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What I think needs to change in today's educational system:

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BP16_2009113_Researching and Blogging about Web 2.0 Tools 7- Comments on Hardy's Blog

sunday, november 8, 2009

BP10_2009118_Reflective Media Asset

Just a couple of quick reasons on why www.yacapaca.com is used in my classroom.

BP15_2009113_Researching and Blogging about Web 2.0 Tools 6- Comments on Colleen's's Blog

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2009

BP19_2009113_Leader Glog Video

BP14_2009113_Researching and Blogging about Web 2.0 Tools 5- Comments on Hardy's Blog

BP13_2009113_Researching and Blogging about Web 2.0 Tools 5- Comments on Hardy Blog

sunday, november 15, 2009

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A web burglar introduces you to a new Web 2.0 website.

BP12_2009113_Researching and Blogging about Web 2.0 Tools_Pixton

This week I have been researching Comic Creator websites because I want create a comic with my class, but our school does not have Macs, so I couldn't use Comic Life. I finally found this great site called Pixton, which is free and very easy to use to create comics.

I think this is an amazing Web 2.0 tool because students can either use pre-made comics that they just fill in or they can create their own comics from scratch. Even the customizable comics are super easy to use and you can still choose from hundreds of characters, backgrounds, props, colors etc to really help create your own, professional looking comic. What is also really cool is that if your school likes this site, they can subscribe to it and then your students can share their comics with each other and then comment on each other’s comics.

I am planning on using this site for a project my students are doing on King Arthur. I am going to give them each one literary device and one component from the King Arthur Unit we have been discussing, and then the students must create their version of the legend, including both of their assigned elements. So for example, one student might get “similes” and “jousting”, so somewhere in their comic they must have a simile and an example of jousting. I think this is a great way to update the King Arthur Unit they were doing last year, where all they did was research their elements online and they create a journal where they discussed their elements. I am in love with Pixton and have been playing with it all weekend. I hate to say it, but Comic Life might have some serious competition. It is funny, I have been previewing Pixton with the librarian at our school, and she said she was worried because the comics can take so long to make and she was worried the students would want to do that much work. So, I agreed that it took a long time to sort of figure Pixton out, but that I had so much fun doing it, and she said “Ya, it was so fun, I didn’t even care it took me hours to finish!” This is the exact response I am hoping I will get from my students.

References

Pixton Comic Inc. (2008-2009). Pixton: No drawing necessary. Retrieved on November 15, 2009 from http://pixton.com/

BP11_2009112_Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking

One of the first interesting articles I found on how to use Social Bookmarking as an educator was on how one library choose to use Social Bookmarking to organize their whole online resource systems. “By using Web 2.0 social bookmarking sites, libraries can more easily manage subject guides and other lists of Web resources. Social bookmarking services such as Delicious provide a one-click method to bookmark a Web site, allowing librarians to describe and categorize Web sites” (Corrado, 2008). This made a huge amount of sense because often I send students to our library to do a research project, but they will come back with projects that use things like “Wikipedia” as a reference. In order to guide their research I will often pre-research for them and then give them a list of acceptable URLs for them to use for their assignment. This method does not really fix the overall problem though because I am not teaching my students to how to research appropriate sites online and how to decipher “good” sites from “bad” ones. If our library was to use a Social Bookmarking site, like “Delicious”, and tag good websites by categories, students good just go in and search through the tags to find the websites they need for their project. Students could also tag sites they think are appropriate and then share them with me to make sure they have found reliable sites to use for their research projects. In this same idea, students could then share their tagged sites with other students to help collaborate in their research and find the best sites possible.

