"Google is currently attempting to scan and digitize more than 50 million books from five of the largest research libraries from around the world." (pp. 129)
I did not know this. I don't really like to read book online. I don't think I could read an entire book online actually. I prefer to carry the full text in a bound version. But I will agree, that this technology is certainly changing the world.
"For more than a hundred years we have defined being literate as being able to read and to write. And although those sore abilities are still central to learning, they are no longer enough to ensure understanding."
So true, so true. This is the world we live in and the world the next generation is continuing to shape. Educators MUST stay on top of technology in order to generate literate students ready to compete in the modern world.
"If we fail to graduate students who are not able to create, sustain, and participate in these networks in safe, ethical, and effective ways, we've done them a disservice."
I like the Internet as a mode of publication that moves the classroom out into the real world. SO more than a teacher and perhaps a classmate sees what students are creating. It is a collaborative environment and an inspirational tool.
"Big Shift #4: Teaching Is Conversation, Not Lecture" ---Well, DUH--This is how is ought to be whether the Internet is being used or not! Out with the days of endless boring lectures!
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
CHAPTER 8 ENTRY
All right, it is the next to last chapter. There is nothing like some good text book reading to get you going. (lol) --And I've done a great deal of text book reading since I've been in this program. UGH.
OK, so back to Chapter 8. "Podcasting is basically the creation and distribution of amateur radio, plain and simple." (pp. 110) I'm not really into the creating Podcasting thing, but I'm not going to dismiss it because I think some students might really enjoy it. I'd really like to learn more about screencasting and live streaming. They sound much more engaging and involved to me. I did like the idea of being able to download new programs "like Meet the Press and 60 Minutes, and many radio shows like Fresh Air from NPR" and then listening to them later on an Ipod. Of course, I don't actually own an Ipod, but if I did this would definitely be something I'd want to learn to use.
YouTube has invaded nearly every student's Internet use. Teachers really need to know about this just to keep up with what kids are doing. I've used YouTube video as part of a lesson, but I really frown of surfing YouTube to kill the last ten minutes of class. I know this happens a lot when teachers choose to abuse their special YouTube privileges. Oh, I've also used TeacherTube, but most of the time I don't have much luck with this site.
Screencasting and Live Streaming--Now this sounds super cool! I student taught at North Oldham High School and they used to have a weekly screencast/ live stream show put on by students about school news and the morning announcements. They put a lot of effects into it and the students watching were really into it. They definitely paid much more attention to the screencast show then to the usual morning announcements over the intercom. Even after reading about this in the book, I'm still confused about how it actually works--but given a few hours and some techie students to help along this would be something I'd like to attempt.
OK, so back to Chapter 8. "Podcasting is basically the creation and distribution of amateur radio, plain and simple." (pp. 110) I'm not really into the creating Podcasting thing, but I'm not going to dismiss it because I think some students might really enjoy it. I'd really like to learn more about screencasting and live streaming. They sound much more engaging and involved to me. I did like the idea of being able to download new programs "like Meet the Press and 60 Minutes, and many radio shows like Fresh Air from NPR" and then listening to them later on an Ipod. Of course, I don't actually own an Ipod, but if I did this would definitely be something I'd want to learn to use.
YouTube has invaded nearly every student's Internet use. Teachers really need to know about this just to keep up with what kids are doing. I've used YouTube video as part of a lesson, but I really frown of surfing YouTube to kill the last ten minutes of class. I know this happens a lot when teachers choose to abuse their special YouTube privileges. Oh, I've also used TeacherTube, but most of the time I don't have much luck with this site.
Screencasting and Live Streaming--Now this sounds super cool! I student taught at North Oldham High School and they used to have a weekly screencast/ live stream show put on by students about school news and the morning announcements. They put a lot of effects into it and the students watching were really into it. They definitely paid much more attention to the screencast show then to the usual morning announcements over the intercom. Even after reading about this in the book, I'm still confused about how it actually works--but given a few hours and some techie students to help along this would be something I'd like to attempt.
