Creating A Social Network

The theme of our first week of class was, "Creating your own social network". To me, it's very exciting to see all of the ways a person can become connected. This week, we will continue creating our own social networks and also learn more about using Web 2.0 as a research and reflective tool. Here is a list of tentative ideas for class this week:

1. Explore tags, labels, and technorati
2. How to write an effective blog entry
3. How to comment effectively on blogs
4. Diigo - social bookmarking and the connections
5. Explore "professional" blogs

I've also added a new "help" page to our wikispace. If you find any other youtube videos that you think should be added to this player, please email me the hyperlink!

What else would you like to explore this week? In your "web 2.0" travels last week and over the weekend, what questions have you come up with? You may respond to this blog entry with any ideas/questions you have!

Time for Kindergarten Already??????

Madison's first days of school.



The most difficult thing Keith and I have ever had to do is put her on the bus. It all happened so quickly that neither of us had time to cry and thankfully, neither did Madison. She got on, sat with her new friend "Justin" and rode to school. The best part was seeing her glowing smile as she ran off of the bus that afternoon. We knew she would love school!


And then there's Owen - he was VERY excited for his first day of preschool today!

Organizing My Thoughts About Learning

Tonight in class, we will begin discussing Jonassen's updated "Mindtools" text. We will try to make sense of how he wants us to "travel" through the text. Tonight's goal is to begin apply his "framework" for creating meaningful learning experiences for our students. We'll use a concept map to document our thoughts and embed that concept map in our blog and reflect on it. This way, we'll be able to document how our thoughts evolve throughout the course.

Some key ideas from chapters 1-3; your reading due Tuesday night:

Meaningful learning:
1. Meaningful purpose
2. Conceptual engagement
3. Conceptual development
4. Methods and strategies that support these three components (Jonassen, 2006, p. xiii).

Jonassen asks: "How do we engage and support conceptual change in students?"
Jonassen answers: "...building models of phenomena being studied is among the most effective methods" (p. xv).

How we will begin to organize our ideas: (refer to the graphic organizer on p. xvi of the text).
1. Identify learning goals.
2. After skimming through chapters 4-8, how do you classify your learning goals? (domain knowledge, systems, problems, experiences, or thinking)
3. How do you want your students to model phenomena and which tools should they use? (chapters 9-17 discuss the tools)
4. How will you assess this learning? (chapter 3 and also throughout 9-17)

We are going to create models of the ideas we are learning. Here is my Graphic Organizer as a sample:


This is a different type of thinking for most. In addition, intense learning about technology has to occur throughout this process as we create "Mindtools". I'm calling for a shift in my students' thinking; a change in the way they do things. It's all about their "learning". I share a thought from Will Richardson's most recent blog entry: we need to try to re-envision our own learning; not just our students. I think this class will do that.

Your comments are welcome!

NECC 2008

This year at NECC 2008, I presented with Kristen Kozloski. The title of our presentation was, "University 2.0: Digital Innovations in the University Classroom". We shared the many technologies that we use in our university classrooms to facilitate our students' learning. We use many different Web 2.0 technologies to create a professional learning network with our students. The neatest thing about our presentation was that we created a Diigo group for all who attended. The purpose of this group is to continue the discussion "University 2.0". It's also a place for social bookmarking. You too can create your own (free) Diigo account (www.diigo.com) and ask to join our NECC 2008 group. Please join the discussion and collaborate with us! Diigo allowed us as presenters to create webslides of our bookmarks within this group. Here is a link to the webslides.

Finally, we experimented with UStream and streamed our presentation LIVE! The video isn't great quality but we you can definitely hear the information we share. We hope you enjoy the presentation...we challenge you to join our group AND our discussion. Collaboration is FUN!!!

Video clips hosted by Ustream

We made strawberry jam!

This week in EDTEC 448, we will be letting our creative juices flow! We'll begin with an introductory presentation by Sir Ken Robinson

and a discussion about how to get our students to be creative. After a discussion about thinking differently about our teaching and our students' learning (what we've been doing all term), we will begin to create our own podcasts. We will be using Audacity but we'll also discuss other tools that are available. We'll close tonight with the following sample digital story done in Voicethread (www.voicethread.com).



During the next class, we'll be continuing the Digital Storytelling conversation with flickr and several other publishing technologies.

My goal for teaching the Internet in the Classroom class at Penn State Great Valley is to motivate my students to "...think differently about their classrooms and the potentials of the technologies...in terms of pedagogy and curriculum" (p. viii, 2006, Richardson), we will be discussing their classroom web portals this week. As I thought about what their classroom portals might look like (and some already have one), Web 2.0 is going to have a huge influence on the appearance, purpose, etc.

I will ask them 3 questions just to see the "sign of the times" (Link to our Ning discussion.)
1. Where is your web page hosted (include the URL and discuss if it is a district mandated issue)?
2. What is the purpose of your web page (or web site)?
3. How do you use your web page for instruction?
4. After this class, what changes will you make to your web page?

Here is the slideshare presentation that I will share with my students:

| View | Upload your own

Social Bookmarking

This morning, I was thinking about my next grad class and how I would continue our “searching”, “researching”, “looking for professional resources”, etc. conversation. We are going to discuss organizing our Internet-based information and I’d like to use del.icio.us to do that with my students. I had been using delicious for a while as a bookmarking service. I love it (and the firefox menu bar that I downloaded to my browser is great!). HOWEVER, I know that diigo also does social bookmarking. I also have been using diigo for a while, but only in this way: I use diigo to highlight key points in an article on the web, add sticky notes, and then share w/ a colleague. She can see my highlights/notes and add hers, etc. It’s collaborative notetaking, research, thinking, etc. I decided to do a little research to see how I should present this to my students.

First, I did a search on google that looked like this: delicious vs. diigo. The first few hits were all I needed to dive into my research.
Here are some of the first few links that appeared:
1. http://www.diigo.com/help/why_diigo (biased of course!)
2. A post from Will Richardson: http://weblogg-ed.com/2007/diigo-and-delicious/
3. http://techfridge.blogspot.com/2008/01/diigo-cant-say-it-but-we-like-it.html
4. http://christytucker.wordpress.com/2008/03/29/diigo-or-delicious-for-beginners/ (This post echoed my “gut” instincts to go w/ delicious first!)
So, I’ve made my decision. We’ll learn del.icio.us as a whole group. (And of course, they can also watch the Common Craft video on del.icio.us for more help.) Those students who have used del.icio.us before can explore diigo and then share with us.

There’s something else very important that I want to note: As I was reading Will Richardson’s post, I was very excited. This is the type of blog post that I want my students to read, learn from, and write for this course. This is modern day Web 2.0 research! There is so much to learn just from this one blog post. Here are my questions for my students as they read Richardson’s post and the corresponding comments. They are entering the realm of Research 2.0 (that’s what I’d like to call it!). After reading Will Richardson’s post, from a professional development standpoint, Where will you go from here? What do you want to learn more about? How will you find the information? How will you use it professionally/in your classroom?