Final Thoughts on the APSU 23 things

Finally done, my only complaint was amount of projects crammed into this last weekly session (and the only thing I would do different – 12 projects and 12 blog entries and an assignment on the NET-S Wiki plus the regular discussion board was a little too much).  A lot of these “things” went by so fast I hurried just to get them done.   I guess my lifelong learning goal is now that I’ve had a quick overview of some great technology helps, to go back over them one by one and really develop fluency with them all.  Now the thinking and reflecting is setting in.  Thinking back on the ones that really excite me, all revolve around the really practical classroom use I see for elementary students: (a) Wiki, (b) blogs, (c) podcasts and (d) Zoho writer (web application).  I am working on my reading specialist degree and so I see a lot of benefit for all of these in helping students to read, write, listen and speak better.  The Wiki is great for content area reading and writing as I see tremendous potential for science and social studies projects.  Podcast would be great for student reading books or sharing their favorite stories in a low stress, non-threatening way.  The blog and Zoho writer are very multifunctional, having uses in all the content areas as well as reading and writing.

And finally, where do I go from here?  The Google reader and RSS feeds are a great professional development tool because they will allow me to stay current on Web 2.0 and Learning 2.0, as I have feeds centering on using technology in the classroom.  I need to set aside some time each day (15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes in the evening) to go through and read and practice.  These will be great tools only if I am familiar enough to use them.  I will end with the same quote I used in Thing 5.  Good luck and Godspeed on your own personal quest moving forward from here.

“We can no longer ask our children to live in a world where they are immersed in technology in all parts of their lives except school.  We must rewire education or we risk losing this generation of media-immersed, tech-savvy students.”

“Welcome to the iGeneration!” by Larry Rosen (2010).

Thing 23: Creative Commons

 

 

The first time I really notice anything about copyright was on the Learning 2.0 – 23 Things for Teachers: Thing 13 on web based application.  At the bottom of the page was a photo source for the picture used at the top of the blog posting.  Modeling myself after that, I went back to some of my first blogs and edited them to include a photo source and hyperlink with the images (from Google Images).  It made me think about teaching the subject of copyright with students and the Creative Commons would be a great place to start.  I like uses a lot of images and video in my PowerPoint’s and have never included source information about where I retrieved my images or videos, a practice I am working on to change.  The most important thing I learned from watching “A Fair(y) Use Tale” is that it is okay to use short clips of video for educational purposes, just cite the source.

 I found a great example of the creative commons license in action.  All the way down at the bottom of Learning 2.0 - 23 Things for Teachers,  a project I have been working on the last several weeks, it lists the credits this site used to create this project.  As you can see from my picture ("Credits") above it talks about the creative commons license.  The only thing missing, the cool little icon.

 

Thing 22: Podcasts

I liked the Podcastdirectory.com best because I liked the indexing by topics the site provided.  Once you selected a topic, Education, and went down to a subcategory like Education Technology, the subsequent page opened up into a nicely laid out index of all the podcasts for that subcategory.  Each site had an icon or picture and a brief description.  The Educational Podcast Directory was much harder to navigate but I did like the fact that it included podcast by students or from classrooms.  The Learn Out Loud directory was also good and gave me several podcasts focused more towards adults and high school or college students.  PodcastAlley.com was an okay site, nothing all that spectacular and not well organized, just very long lists of podcast titles listed under various subcategories.

Listening to an elementary grade podcast I found using the Educational Podcast Directory I listened to several students retell a story accompanied by pictures from the book.  Here is one of my favorites by a younger child (kindergarten or 1st grade) reading Caterpillar, Caterpillar.  Another great one was a younger child reading Hedgehog is Hungry.  It is very easy to see a classroom application just by listening to these two student podcasts.  In addition to using podcasts in reading it would be a great way to narrate a social studies story the student could create.  They could create a podcast describing the Civil War (as if they were reporting on a radio) or narrate the Lewis and Clark Expedition as either of these two men or as Sacajawea.  Student could outline the process of photosynthesis via podcast of pretend they are recording scientific observations during an exploration through the Amazon Rainforest (some great ideas from some podcast entitled Science from the Wild Side narrated by an adult but students could easily do something similar).

Thing 21: Animoto (video clips)

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Jazzy Brown Squirrel

Well I obviously did not read the tips about uploading images before I selected my images.  I started working on this during the evening, went to bed to let the photos upload while I sleep, and still had photos trying to upload the next morning.  I tried to delete some photo but couldn’t get them off the uploading tray while they were “pending.”  Then I read the uploading tip that suggested I resize the images to speed uploading time.  I canceled my upload and resized my picture.  On a Mac you do this through the “Preview” application that is preloaded on a Mac.  First you click on the picture to open it, then go to the File/Save As and a dialogue box open up.  Down at the bottom there is a slide bar that lets you adjust the quality of the picture.  To resize the picture smaller just lower the quality, as you do it will tell you the file size right below the slide bar.  Once my pictures were resized I finished the project in another 15 minutes.  It was a fun little application, but I did not see much practical use for the classroom.  I guess for special events you could have pictures of the class (Christmas, end of school year), or maybe use this after a field trip or field day.  It would be fun to have on a class website, classroom blog, or other site parents had access to.