CHAPTER 7 ENTRY
OK. So it is the last class and I've noticed that no one is reading by entries. So I've decided to truncate them down a bit. Also, this is the last class!!! Woo hoo!!! and I'm ready to be done.
Chapter Seven was all about Flickr and since I just completed my H.A.T. lesson plan using Flickr I'm feeling pretty comfortable with this tool right now. Did you know "Flickr members self-police the 1-2 million photos that are uploaded daily, and content filters keep the most troublesome photos at bay." (pp 100) Pretty cool, huh. That is a staggering amount of pictures! Richardson also tells us that "The vast majority of the photos on the site are appropriate for all, and there are some absolutely wonderful photos on just about any topic that you can find there." Being that Richardson is SO pro-technology I'm going to hesitate on "the vast majority" part and probably only use Flickr as a personal search tool. I will allow students to view my photos and each others, but I don't think I would want to set them loose on a Flickr photo search.
I like the idea of setting my photos to only invited friends and family because I was a photojournalist for eyars and I shot a ot of work I'd like to sell one day. I really don't like putting too much work out that may be copied for free. Of course, with all that is available out there I guess the odds are slim that someone would want to steal my work, but still, I like to think I'm at least trying to protect valuable work.
I sort of use a version of "Fliction" in my lesson plan. This is when "students pick a random photo from Flickr and write a story about it. (pp.107)
Chapter Seven was all about Flickr and since I just completed my H.A.T. lesson plan using Flickr I'm feeling pretty comfortable with this tool right now. Did you know "Flickr members self-police the 1-2 million photos that are uploaded daily, and content filters keep the most troublesome photos at bay." (pp 100) Pretty cool, huh. That is a staggering amount of pictures! Richardson also tells us that "The vast majority of the photos on the site are appropriate for all, and there are some absolutely wonderful photos on just about any topic that you can find there." Being that Richardson is SO pro-technology I'm going to hesitate on "the vast majority" part and probably only use Flickr as a personal search tool. I will allow students to view my photos and each others, but I don't think I would want to set them loose on a Flickr photo search.
I like the idea of setting my photos to only invited friends and family because I was a photojournalist for eyars and I shot a ot of work I'd like to sell one day. I really don't like putting too much work out that may be copied for free. Of course, with all that is available out there I guess the odds are slim that someone would want to steal my work, but still, I like to think I'm at least trying to protect valuable work.
I sort of use a version of "Fliction" in my lesson plan. This is when "students pick a random photo from Flickr and write a story about it. (pp.107)
Thursday, May 21, 2009
CHAPTER 6 ENTRY
"The social Web says that we have many friends out there just waiting to be found and connected to, and those friends have other friends (friends of a friend or "FOAF") who can just as easily connect with us and point us to new and interesting information for learning." (85)
A "FOAF"? What? I'm coming more and more to the shocking conclusion that I am old fashioned as the technological dark ages! Well, almost anyway. As I sit in a dark basement typing this to whatever faceless person may end up reading it I can't help but bring up a moment of recollection.
It was a pleasant day when I arrived far to early on campus for a class in the Humanities building here on campus. I had some reading to catch-up on so I thought I'd sit in the building's waiting area and read. It wasn't easy to find a comfortable seat because apparently I was not the only student with no place better to go on a pretty day but inside a dull building. Not really feeling enthralled with my reading I decided to observe people as it is one of my favorite things to do. As I looked around I noticed four students with head phone attached as they listed to ipods, MP3's and laptops. Several students had laptops out. One girl was busy texting, while another talked loud enough on her cell phone for all of us to hear her side of the conversation. There was a young guy playing with some sort of technical gadget I can only guess was a game and another guy looking like he was working with some sort if digitalized planner.
I sat back and watched them all. I must have sat there a half an hour as students came and went and nearly every person I saw was plugged in! I'd never stopped to notice this before, and in that half an hour I witnessed what can not possibly be the ordinary, but we sure are heading in this direction--I did not see a single conversation take place between two people that were physically present in front of each other. I watched all these people come and go and not one of them looked at me, or anyone else. Sure many of them were communicating, but they were communicating through technology and not in person.
