I posted a link to my voicethread on the right, but Ifigured it might be easier to navigate if’n I go ahead and post it here too.
Archive for October, 2009
29
Oct
09
My VoiceThread
This is a short film by Spike Jonze revolving around a delusional Kanye West. The video starts a little slow and it’s crazy to see this huge hip-hop star aggrivating everyone he comes in contact with in the club, but stay with it ’til the end! *Warning: some offensive material and general creepieness!
*Apparently Spike Jonze pulled the video. If you search for it, I’m sure you’ll find it somewhere! Worth the view.
15
Oct
09
Dr. Tyson Keynote
First off, let me say wow! Talk about unlocking potential. I know I should realize this, but sometimes it is difficult to think of middle schoolers as young thoughtful minds. These middle schoolers at Mabry Middle have definitely shattered any type of stereotype they may have been labeled. All of their videos were very insightful and thought provoking. This truly is authentic assessment. The students hunger for the knowledge of their assignment and cannot wait to share it.
What I’m talking about is the video project assignment for Mabry Middle school. The videos are made by students who are studying particular topics and use a video project to enhance the learning process. They then are posted on Mabry’s web site for the entire world to see. I like Dr. Tyson’s quote, ” Why do we just put students’ work on the bulletin board, when we can share it with the world?” Again, wow. I can’t imagine what this type of encouragement can do for students’ self esteem. I never had the opportunity to do this sort of thing back in the dark ages when we still had typing classes. The closest thing I ever came to displaying my work was as a contributor for the school newspaper, and for that I got my share of ribbing.
What this idea seems to do is motivate the student to learn and to teach. Again we cannot be scared of technology, but we as educators need to learn how to harness it for use, not abuse. We definitely need to mediate in the use of technology in the classroom and use it in the classroom in such a manner that students come to respect the opportunity of using technology to learn.
Ahhh, the dreaded social web!! By the time I just got the hang of using my phone to text, along came social networking sites! A friend of mine once told me that I needed to ”join the rest of the human race in the 21st century” and sign up for facebook. I responded with, well, I don’t think I can repeat what I said so as not to offend a few people, but I thought I was being very witty in my response.(If you want to know, ask me in confidence next time you see me) But now, every line of communication seems to be going the way of, what I find to still be somewhat impersonal, computer generated communication.
In the “Welcome to the Twitterverse” section of the chapter, I found some enlightenment about this “micro-blogging”. Just as I thought of facebook, I thought, Why the hell would I even care if so and so is pulling into the parking lot…going up the stairs…passing the water cooler…sitting at his desk…I never thought of the application in education. In the words of Bob Dylan, “The times, they are a’ changin’”. As teachers we have to adapt to these rapid social (using the word loosely) digital interactions, and what better way to involve students than with something like “Twitter Collaboration Stories”? What a cool idea!
The social bookmarking section also revealed another great tool for the classroom. I know we have gone over this in class and have even set up del.icio.us accounts, but explained in this chapter was a little more insight and depth on the advantages of social bookmarking. The keyword matching deal is pretty cool. Being able to subscribe to someones tag and see all of the information they have gathered about the topic, as well as info others who have subscribed to their tag, and to their tag and to th…talk about your six dgrees to Kevin Bacon! When I have more time, I plan to explore some more. Exciting stuff!
06
Oct
09
Glogster, Gabcast, Wordle, etc.
These are really cool sites and I can completely see using these in the classroom. Glogster is a cool poster creation site that reminds me of the posters I used to see in the halls back in high school. Yes, I have a fair amount of memory recall from those years! The posters would almost always contain some motivational or inspirational message even though only nerds like me paid attention to them. This is a perfect way to let students show what they learned from either a specific lesson in the class or a book they have read. It doesn’t mean that they should NOT write a report, but this would be the perfect companion to a writing assignment in the classroom.
Gabcast seems pretty cool too, but I don’t quite know what the application for the classroom might be. I guess I’m still kind of an in-the-box thinker when it comes to all of the rapidly advancing advances in classroom technologies. I’m sure if I sat and thought about it for a while I could come up with something interesting to do with Gabcast, but for know it’s just another novel idea to me and a new, un-attempted recipe in my classroom cookbook.
Wordle is a pretty cool site too. Like Glogster, students can input words to make a pretty neat looking design with their word choices. Again, not necessarily an essential classroom tool, but I think students might like to create something interesting with text from either the main idea of a book or content of a poem or something like that.
These seem to be great tools to use in the classroom, and I am excited about using technology in the classroom.
SocialVibe