’s attention (cause I found it annoying), but I might test it. I wish that Between the Lions podcasted some of their clips. (They do have some on the website.) The other podcast to which I subscribed is NPR’s Speaking of Faith, just for my own personal enjoyment.
I am looking forward to podcasting with our students. In past years (before I was their teacher), they practiced reading stories for fluency and then recorded podcasts. I can’t wait to learn how to do the recording and see the kids podcast.
I found 43 Things to be very interesting. I don’t know if I would find the pressure of public goal setting to be a motivator. Of course, there is something nice about anonymous accountability - having people who don’t know you and you’ll never meet cheer you on in your progress towards your goal. I think I would rather set goals on paper rather than online. I was surprised by the general positivity of the site. It didn’t seem like people were being snarky or critical. That’s nice.
I can definitely see a use for Library Thing in my life. Put in a book I like, get out a list of suggested reading. I could catalog my books which appeals to that place in my heart that wants to be organized but doesn’t know how. I see a point for this tool, BUT I see more of a use for conversations, face to face, about books and reading. I would rather go to Natalie, our elementary librarian, for a suggestion of a book to read aloud to my class. She knows so much about books AND (this is the really important part) she knows the kids in my class. I don’t think Library Thing is as helpful or as social as Librarian or Bookgroup or Friend Who Likes Similar Books. I like the conversation that goes with suggesting books to each other - the tangents onto books you’ve both read, the excitement about a book you’d really like to recommend. I see how Library Thing, and other social sites are social (and helpful and cool and fun,) but I don’t see how they could ever be as social as actually talking to real people without a computer, a router, a network, and a website in between. Sorry for sounding like such a negative person, but I’ve been thinking a lot about social/emotional education recently and how important that is for 5 and 6 year olds, and by extension, everyone. Life is about the meaningful connections you make with other people. I guess if you can make meaningful connections with people via the internet, go for it.
I do think it’s really interesting to check out how people are using the Web 2.0 to create really specialized virtual communities. If you are obsessed with a particular book, you can go online and find people who are also obsessed with that book, even though you might not know anyone who likes that book. You can talk about your passion, ask questions, and presto, other like-minded people will respond (you hope). It’s neat that the Web (2.0) is becoming such an interactive entity.
Well, I guess I discovered that I don’t use bookmarks. Maybe I should. Now I guess I’ll skip that and go straight to using del.icio.us. I do like being able to see how many people bookmark the same site as me. Not too many people on some, tons on others. Find my del.icio.us site here. I don’t really get who will look at my delicious page. Do you have delicious friends like Friendster friends and Facebook friends?