I thought, if I tried to spark a conversation with anyone around me right now I would just be invading whatever it is they are doing with their technology and how sad is that. I tried to imagine this same room years ago before the cell phones and the Internet. I bet friends were made on the spot and relationships formed. Those friends probably introduced them to their "FOAF's" in person! and you were able to decide immediately whether to spend any more of your time on the people you networked with becuase you were able to see how they were raw and IN PERSON.
I do not like to use the Internet for my social life and it worries me that as people turn more and more to the Web for social interaction they will eventually become dependent on it and stop trying to meet right on the spot and in person entirely. Everyone will have to screen each other online first.
I guess I'm a real pessimist when it comes to this, but the social Web makes me long for days gone by.
I do like the idea of the social bookmarking services though and I wrote about this in my Choose Your Tool Assignment blog.
Oh, and Twitter just sounds kinda creepy to me.
A "FOAF"? What? I'm coming more and more to the shocking conclusion that I am old fashioned as the technological dark ages! Well, almost anyway. As I sit in a dark basement typing this to whatever faceless person may end up reading it I can't help but bring up a moment of recollection.
It was a pleasant day when I arrived far to early on campus for a class in the Humanities building here on campus. I had some reading to catch-up on so I thought I'd sit in the building's waiting area and read. It wasn't easy to find a comfortable seat because apparently I was not the only student with no place better to go on a pretty day but inside a dull building. Not really feeling enthralled with my reading I decided to observe people as it is one of my favorite things to do. As I looked around I noticed four students with head phone attached as they listed to ipods, MP3's and laptops. Several students had laptops out. One girl was busy texting, while another talked loud enough on her cell phone for all of us to hear her side of the conversation. There was a young guy playing with some sort of technical gadget I can only guess was a game and another guy looking like he was working with some sort if digitalized planner.
I sat back and watched them all. I must have sat there a half an hour as students came and went and nearly every person I saw was plugged in! I'd never stopped to notice this before, and in that half an hour I witnessed what can not possibly be the ordinary, but we sure are heading in this direction--I did not see a single conversation take place between two people that were physically present in front of each other. I watched all these people come and go and not one of them looked at me, or anyone else. Sure many of them were communicating, but they were communicating through technology and not in person.
I thought, if I tried to spark a conversation with anyone around me right now I would just be invading whatever it is they are doing with their technology and how sad is that. I tried to imagine this same room years ago before the cell phones and the Internet. I bet friends were made on the spot and relationships formed. Those friends probably introduced them to their "FOAF's" in person! and you were able to decide immediately whether to spend any more of your time on the people you networked with becuase you were able to see how they were raw and IN PERSON.
I do not like to use the Internet for my social life and it worries me that as people turn more and more to the Web for social interaction they will eventually become dependent on it and stop trying to meet right on the spot and in person entirely. Everyone will have to screen each other online first.
I guess I'm a real pessimist when it comes to this, but the social Web makes me long for days gone by.
I do like the idea of the social bookmarking services though and I wrote about this in my Choose Your Tool Assignment blog.
Oh, and Twitter just sounds kinda creepy to me.
CHAPTER 5 ENTRY
Ugh "(which we will get to later)" frustrates the heck out of me. I don't know about you guys but it always bothers me when a teacher does this. It is even more irritating in a book. I'd rather he wrote something like: (which we get to on page .... if you want to read ahead, but for now...).
This RSS sounds interesting, but really who has time for this? I already delete practically everything the NCTE emails me because my time is spread so thin. Unless it pertains to what I need at the moment I need it, I'm not going to take the time to read through it. I'm thinking this is a tool I will appreciate more a few years into my career when I don't always feel so rushed for time. I see how in the long haul it could be beneficial and even a time saver, but when it comes to immediate results I'm not sure. I guess since I've never used this it is difficult for me to imagine.
