Things from NECC

Hey guys! I am back and came back with so many incredible ideas from NECC that I can't wait to do with my teachers in the fall. I went to many podcasting, blogs, and Universal Design sessions. I really came back with some great resources. Since I have much to prepare for Friday, I can't list them all today, but I will blog again and add them for you all soon. I was thinking that it would be cool to have one blog site where we can still get together and share ideas after we are done...anyone else?

Anyway, the site I cannot not wait to share with you is http://www.imbee.com/teacher
It is a free social networking site for teachers to use with their students. (Caution though...still may need to get permission to use, but this is a great place to take a look at) Teachers would set up an account and invite students to join. Parents give permission first and every time their child logs in, their parents get an update. Parents can also view what is going on. I seems like a great site. Check it out and let me know what you think. See you all tomorrow!

June 20, 2007

I know we are coming to an end, but there still seems so much to do to get ready for exit next week. NECC couldn't have some at a worse time, but I am excited about going. Today, I was on the NECC conference site and looked at the program. I discivered a neat planning feature where I could explore the program and then add a session to my planner. The planner kept track of all of the sessions I was interested in. Of all the conferences I have gone to, I have never seen anything like this. Conference planning is going high tech. No more carrying around the big booklet anymore with marked up pages of sessions you want to go to. As I was scanning the sessions, there are many on wikis, podcasts and blogs. I do plan to go to a couple of these sessions because I really enjoy to hear ideas that other come up with on how to use them in the classroom. I have been to podcasting sessions before and many of them show Garageband on the mac, which doesn't really help us in our schools. I was really excitied to see a podcasting for windows session. Other sessions I am excited to go to are universal design (yes, I was surprised to see one too!), students podcasting daily news and many more...I leave Sunday morning. I will have to let you all know how it goes.

June 14

Wow! Did I really miss blogging this past week. Maybe I was just too caught up in reading everyone Else's. I must say I am quite impressed with the thoughts of many in our group...so creative and some pretty deep. I can at least be the light and simple for everyone. In class our group was discussing the hope that this semester was being taken in an entire semester instead of 6 weeks. The new tools we have been learning about have been very fun and it would have been great if we would have had more time to really explore them like we explored Wikipedia. Another thought is that we could have had 1 blog that just discussed Will Richardson's book. There are so many good websites that he discusses that we could have evaluated for ourselves and wrote about them in a blog.

Completing our Public Service Announcements in a digital format really made me appreciate it. It was so much easier than doing in camera editing on the old VHS cameras and it is so much cleaner. Thank God for the technology age!

May 31- Wikis and such...

Last week when we started to think about blogs and how they could be used in the classroom, everything my mind went to was actually more suited for a wiki than a blog. I love the ideas of wikis. I can think of many times when I was in undergrad where it would have been very nice to have a wiki to collaborate on. I had a friend who sent all of her papers to her mom and dad because they were English teachers. A wiki would have been very nice because just by using the history feature she could see what changes they had recommended.

It was a good experience creating a page on Wikipedia. I have read many things from there, but never created a page before. I think it would be neat to have kids create pages on there as well. It amazed me how someone was editing the page within 10 minutes of me finishing it. I really look forward to doing more collaboration next year with Angel and wikis and blogs.

May 24th- What a week!

Hey everyone! After the first week of doing classwork, I realized that it really won't be too bad. I have enjoyed doing it. I love doing collaborative work and really learn a lot from others. Now, I am very glad that I chose to do my online work in Blackboard. Doing a happy hour summary is a little more interesting in a group. When doing collaborative work, I also love how you can start with what you think is a great idea, and with input of others a great idea becomes an incredible idea!!

In class last night, we talked a lot about blogs and ways that we could possibly use them in the classroom. Many of the things that came to my mind involved collaboration on a finished product, which lends itself more to a wiki format. I think that I will really enjoy talking about wikis. I have never really thought that blogging is something that I would enjoy or embrace. I always loved to write my thoughts down when I was younger in a journal or diary, but I would never want to share them with EVERYONE! It is amazing to me how people are so out there. I also thought about what Bill said in class about how everything can be found once it is online, and I thought about how teenagers and young adults put everything out there these days. More and more jobs these days are looking at things like my space, and to be honest with you, I am not sure that I would be viewed the same today in my profession if some of my mistakes as a "child" were posted and available to read. I really think there is a need to educate our kids and students on this....

First Class...

Last night was our first class. We were given the outline of the semester with everything that we were going to be doing. WOW!! What a class this will be. We will be doing so much this semester in such a short time. What is keeping me positive about this semester so far is that we will be doing fun things, and things I am familiar with, so at least I won't have to struggle through a new tool. Since we will be so busy, at least the semester will go by fast...