The second interesting article I found on the use of Social Bookmarking as an educator was on a study that tried to find the most popular news cites as a means to draw conclusions on what type of news media people use most frequently. “This study examined the selection and sharing of news stories from Delicious, a popular social bookmarking site, in order to identify the most frequently consulted news information sources and news topics”(Chung and Yi, 2009). I found this study to be fascinating because as a Journalism teacher I am teaching my students to create Newspapers, but according to this study it showed that most people are turning to blogs and other online news sources for their daily news updates. This trend could suggest that Newspapers and even TV News Broadcasting could become a thing of the past. “Social media sources, primarily blogs, are growing as a major news source… What online news audiences consider to be news is becoming increasingly broad and complex with unclassified sources dominating tagged stories”(Chung and Yi, 2009). It would be really interesting to have my Journalism students recreate this study by using “Delicious” for one month and bookmarking any online “News” site that they use in that time. We could even do a poll of our students to see what news sources they use. We could then compile all of that information by having students share their “delicious” news tags and then (ironically) write an article about the types of news trends we are seeing at our school and whether print media is soon to be a thing of the past.

The third article I found pertained to using Social Bookmarking as a means to further Art education specifically. “…this article details potential uses of delicious, flickr, blogs, podcasts, and wiki. Through these technologies, students may collaboratively build knowledge, develop a deeper understanding of their own artworks and those of other artists, and interact with artworks in new ways” (Buffinton, 2008). The idea was that Art students could use Social networks to share their pieces of art online, but also use Social Bookmarking sites to share inspirational Art sites they had found during research. This would be especially helpful in an Art History class where students would need to look at a lot of different artists in a short period of time. You could have each student research a specific artists and then use “Delicious” to bookmark all the helpful websites they found on their specific author. Then before a test all the students could share their artist tags with all of their fellow students and it would be like one big study guide that the students created themselves. All in all, I found that most of the research about Social Bookmarking was extremely positive and the possibilities of using it in an educational environment seem endless.

References

Chung, D and Kwan Yi. (2009, July). Distribution of news information through social bookmaking: an examination of shared stories in the Delicious website. Information Research. Retrieved November 8, 2009, from http://informationr.net/ir/index.html

Corrado, E. (2008). Delicious Subject Guides: Maintaining Subject Guides Using a Social Bookmaking Site. Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library & Information practice & Research. Retrieved November 8, 2009, from http://www.apla.ca/ejournal.cfm

Buffington, M. (2008). Creating and Consuming Web 2.0 in Art Education. Computers in the Schools. Retrieved November 8, 2009, from http://www.haworthpress.com/journals/dds.asp

BP10_2009112_Researching and Blogging about Web 2.0 Tools 4- Comments on Toni's Blog

Toni Orr's Blog:

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2009

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There were many interesting sites that seemed great to use in the classroom but many that I checked looked like they were free but really not. Many sites had a free trial period before you had to pay.These would not be acceptable for most teachers as we know there is no money for this school budgets. Some sites will let the subscriber use the site but will not remember what was done as Typing-Web. To subscribe for a meaning tool in the classroom it would be around $900 + . Not sure if this was for a year or you own the program for that fee.

Found another cool looking site that seemed to be a great classroom site called "EkoLoko" http://play.ekoloko.com/ekoloko/index.html. This was an Ecological Virtual tour of the Environment for Kids as well as being interactive about friendship, nature and the world "at risk". It really had great ideas to help the students with critical thinking skills and to help the world around us but the characters in the "environment" were smoking pipes or cigarettes and blowing smoke!! Turns out this site is from Israel and it must be acceptable to smoke in front of the students. Sad they had to ruin a great site.

Another great site that I found was PB works, formerly PB wiki. The new site is https://my.pb.works.com. Before we knew about all of the iGoogle products my colleague created a wiki site to collaborate with at http://fullsailjuly09.pbworks.com/. This is also one that our school district has been working with for us to use in the classroom that is gated. The teacher would have control of it. You could get students to collaborate on projects together, put videos on it for tutorials so they could view at home, etc. Another great thing to implement for your students. Mine from last year was http://mumlttcadreorr.pbworks.com/ You can add video, images, links, etc. while you are monitor.