Richardson even says, "Don't be surprised if at first you think RSS is adding to your information overload instead of easing it." (73) Then he tells us we will soon "begin to understand why pretty soon RSS will be a household tool..." (73) I don't know I'm a little leery
of this one.
I guess one rainy day when I have the time to spare I may set one of these up. I suppose the worst that could happen is I would hate it and decide not to use it anymore. There really is nothing to loose and it does seem to have some potential for helping to stay on top of the most recent information.
This RSS sounds interesting, but really who has time for this? I already delete practically everything the NCTE emails me because my time is spread so thin. Unless it pertains to what I need at the moment I need it, I'm not going to take the time to read through it. I'm thinking this is a tool I will appreciate more a few years into my career when I don't always feel so rushed for time. I see how in the long haul it could be beneficial and even a time saver, but when it comes to immediate results I'm not sure. I guess since I've never used this it is difficult for me to imagine.
Richardson even says, "Don't be surprised if at first you think RSS is adding to your information overload instead of easing it." (73) Then he tells us we will soon "begin to understand why pretty soon RSS will be a household tool..." (73) I don't know I'm a little leery
of this one.
I guess one rainy day when I have the time to spare I may set one of these up. I suppose the worst that could happen is I would hate it and decide not to use it anymore. There really is nothing to loose and it does seem to have some potential for helping to stay on top of the most recent information.
Choose Your Tool Assignment
Principal Administrator Person:
I have just been made aware of an online resource that has great potential for serving the teachers at this school as a resource sharing tool. It is a site called http://delicious.com. Teachers can join this site, set their membership to private, and then share educational Internet links with each other. The site is free and provides us with a valuable tool by bookmarking URL's we have saved to the site. So a new English teacher, such as myself, could peak in and follow links marked by other teachers in the English department that have taught the same subject matter as myself. I think Wikipedia provides a great and more thorough explanation of how it works:
Delicious uses a non-hierarchical classification system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms (generating a kind of folksonomy). A combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL "http://delicious.com/tag/wiki" displays all of the most recent links tagged "wiki". Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by similar-minded users.
Delicious has a "hotlist" on its home page and "popular" and "recent" pages, which help to make the website a conveyor of internet memes and trends.
Delicious is one of the most popular social bookmarking services.[2] Many features have contributed to this, including the website's simple interface, human-readable URL scheme, a novel domain name, a simple REST-like API, and RSS feeds for web syndication.
Use of Delicious is free. The source code of the site is not available, but a user can download his or her own data through the site's API in an XML or JSON format, or export it to a standard Netscape bookmarks format.
All bookmarks posted to Delicious are publicly viewable by default, although users can mark specific bookmarks as private, and imported bookmarks are private by default. The public aspect is emphasized; the site is not focused on storing private ("not shared") bookmark collections.[3] Delicious linkrolls, tagrolls, network badges, RSS feeds, and the site's daily blog posting feature can be used to display bookmarks on weblogs.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)
I'd be happy to type-up a memo directing the school staff on how to get on board and sign-up for this helpful teacher tool. Please ask me more about Delicious and I will be glad to discuss the site with you.
Sincerely,
M......McD
I have just been made aware of an online resource that has great potential for serving the teachers at this school as a resource sharing tool. It is a site called http://delicious.com. Teachers can join this site, set their membership to private, and then share educational Internet links with each other. The site is free and provides us with a valuable tool by bookmarking URL's we have saved to the site. So a new English teacher, such as myself, could peak in and follow links marked by other teachers in the English department that have taught the same subject matter as myself. I think Wikipedia provides a great and more thorough explanation of how it works:
Delicious uses a non-hierarchical classification system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms (generating a kind of folksonomy). A combined view of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag is available; for instance, the URL "http://delicious.com/tag/wiki" displays all of the most recent links tagged "wiki". Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by similar-minded users.
Delicious has a "hotlist" on its home page and "popular" and "recent" pages, which help to make the website a conveyor of internet memes and trends.
