Week 6 of Cedo 535

The item that I have decided to use fully in my professional life is a class wiki.  I am going on my 3rd week of using this now, and it is working very well.  The students can easily access this and enjoy having a centralized place were they can see what we have been doing in class and have the opportunity to edit any information they feel needs to be changed.  Since I have already started to incorporate this in my classroom, it is very easy to measure how well it is working for me.  I can look at all of the edits made by the students and figure out how much participation the students are having within the wiki.  I feel that this experiment will turn into something I use as a full time tool not just in my current Civics class, but in other classes I teach in the future.  It really does make teaching easier and learning for the students a more interactive task.

Week 5 of Cedo 535

This week, I started a Wiki and used Eyejot with my Civics class.  My wiki coincides with the work that my students are doing in class.  After a week of using it, I would say it has been a success.  The students have enjoyed entering their thoughts and what they have found for their assignments.  I have seen a lot of great collaboration with the students and they have done a fine job of fixing mistakes that students have entered in the wiki.  It really has helped take my class to another level of thinking.  I now plan to use this wiki for the rest of the year and years to follow.  I would also like to start a wiki for other classes I teach.

Eyejot has been really fun.  I have sent two Eyejot messages to my students the past week and posted them on Facebook.  The messages relate to our topic in class The Articles of Confederation.  I have got positive responses from my students.  They said it's fun and also makes them think more when they can see and hear me on the computer asking them about what we are learning in class.  Eyejot is yet another great tool that I wish I had years ago.  It's so easy, yet so useful!

I really can't believe this class is almost over.  We have gone through five weeks already and learned a ton.  I think this class has been one of my most beneficial in the whole program up to this date.  I look forward the last week and any new tools that I will be learning about.

Week 4 of Cedo 535

This week we had to work on a podcast or screencast.  As decided to do a podcast using a site called Eyejot.  Eyejot is very easy to use and is free.  It's a great way to record your self as a video message and either send that message to someone via email or post it somewhere someone can see.  As I was doing this, I came up with a great idea.  I currently have a Facebook page for two of my classes.  I typically post questions on the page for students to answer.  I think I'm going to try to post some Eyejot messages that the students can watch then respond to.  This may be more interesting for some of the kids rather than just responding to some written questions.  They seem to like to see me on video when I share videos of me in class, so this may be a way of extending their learning.  I will have to try this and update at a future time.

Week 3 of CeDO 535

I have really enjoyed the topics we have been exploring in this course.  This week is no exception.  The two major topics we were investigating this week were RSS feeds and Photo sharing sites.  I made my first Google Reader to collected RSS feeds from various websites.  I wish I had known about this earlier, it really is neat and useful.  It basically collects information from sites you subscribe to and sends it to you.  This eliminates the need for you to go out and look for the information.  It's like email for web information.  I can see my self continually using this for my personal and professional life. 

I also added photos to my Flickr account.  I actually did have a Flickr account set up from a few years ago, but never used it.  I now have added more pictures and can share those pictures with others.  I'm not sure if I will use it more, but I may.  At this point, I do put all my photos on Facebook and share them with my friends there.  I also back up my computer with Mozy, so I will have to see if I will use Flickr more or not. 

Overall, this week has been interesting and I am looking forward to the second half of this class!

Week 2 of CeDo 535

This week, one of the things we investigated in class is the use of Wikis.  For the past few years, I allowed my students to use Wikipedia as a source of information for their work in my class.  After investigating it more this week, I feel more comfortable with my decision to allow that.  However, I am still going to continue to require students to cross check any information that they find with other sources.  As I did as a kid when it was books, magazines and encyclopedias, I always had to cross check my sources.  I continue to feel that Wikipedia is a good place to verify "big ideas."  Although some of the information on the site might be false, the main topics seem to be concrete. 

I am also interested in making a wiki for my civics class.  I think it would be a great tool to have to gather all of my students thoughts into one central location.  This year, I have tried a new way of teaching with my Civics students.  I post questions on Moodle and have the students find the information on their own using the Internet.  I'm able to do this because I have my class in a computer lab this year, so that helps.  After they find the information, they put it into word or powerpoint and then put it into a shared folder.  We then take a day to look at the info everyone got and discuss it.  If move to using a wiki for class, the students can constantly see what others are posting and make changes as they see fit. 

Week 1 of CeDO 535

This week I started my new class called Facilitating Collaboration using Web Tools.  I found the assignment on investigating blogging services to be quit useful.  I really liked the this site called Coveritlive.  Coveritlive is a service that allows users to cover events live.  If there are speeches, sporting events or other live events going on, this service lets you post your thoughts in real time, so others can see what you are thinking about the topic at hand.  It is very similar to instant messaging.    As a person posts  in real time, readers are able to post comments, which pop up like instant messages.  I can see this to be an exciting way to get students involved with discussions.  This services also allows the readers to answer questions to polling questions that the blogger shares.   This services is free and can work in your school if you get certain school restrictions lifted.  
I also like the book that we are starting to read, "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms" by Will Richardson.  This book looks into the many new tools that are out there to use in school.  I really like the idea of blogging more with students and having more of a connection that way with my students.  I recently made Facebook pages for 2 of my classes, and so far that has been a fun way of interacting with my students in a way I have not done in the past.  

Week 5 of CeDO 540

This week we took a look at Google Trends.  I found this to be really interesting.  I really liked how easy this site makes it for a person to look at the popularity of two or more subjects based on the searches for the certain topic.  As a group, were were too look into this site and research a topic.  We decided to look into popularity of professional sports.  It was really neat to see the big difference in popularity between NHL and NFL here in America.  Football is a lot more popular!  However, you are also able to look at popularity in different areas of the world.  To no surprise, Canada's love for the NHL for surpasses that of its love for the NFL.   We also compared the NFL to the NBA and they actually were quite similar, but some cities had higher interest for NBA or NFL than others did.   After looking into our group assignment, I wanted to play around with Google Trends a bit on my own.  I took different U.S. cities and matched them up to on another.  New York had the most hits, followed by Chicago.  I was a bit surprised, because I thought 2nd place would be Los Angeles since it is the second largest city in the country, but Chicago had quite more hits than LA.   One thing I found very interesting was when I put Minneapolis in Google Trends.  Overall, there isn't much activity for searches on Minneapolis, but there was a large spike around August 2007....or when the I-35 bridge collapsed.  That event cause many, many people to look up Minneapolis.   Anyway, I am happy that I learned this new tool and I hope I will be able to use it for something practical in my personal or professional life in the future.