The next item I thought to use to teach my students was a skill they need to know since so many of them are into video taping and photography was about sizing and resizing images. Students many times want to email or use images for different reasons but do not understand that different cameras and media devices save images in many different sizes. Most students do not realize that when they are unable to upload a picture to the email it is because of the large size and how much memory it can use. I found a site called "Re-sizer" that will take a large image (3264 X 2448 - 960 KB) and size it in usable form to 200 X 150 but putting through the re-sizer. The site is http://resizr.lord-lance.com/ and it is very useful. It does the re-size as simple as I have seen. Here is the picture that I re-sized. My colleague does not even realize how large the file for this one picture actually was.

This is a tool students need to know about for the 2.0 digital world they will be living in. Most students do not know or understand this as life long skill they need to develop. As an educator in the digital world it is my job to teach them about this.

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http://www.zinepal.com/ is this amazing Web 2.0 site where you can turn your blogs into a printable magazine. This is exciting because after this class I could go back and take all the blogs I have written for this class and turn them into a professional looking magazine that I could take along with my on job interviews to show my media background. It would be a great site to use with students as well because you could have them blog on literature as they were reading novels in your English class, and then have them turn all of their blogs into a really exciting magazine as their final projects. This would be a great lesson that would really engage the "whole brain" learning approach, as it involves critical thinking skills, as well as creativity. Students could upload photos or graphics to make their magazines more visually exciting and it would be something they could take away from class and add to their own professional portfolios. I am definitely going to try this site once I am done with this class, so that I could have a paper version of all the hard work I have done in this class. I think students would also get a sense of accomplishment from having their very own magazine to have at the end of my classes. I also think I could use this site in my Journalism class to show students the differences between Newspapers and Magazine layouts. I am really excited to try out this tool both in my own life and in my classes.

Zinepal Solutions Inc. (2008-2009). Zinepal. Now you are the editor. Retrieved November 8, 2009, from http://www.zinepal.com/

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http://sketchfu.com is this really simple and easy to use drawing tool that would be great for my Journalism class. A lot of High School Newspapers use Clip Art or Creative Commons for ALL of their visuals in their papers, but I like the students to actually create their own graphics. I think graphic arts is such an important skill to have and could really enhance their career opportunities later on in life if they had those skills. Indesign and Adobe have great drawing programs, but sometimes they are a little too complicated for beginners, but sketchfu is a really simple websites that beginners could use as a way to start learning how to create drawings online. It even gives you prompts if you can't think of what you want to draw next, so you could have your students go on daily as a warm up and draw the prompt given on sketchfu. I am not the greatest artist myself, but I found sketchfu simple and really user friendly. I think it is a much less daunting place to start with your students, other than Indesign. I think it is most useful for beginners as it is very simple, but I think more veteran graphic artists could also use it as a way to just practice their drawing skills in a fun and easy to use, online environment. What is great about the site too is that you can then share your drawings with friends, so after your students had drawn a picture they could do online critiques of each other's work. Once again, this Web 2.0 tool is a great device for teaching both the skills students need in your classroom, but also tech skills that will benefit them forever.

(2009). Sketchful. Where you can design and share. Retrieved November 8, 2009, from http://sketchfu.com/

BP7_2009112_Researching and Blogging about Web 2.0 Tools

http://askforia.com/ is a great, interactive Web 2.o site where students can go to ask any question they might have on a particular subject and get answers from either their friends or educational professionals. They can create their own accounts, so any time they are having problems with either a homework assignment or even just a life problem, they can go onto askforia and post a question and put a preference on whether they want it answered by a professional or a friend. This would be a great way for your students to collaborate on projects outside of class when you aren't around to answer their questions. You could even assign a group project where part of their grade was to work through askforia to increase both their tech skills and their ability to use the web to work in a collaborative learning environment. Askforia's slogan is "Ask questions. Share knowledge. Make friends." This slogan really does encompass all that Askforia has to offer. Students can even use this site to work with students from across the world, so it really does serve to open up their learning environments into an international platform of knowledge. I am very excited to use this site in my classes and see how beneficial it truly could become.

xWaylab. (2009). Askforia. Ask questions. Share knowledge. Make friends. Retrieved November 8, 2009, from http://askforia.com/