BP6_2009112_ Flickr

We use Flickr Creative Commons in my Journalism Class daily because we constantly need additional photos to supplement articles in our newspaper. Since I can't send a photo journalist to Iraq to cover the war, it is so helpful to simple go onto Flickr and find a great picture of Iraq in the Creative Commons to use in our Newspaper. It is also a great way to teach students about Copyright Laws and how to properly cite images without plagiarize another person's work. In terms of using Flickr for a lesson plan I noticed that a lot of teachers use it to help students get to know each other better. I think it would be a great start to the year activity, where you had each student create a photo essay of the top 10 things we should know about them on Flickr. Then you could have your students comment on each other's photo essays and then present them to the class. I think it would be an awesome way to teach important tech skills, while also allowing your students creative freedom and a way to share a part of themselves they might never have felt comfortable sharing. As the saying goes "a picture speaks a thousand words", so just think how much more you would learn about your students through their pictures all in the first week of school.

Below is a picture of one of my students dressed up for Spirit Week. As you can see, a picture really does "speak a thousand words" :)

BP5_2009112_Reflective Media Asset

BP4_2009111_Researching and Blogging about Web 2.0 Tools

I learned how to use www.repper.com. It was this really cool site where you could take any picture and create a pattern using the picture. You could also use preloaded patterns to start with as well. To change the pattern, you simply clicked the edge of a highlighted portion of the pattern and drag it to change the pattern in any way. So, from one picture you could make an unlimited amount of patterns. I thought this would be an awesome Web 2.0 tool to use in my Journalism class because in the yearbook we are often struggling with new and exciting ways to create layout designs for each page. A yearbook is so large that often it begins to look repetitive and boring, or it takes so long to do each page that by the end the pages become less visually exciting. This would be one really easy way to use photos that the students have taken all year long to create different and interesting backgrounds for each page. The website says that the patterns you create can be used as Creative Commons, but I would do more research before using any of the patterns in a published yearbook, in case there are more copyright policies that the site does not state just to be safe. If nothing else, the students can create interactive backgrounds that they could use for their online profiles, etc. It would be really fun to give one class the same picture and see the vast differences in patterns each student makes from just one starting picture. It would even make an interesting writing prompt in English about how differently each student works.

Ludens, S. (2009). Repper: Images become patterns. Retrieved November 1, 2009, from http://repper.studioludens.com/#

BP3_2009111_Google Reader 5 Blogs

I subscribed to the following 5 blogs for Educational purposes. I plan to follow all of them mainly for my Journalism class, so I can draw from current events to add to my lesson plans.

1) Art Beats: Which covers Art, Media, Movies, etc daily, so my students can look at it for ideas for our Entertainment section of the Newspaper.

2) Lens: Which is a great Photo blog, which I could use to show my students examples of really great photographs used in online media.

3) Rick Sanchez: Which is a blog from a CNN reporter who covers World News, so my students could check it daily to see what is happening in the world that we might want to cover.

4) Young People Who Rock: A great blog about young adults who are achieving amazing things. We do a similar section in our newspaper, so again my students could use it to gain ideas or I could use it to model a great article.

5) The Moral of the Story: Is a great blog that discusses the ethics of stories and news. Great blog to use when teaching about objectivity, propaganda, and rhetoric.

BP2_2009111_Educational Uses for Blogs

Blogs can be useful in a variety of educational settings. As an English/Journalism teacher, I use blogs in both my English and Journalism classes. In English, we have an SIR program where students must read a book of their choice everyday for 10 minutes a day. Instead of using class time to make sure they are reading daily, I have my students blog once a week to ensure that they are in fact reading. They must post how many pages they have read and summarize the main events in the book they are reading. When they finish a book, they must do a "Blog Critique" where they give a brief summary of the whole book and then critique the book for their fellow students. Then each student must comment on at least 3 of their fellow students' book critiques a quarter to receive full credit. This enables the students to not only get familiar with creating blogs, but also enables them to use the comment section to find other books they might enjoy. So far it has been a great success.

In Journalism we use blogs as a part of our online Newspaper. Students can create blogs to go along with articles they are covering or add additional topics on the site if something happens at school that we have not covered in that edition of the Newspaper. It is a great way to open up communication to the whole school on our articles and writers. Students who are not in Journalism can then comment on the blogs, which helps us decide what to publish next or what stories to cover. If we get really good or interesting comments we sometimes publish the blogs in the actual Newspaper in the "Letters to the Editor" section. It is a great way to teach students the way that News is being covered online and through the uses of new technologies.

I asked several teachers at our school how they are using Blogs in their classrooms and many of them are not. The ones that are using blogs, are doing so in a variety of ways. The PE teacher is having students blog every night on how they feel after certain workouts and they have to do a two week food diary blog to track their healthy eating habits for the Nutrition class. Science teachers are having students blog on nightly reading and labs, by posting questions they may have while doing their homework. Lastly, I found that the Art classes are using blogs as part of a Research Project where they do critiques on various artists using blogs.

All in all, I think the use of Blogs as an Educational tool is endless and is a truly exciting way to spice up old lesson plans and get the students interested in a whole new way.

BP1_2009111_Setting up your iGoogle Home Page

Here are the 3 screen shots of my iGoogle pages....

1) WGO page:

2) AR/CBL page:

3) ETC page (2 shots):