Ning is okay, but for now, I would rather focus my energies on something more along the line of Pageflakes for my classes.
When exploring Ning in Education, I liked the Forum questions the best. It is nice to read the responses to questions that are similar to mine. I don’t see needing to use the forum often since I can usually get any questions answered by my colleagues at school.
My impression is that a social networking site would be great for college seniors to help network to get a first job. My husband is on LinkedIn and is amazed at the networking possibilities. For now, I will leave my students’ social networking experiences to facebook and myspace.
I still haven’t found the perfect RSS feed for me. I really like the RSS idea, so I will continue to search. What is interesting to me is that I had never questioned what an RSS was even though I had seen it on many websites. Now, I can’t seem to visit a site without questioning whether it would be a good RSS for me.
I subscribed to some RSS feeds from some fellow Web 2.0 classmates and have enjoyed reading their thoughts. I’m not sure how often I would have visited their blogs so the RSS keeps me current.
I already have an igoogle startup page so playing around with pageflakes wasn’t too difficult for me. We have edline at the school, but I can see having a class pageflake (or something similar) to keep everyone up to date with the class. I would love to have it ready for parents’ day so that I can demonstrate it for the parents and then maybe they would check it out regularly. I am a big proponent of keeping in contact with parents and I think this is a wonderful tool.
I’m not completely sure what topics or themes I will include, but a calendar of upcoming events is a must. Since I teach seniors, I think it is important for them to know deadlines so that they don’t get too far behind. I have added a flake with my schedule for the year and the sudoku flake for fun. I have a feeling I might spend more time than I would like playing around with this.
I think googledocs is a perfect tool for teachers who give common tests. As long as the site is secure, teachers could collaborate on tests and track changes much easier than emailing attachments.
Another good use is like what we are doing in this class. If students have a project that has multiple parts, they could keep track of their progress along with the teacher.
Students could also use googledocs for a collaborative project. Since the students at our school live all over the metro area, a shared document would be a great advantage for working at home.
The problem that I encountered is again a math issue. I created a word document and used the software Mathtype to include math symbols. When I uploaded this onto googledocs, the version that I can see does not include these symbols. I will have to work on this to see if I can overcome this obstacle. If not, most of the worksheets or tests that I create will not be usable on googledocs.
I had honestly never thought to look to youtube for intellectual content, therefore, I was surprised to find some good basic calculus videos out there. I did discover some dumb videos, but the tutorials were good. It makes me wonder if our students have ever searched for this kind of help on youtube. But will all of that said, the link of choice for me is the Charlie video. Do yourself a favor and watch it so that you know what your students are talking about when the say, “Charlie bit my finger” with an English accent.
I have not had a great podcast experience. I have tried to record my three ideas three times and it will not save. I will continue to try and will embed it when I can get it to work.
When reading/exploring about podcasting, I kept thinking about how this tool could be used for absences (student and teacher). I think it would be great that when a student is absent, I could direct them to a podcast that they could watch so that maybe they wouldn’t be too far behind when they return. (These podcasts could also be good as reinforcement for a student who might need extra help at home.)
I see podcasting as a wonderful teaching tool when a teacher needs to be absent. If I had a scheduled absence, I could create a podcast of my lesson and the substitute could show it to my class. When at a conference one summer, I heard a teacher describe her plan for podcasting. She would record all of her lessons for one year so that she would have them on file for subsequent years. I’m curious how this will hold up when they adopt a new textbook?
I know that some of my students would love to work with podcasting as a presentation tool for projects. I would like to look into this idea further.
The entire time I was playing on LibraryThing, I couldn’t help but think about my daughter. She and her friends could have so much fun with this. They already tell each other about the latest book that they have read and exchange book regularly. I plan on showing my daughter this site in a few minutes and let her loose with it.
I was also disappointed that my father’s book didn’t show up when I searched for it. He self-published and most of his target market isn’t completely computer savvy so I wasn’t really surprised. Maybe I’ll start my own list and put his book first!
My first instinct was to search for calculus help pages for my students. There were many choices, but I noticed that I liked the sites that were displayed on the first two results pages the best. I like the solvers so that students can see if their answers are correct before going on to the next problem. I really enjoyed watching some of the video tutorials. I think that the kids can benefit from this form of reinforcement of my lesson.
I like the idea of me and my colleagues using del.icio.us to share our research. I could see finding a few of the best resource sites for each of our math classes to have on a del.icio.us account and then link it to our school math page. All of our students would benefit from this, not just those with computer savvy teachers.
Check out my del.icio.us bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/cksilvers.
Although I have enjoyed reading some of the math related blogs and learning about other sites from fellow participants, I was the most excited about a new blog at our school regarding campus construction. Our IT department has set up a construction blog, and I subscribed to the RRS. I am a closet architect and love the entire process of building so this blog is fun for me. I just wish the updates were more frequent and included The Floyd.
