For 4/10 class, we will be continuing our conversation about writing to learn but with a bit of a 21st century flair. I hope we can talk about what the limits and possibilities of emerging technologies are for the classroom, particularly in supporting the writing to learn process.
I want you to browse as many of these sites as you can ... I'd like to say check them all out but I know that there are some that you could spend hours on alone. So browse means spend a good amount of time exploring these sites and thinking about what the possibilities might be for your subject area:
These are some simple Web 2.0 tools to use with students (and there are so many more so these are just ones I chose because I know real secondary teachers using them - remember all this stuff was created AFTER I taught high school ... so these were just a twinkling in someone's eyes. I defer to those of you who are much more immersed in this to suggest other places): blogger - the free site we're using, a social networking site - ning.com, and pageflakes. None of these sites show you actual people using these sites - these are the just the set up and features ... maybe you can imagine the possibilities from these. In fact, you might want to search this catalog and see if there are some uses for your content area that you didn't think of. If you find any good ones, please comment and post the link below.
This is one of the better resource sites - socialstudies central-- I've found on Web 2.0 tools and, though this is posted by a social studies teacher, this is a general resource site for anyone wanting to learn more about this. And, finally, here's a little short article to give you a glimps of how blogging might relate to writing to learn - what can these tools help us think about in terms of extending learning and possibly bending time ... the demon that plagues all teachers? I am also posting about some work using digital video here that I find intriguing. Finally, here's a colleague's active middle school science site. Can you find other uses in your various content areas to share?
If you want to connect any of this with things we have seen before, take a look at the multiliteracies sites on the links to the right of this post.
If this inspires some ideas and questions, please comment to this though that's not required. If you have something to share, please comment here and share either your experience, your observation, and/or a link. Have fun!
(And thanks Jack and Anita for the tutorial on links!)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
There is so much to learn, it's daunting, it's mind-boggling to a troglodyte such as I am. This is how much I don't know: I never even knew the term "Web 2.0" before reading this post.
I've been browsing some of these sites and see lots of possibilities but the quality of student work I've been looking at is not that great. Not-so-great writing is something that's more comfortable in a weird way -- I have an idea what to do with it, about it, how to talk about it. But not-so-great videos or other "new media"? Do you have to treat them like blogs -- students' "self-expression" and leave it alone?
Here are a few suggested sites. For blogging, I think Wordpress.com is very good. It offers many more attractive templates than blogger.com, and more importantly, you can add pages as well as posts, so that it is like a combined Web site/blog. It is also free.
A new site I've been using is Tumblr.com. This is like Web scrapbooking, as opposed to the Web journal writing of blogs. It is very easy to start to use and thus very student friendly. It does not allow comments, however.
Westchester and Putnam school districts belong to LHRIC, the arm of BOCES that supplies tech services and support. The head of that service, Pete Reilly, has a blog called Ed Tech Journeys that I have found very useful reading. He links to many other educational technology blogs.
English with Dr. T is the Web site of a sixth grade teacher in Haverford, PA. She has maintained a Web site for her students since at least 1997. There are many good reading and writing strategies detailed on this site.
A recent discovery is iTunes U, the free content academic part of iTunes. You can find lots of broadcasts of lessons on virtually any topic, some for you and some for your students. The Annenburg Foundation learner.org site has very useful video for us as teachers.
Cheers, Anita
P.S. Dear Jill, I think we treat student writing in electronic form the same way we would their writing on paper - it depends on our goal as a teacher and thus on the assignment. Some writing may be personal and expressive and other writing may be more academic. Is our focus the process or the product? I've seen lots of imperfect work posted in classrooms - maybe it just looks worse on the internet!
Best, Anita
Here are two articles that address a negative consequence of online social networking sites - the invasion of students' privacy.
The first article discusses "cyberbullying", while the second article offers a low tech alternative to online social networks, called of all things, a diary.
Post a Comment