Wow! I can't believe how much I've learned in this class in such a short time. Using the webcams is pretty cool. I'll be Skyping with a classroom in New Zealand next month; I just need to figure out how to get my whole class in the webcam view. My students have been correponding with this class for over a month learning how environments and culture affect their lives. It's been a great project, courtesy of www.epals.com. Using all this new technology to share documents over the web has given me another idea. Wouldn't it be awesome if I could get the New Zealand classroom to collaborate over Google Docs with my students? My students are paired up with individual students in New Zealand working on a final collaborative project. We were just going to email the projects back and forth, but after seeing how user-friendly Google Docs is, I think this would be the best avenue for the collaborative piece of the project.
On a different note, I like the idea of online storage; Box.net and DropBox are the two I am most interested in. They have similar features and both appear to be very user-friendly. Both have free accounts, which is great. Box.net offers 1 gb free space while DropBox has 2 gb free, so I'm thinking DropBox is what I will go with. Again, with my New Zealand project, we are going to be sending photos and videos to each other and I was worried about space issues. If I save these files on DropBox, I can allow the New Zealand teacher to share my folder on DropBox and won't have the space worries.
Monday, March 15, 2010
Friday, March 5, 2010
My first blog!
This is my first blog. I have to admit, I was very intimidated to start one. I've been tempted to write one, but I always wondered who would care to read about my daily rantings? Strangely, it somehow feels liberating to put my thoughts out onto the world wide web. Anyway...enough philosophical ramblings.
To be truthful, as the minutes ticked by during class the other night, a feeling of uneasiness slowly crept over me. I'm not sure if it's the anxiety of starting a new journey with my master's degree, the anticipation of increasing my daily workload with homework, or just the good ole' fear of failure. It's the same feeling I had when I walked into a college classroom for the very first time at age 33 and looked around to see if I was the oldest student in the room! I'm not sure why I'm so agitated about this...learning new technologies has always come easily to me. I'm sure all will be good once I get into the homework routine again.
Anyway, back to class. First, a little backstory...This past year my school district has been part of a consortium, along with 6 other districts, who received a $75,000 ISSAC grant to be used to introduce new technologies into our classrooms, as well as integrating 21st Century skills into our curriculum. Our consortium received another $115,000 grant for the 2010-11 school year. It has been through the workshops and participation in this consortium that has allowed me to learn about many of the Web tools we discussed in class Wed. night. As part of the steering committee, I made edits to the grant on Google Docs. We also use Delicious to bookmark any websites that we come across and share with the rest of the committee members. As you can guess, blogging is new to me. But I've been interested in trying it out with my students by using it as a communication tool to share book reviews on new fiction books. This is my 2nd year as the LMS at my school. While it is considered a K-12 library, students did not use the library past 5th grade. There was only 1 bookcase dedicated to young adult fiction with three shelves filled with Loius La'mour, Agatha Cristi and Stephen King. I have brought more than 200 new YA titles into the collection and revived a middle and high school reading interest. Kids are so excited to read now that they want to share their ideas and thoughts about these new books. I want to start a bookclub with them in the fall; I think including a blog as an extension of the bookclub would create a great resource for their ideas.
As for internet browsers, I'm an IE fan. I've used Firefox when IE was down, but only when forced to use it. I'm excited to research all the different browsers out there. One aspect that I totally love about this program is that the homework will enable me to explore all the new technologies that I have always wanted to try, but never had enough time to. Learning these new tools has been promoted to a need rather than a want.
I'm excited to be a part of this esteemed group. I look forward to all that we will learn from each other!
To be truthful, as the minutes ticked by during class the other night, a feeling of uneasiness slowly crept over me. I'm not sure if it's the anxiety of starting a new journey with my master's degree, the anticipation of increasing my daily workload with homework, or just the good ole' fear of failure. It's the same feeling I had when I walked into a college classroom for the very first time at age 33 and looked around to see if I was the oldest student in the room! I'm not sure why I'm so agitated about this...learning new technologies has always come easily to me. I'm sure all will be good once I get into the homework routine again.
Anyway, back to class. First, a little backstory...This past year my school district has been part of a consortium, along with 6 other districts, who received a $75,000 ISSAC grant to be used to introduce new technologies into our classrooms, as well as integrating 21st Century skills into our curriculum. Our consortium received another $115,000 grant for the 2010-11 school year. It has been through the workshops and participation in this consortium that has allowed me to learn about many of the Web tools we discussed in class Wed. night. As part of the steering committee, I made edits to the grant on Google Docs. We also use Delicious to bookmark any websites that we come across and share with the rest of the committee members. As you can guess, blogging is new to me. But I've been interested in trying it out with my students by using it as a communication tool to share book reviews on new fiction books. This is my 2nd year as the LMS at my school. While it is considered a K-12 library, students did not use the library past 5th grade. There was only 1 bookcase dedicated to young adult fiction with three shelves filled with Loius La'mour, Agatha Cristi and Stephen King. I have brought more than 200 new YA titles into the collection and revived a middle and high school reading interest. Kids are so excited to read now that they want to share their ideas and thoughts about these new books. I want to start a bookclub with them in the fall; I think including a blog as an extension of the bookclub would create a great resource for their ideas.
As for internet browsers, I'm an IE fan. I've used Firefox when IE was down, but only when forced to use it. I'm excited to research all the different browsers out there. One aspect that I totally love about this program is that the homework will enable me to explore all the new technologies that I have always wanted to try, but never had enough time to. Learning these new tools has been promoted to a need rather than a want.
I'm excited to be a part of this esteemed group. I look forward to all that we will learn from each other!
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