Thing 20: You, Too, Can YouTube

I love YouTube videos but have been frustrated that CMCSS blocks access to YouTube on the school server (I understand completely – there is a lot of YouTube stuff you do not want children viewing).  While student teaching I was looking of videos on rock climbing (turn the volume down or off BEFORE clicking the hyperlink if young children are present), to build background information on a novel I was doing for 5th grade Language Arts (On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer).  Back then I did not know how to download YouTube videos with a Firefox add-on, and so although I found several great videos, I had to go another direction because I couldn’t show the videos using the CMCSS server.  For this particular video, using with students, I would ensure the sound was off (and double check – although the bad word is at the very end and there is other talking to remind you to turn down the sound).  I picked this because it is a good example of finding a good video but having to use care with the audio (also a lot of the music used in the background of some YouTube videos might not be appropriate).

I also found this great video while reading Rikki-Tikki-Tavi by Rudyard Kipling in a 4th grade classroom, but again, before I knew how to download a video and so back then it was unusable to me.  Some of the comments made after the video are inappropriate for children.

Thing 19: Beyond MySpace: Other Social Networks

I signed up for my first social networking site just for this class and had not been a member before, due to the reasons I have listed below on my blog for “Thing 18: Social Networking”.  Perhaps it has a lot to do with wanting to keep a smaller footprint out in cyberspace and not have too much information out about myself (maybe it is just being in the military too long and the training I’ve had to keep my personal information carefully guarded).  I have looked at “Ning” before and have joined “Edmodo”.  I clicked on “TeacherPop” but didn’t really see any great advantage over a blog (the one advantage being other people can add things almost like Wiki page, so I guess this is a merge between a Wiki page and a blog).  I joined Edmodo because I saw a little more classroom application in using this site.  This would be great to set up a site for your whole class to share a calendar, post assignments, and include links to websites.  Parents could get on the site and see assignments, the calendar, and post questions also (at least I think they can – I think you would just have to give them the code).  Assignments can be turned in via Edmodo, graded and returned back to the students with a grade.  Students that had questions about an assignment could post a question.  Resources for class project could be listed under the library.  You can send messages and assignment to individuals or groups (you could sent information just to the group working on a Civil War project).  The term of agreement require you to keep consent form signed by each parent on file (and provide them to the company upon request) and that teachers have the permission of the school or district before using the service.  I would recommend reading some of the testimonials (especially read the one by a 5th grade teacher, Robert Miller.  The special needs students and the one on small group collaboration were also good to spark the imagination).

Thing 18: Social networking

 

I will admit that I enter into this topic with a lot of bias and little I found alleviate my concerns.  I am sure there are a lot of urban legends out there about Facebook and MySpace but I still vividly remember the girl who committed suicide when a fake online boyfriend on MySpace broke up with her.  The fake boyfriend turned out to be another child’s mother.  Just a couple of month ago at the beginning of this semester, there was a story of an educator losing her job when she complained about parents on Facebook.  When clicking the APSU 23 things link about creating a Myspace profile from about.com, I followed some of the other links.  One lead me to another site on about.com called common sense media, which offered a review on Myspace for parents.  It found the site not appropriated for those under 16 year olds and labeled the site “iffy” for 16-18 year olds (or for most of the school aged children through high school).  It labeled the site as having no educational value and it was not an educational medium.  I think the greatest importance for a teacher to learn about these sites is because students are using them.  With the recent attention placed upon cyber-bullying due to a suicide of a college student at Rutgers University (if college students aren’t strong enough to handle this kind of pressure, then why would we think younger children can?) teachers need to be aware and tuned in to how students are using (or abusing) both Facebook and Myspace (okay, so a weak connection between Facebook and Myspace, as in this case the spying was done using a webcam but my point I think is still valid, teachers do need to pay attention to cyber-bullying).  I opted to set up a Myspace account just because in my reading it appeared to be the most popular.  I signed up using an alias (Brown Squirrel) and using a fake birth date (both disappointingly too easy to do – if I can do it so can an online predator) and after following the other steps set up my account.  Upon setting up my account I attempted to unload some photos, which surprisingly took quite a while to do (they uploaded very slowly) and I could not select a batch of photos to upload (there is a way to do this, I just clicked on the tutorial on MySpace and still couldn’t figure out how to make it work).  After only getting one photo loaded I figured I had already spent too much time on this and decided to cut my losses and move on.  Still searching for a good educational use for social networking, perhaps my bias is just a little too big to overcome.