Morning coffee

Such cool stuff! I love to play around with images. Once, I took a picture of a friend’s mini-cooper and photoshopped a smile out of the car’s front bumper and then added eyelashes to the headlights. Then I printed the image out and and stuffed it in her mailbox with some silly caption about “carma”. Of course she knew who did it since I’m her only friend who is geeky enough to do that…..so yes, I’m way into incorporating some kewl stuff like image generators into my teaching.

I’ve got to learn about Flickr mashups since I thought mashups were great new songs made by combining audio tracks together….like digital DJ wizardry.

I’ve had a flickr account for years now but never really thought about the possibilities in education. (I also have a Picasaweb account). Mostly, I simply used both photosharing sites for posting pictures of our family life and sharing that with friends. When we built our house, we posted new pictures regularly and used the comment boxes to describe what was going on (kind of like “flicktion” but it was all true). Then, when we started the gardens and farm operations, we documented that with those sites. I really like the idea of using flickr’s community photos for students to learn about other parts of the world. I think even my own children would love that. So many possibilities here that I had not thought of…..

I’d always thought that I was pretty good at finding whatever I needed on the Internet but after completing a “search” webquest, I realized that there’s a lot more to good searching than I realized. I’m familiar with most of the big search engines and even the meta-search engines and even basic boolean terms to use in searching but I didn’t know about some of the deep searches or academic search engines. Nor did it occur to me to use “links to this page” or “search similar pages” in Google (my computer’s homepage).

My favorite of the search webquest is probably “Beaucoup” because it found information that I had not seen before. I also found the websites there to be more useful than those from the other search engines. The most important thing to remember though is that not one search engine is appropriate for every type of search/set of information. If I were teaching a lesson on this, I’d stress to my students the need to try different search engines to get a wide variety of information. Of course, I’d show them how to use boolean search terms as well as tricks like “similar pages” in Google.  In fact, every student needs to a lesson like this on searching the Internet. Perhaps along with lessons on using encyclopedias (do teachers even do that anymore?), students could learn about search engines on the web as well.

The Paradigm flip discussed in the article, “Flip This Library, Schools Need a Revolution” by David Loertscher (http://www.diigo.com/04qah ) drives home the need for radical change in k-12 school media centers and libraries. According to the author, educators need to change their focus from disseminating information to students and “flip” to using Web 2.0 tools to collaborate with the entire school community. Administrators, teachers, media specialists and students all share information and students are challenged toward creating and sharing information rather than simply completing a teacher-led assignment.

Instead of a paper course syllabus or assignment sheet, students could use the iGoogle suite of tools to control and keep track of information on the web. Assignments could be given via RSS feeds to each student in the class and the students could make comments or collaborate with other class members via course blogs. I can imagine students posting lab results on a course blog and commenting on other students’ findings. Instead of the traditional essay in a Literature class, students could post their analysis online on the course blog. Students could constructively comment on each others’ work to help in essay revisions. In the process, student would be learning to search and gather information, analyze and create and use all the best of the Internet. The article really challenges the traditional methods of education and urges educators to stretch their imaginations and see the possibilities….if you think about it, they really are endless!

I’ve been following various blogs for several years now and even tried blogging myself when I was a stay-at-home mom. (Long live the “Happybeans”…yes, that’s what my blog was called). But I haven’t tried blogging myself since those days.

I can definitely see the value in education though. It is a great way to communicate with students. You could give your classes your blog address and have students check it regularly for updates, new assignments, announcements, etc. It would be great for the online teacher to use for posting FAQs or other information to supplement the online curriculum. Teachers could also assign a blog project to students and have them create a blog for class. Students would then post to their blogs as part of their assignments. Yes, I think there are many possibilities out there for educators to embrace blogging.

It never occurred to me that websites like Twitter would be useful in education but after using it for a few days now, I am sold. I can imagine posting assignment due date reminders and letting students know when I am grading their assignments or out of the office. I think I’ll probably use it more for teaching online than I will in my personal life. I can imagine students might find it useful too to post an update if they will not be attending school that day or to let others know when they are working on an assignment, etc. (in addition to updates on social activities).

I decided to try the Clovis23things challenge to learn about 23 tools of web 2.0. Here’s the link to Clovis23things  http://clovis23things.wordpress.com/2009/01/30/register

Next, we’ll talk about Twitter (a new experience for me but probably good since I spend a lot of time texting people anyway!).

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