Delicious is one of the most popular social bookmarking services.[2] Many features have contributed to this, including the website's simple interface, human-readable URL scheme, a novel domain name, a simple REST-like API, and RSS feeds for web syndication.
Use of Delicious is free. The source code of the site is not available, but a user can download his or her own data through the site's API in an XML or JSON format, or export it to a standard Netscape bookmarks format.
All bookmarks posted to Delicious are publicly viewable by default, although users can mark specific bookmarks as private, and imported bookmarks are private by default. The public aspect is emphasized; the site is not focused on storing private ("not shared") bookmark collections.[3] Delicious linkrolls, tagrolls, network badges, RSS feeds, and the site's daily blog posting feature can be used to display bookmarks on weblogs.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)
I'd be happy to type-up a memo directing the school staff on how to get on board and sign-up for this helpful teacher tool. Please ask me more about Delicious and I will be glad to discuss the site with you.
Sincerely,
M......McD
Monday, May 18, 2009
CHAPTER 4 ENTRY
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."
~Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder (Wales, 2004)
-----I just think this is a great quote!
"So when mistakes occur or vandals strike, the collaborative efforts of the group set it straight, usually very quickly. University of Buffalo Professor Alex Halavais tested this by creating thirteen errors on various posts on Wikipedia, all of which were fixed within a couple of hours (Halavais, 2004). Pretty amazing I'd say." (56)
I'd say so to. It is really incredible when you try to imagine how many people are online and all the links they will hit. To think that mistakes on random topics could be fixed within hours is unreal. I would have not even considered editing a Wiki before taking this class.
"edits appear at a rate of about 400,00 per day." (57) --again--just unreal.... I love the sentence that follows this one. "Every day, thousands of people who have no connection to one and other engage in the purposeful work of negotiating and creating truth." I mean that is what this is ALL about after all isn't it? Getting to the bottom of the truth, creating it, and having faith in the overall inherent goodness and intelligence of humans to be able to do this.
I will have to say, however, that after reading this chapter it is SO positive that it is obviously bias. The author is COMPLETELY for Wikis and I found this a bit annoying, even though I agree for the most part.
This is a good idea: "The early consensus among educators seems to be to tell students to use Wikipedia as a starting point for their work, but not as a sole resource." (60)
"Should we be encouraging them to contribute what they learn and know to the Wikipedia entry on the topic?" --YES!!!-- What a great way to show real world application!
Pgs. 66-67 give some great information on places to go to build a classroom Wiki site. I hope to use this information one day in my classroom. After I get a classroom that is. :)
~Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder (Wales, 2004)
-----I just think this is a great quote!
"So when mistakes occur or vandals strike, the collaborative efforts of the group set it straight, usually very quickly. University of Buffalo Professor Alex Halavais tested this by creating thirteen errors on various posts on Wikipedia, all of which were fixed within a couple of hours (Halavais, 2004). Pretty amazing I'd say." (56)
I'd say so to. It is really incredible when you try to imagine how many people are online and all the links they will hit. To think that mistakes on random topics could be fixed within hours is unreal. I would have not even considered editing a Wiki before taking this class.
"edits appear at a rate of about 400,00 per day." (57) --again--just unreal.... I love the sentence that follows this one. "Every day, thousands of people who have no connection to one and other engage in the purposeful work of negotiating and creating truth." I mean that is what this is ALL about after all isn't it? Getting to the bottom of the truth, creating it, and having faith in the overall inherent goodness and intelligence of humans to be able to do this.
I will have to say, however, that after reading this chapter it is SO positive that it is obviously bias. The author is COMPLETELY for Wikis and I found this a bit annoying, even though I agree for the most part.
This is a good idea: "The early consensus among educators seems to be to tell students to use Wikipedia as a starting point for their work, but not as a sole resource." (60)
"Should we be encouraging them to contribute what they learn and know to the Wikipedia entry on the topic?" --YES!!!-- What a great way to show real world application!
Pgs. 66-67 give some great information on places to go to build a classroom Wiki site. I hope to use this information one day in my classroom. After I get a classroom that is. :)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)