AnneKellerman Web2.0 Reflections

I have so greatly enjoyed this course from start to finish.  The resources and tools I have been exposed already have a place in my daily instruction (Precalc) as well as in my daily responsibilities as a technology director at my school.

I am using a Moodle Site, somewhat a combination of the capabilities offered in a blog, a wiki and a pageflakes site.  My students have been tasked with developing instructional overviews of the sections/course topics we have covered to date, each of which includes an overview of the significance of the topic, important concepts, important formulas, important sample problems, and “Bells and Whistles” (this section includes instructional videos (some from Youtube and TeacherTube and some student originals) and has served aws a valuable course resource thus far.  The students indicated to me that they used the site extensively to prepare for tomorrow’s Mid Term exam, by reviewing problems and especially replaying the instructional videos to refresh their memory of a topic.

Currently, our technology and library departments are collaborating to develop our own 23 Things course for faculty professional development.  We will design this course using Moodle; course instruction and content will be delivered online over a 3-4 month period.

Overall, the 23 things course was enjoyable, fast-paced, invigorated and productive.  This course has not only changed my instructional methods, but has matured the manner in which I use and interact with the web.

Bravo to all course instructions and mentors!

I’ve explored several education related social networking sites, including Classroom 2.0 .

My overall impressions are that Classroom 2.0 is well organized, heavily subscribed to, full of significant and useful resources and well “oiled.”

I found discussions to ve valuable, but dfid not uncover any terribly new information (perhaps because I spend over half of each work day working with web 2.0 technologies.) 

I am currently exploring how our school will use social networking tools to reach a larger audience in the Baltimore area to increase awareness and atractiveness of our school.  Our intention is to develop methods  – combination of RSS feeds and other electronic postings which will allow us to posts news and information in various media forms (text, audio, video, and combinations thereof) in one web location and to have these news posts flow out to social networking sites.

I feel Web 2.0  has already and will continue to dramatically change education, bringing students and teachers closer together to pursue not only knowledge but to create new ways of thinking, communicating and creating – a far more productive, engaging and exciting way to learn and to thrive at the game we call life.

At http://kerileebeasley.com/2009/04/08/10-great-ways-to-use-audacity-with-your-students/, I read a blog entitled

 10 Great ways to use Audacity with your Students

The 10 ways are (in summary and in detail):

To quote their website, Audacity can be used to:
* Record live audio.
* Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
* Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files.
* Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together.
* Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
* And more

Here are 10 great ways you could use Audacity with your students.

1. Make an audio/radio advertisement - My Grade 3 students are using Audacity to advertise products the school produces to support service learning for their Advertising unit.
2. Promote language learning – record kids speaking in one of their language classes then upload to Voki to create speaking Avatars. One of the Mandarin teachers at our school, Wendy Liao, did this very successfully with Grade 4 students.
3. Create Podcasts – limited only by your imagination. I recommend checking out what Kim Cofino and colleagues are doing with Podcasts at ISB. Celeste Hopkins and her Grade 2 students use Audacity to create podcasts of book reviews, reports and poetry readings. Mr Balcom’s students created music tracks for their video podcasts. Find a need and get podcasting!
4. Record speeches to provide evidence of learning, and upload to Glogster (a wonderful online poster tool) to share with a wider audience, as I’m doing with Grade 4 students for their environmental unit.
5. Promote reading development by recording kids reading books, as Colin Becker outlines in his post on Emerging Readers.
6. Create sound stories for images using free sound effects websites, as my Grade 2 students are doing for the school arts festival. You could easily use creative commons Flickr photos as your source of  ‘sound-rich’ images.
7. Record sound for PowerPoint slides to enhance any presentation (hat tip to Colin Becker).
8. Record comments/opinions to load to a Voicethread at a later stage. This can be useful if there are problems with multiple users on a Voicethread or to save time.
9. Record compositions or class singing to share with others (e.g. parents).
10. Record soundtracks for animations as my Grade 4 students did for their animation project on the systems of the human body.

seasons greetings - sample podcast/vodcast

I have had the opportunity to create several podcasts and vodcasts for instructional purposes for my Precalculus class, as well as for various school news and web publications.

I have used several tools to do this, including a digital camera, digital video camera, digital voice recorder.  Typically, I have assembled the media using Windows Movie Maker.  I have also used various pieces of audio or video file converter software to generate the format needed for the project at hand.

http://www.thekitchn.com/thekitchn/recipe-review/recipe-review-hot-chocolate-on-a-stick-101625

I read the above RSS feed to learn how to make “Hot Chocoalte on a Stick”  – this made me hungry and a little thirsty too!   Just in time for holiday sipping!  Enjoy!

Our school launched Google Docs, as well as Google Mail, in June 2009.  Since then, I have used most all forms of Google Docs (word documents, excel spreadsheets, forms, presentations and sites) for various school projects.

Perhaps the most exciting and productive project has been the development and implementation of our ongoing electronic newsletter, Quid Novi? (What’s New? in latin).  We have set up a system  by which our lower, middle and upper school post news inthis collaborative forum.  The results have been exciting, and entertaining, too.

Take a look!!  Quid Novi?

I have used videos from YouTube and TeacherTube in my PreCalc class for the past 12-18 months.  While it takes some time to find the best one for the lesson, this is a relatively quick and painless process.  My students are contributing to a collaborative web page (using Moddle) and are finding and embedding YouTube (and other) videos to demonstrate concepts.

This video on vectors is well done:

This post answers questions posed in “Thing 17″

Which podcasts did you preview?

I previewed a podcast from ‘Teaching with SmartBoards” – Episode 52 – Virtual TI83.  This podcast is available via itunes, youtube and teachertube, as well as on http://smartboard.libsyn.com

What did you think?

This particular podcast was interesting but somewhat like a talk show – more converstional than presentation.  The video portion of the podcast was interesting and informative.   They demo’d graphsketch.com – looks interesting.

Which directories did you search and were you able to find podcasts of value?  Yes – I searched the Educational Podcast Network and found many valuable podcasts for teaching math a using a smartboard.

Do you have any ideas about incorporating existing podcasts into your classroom or professional learning?  – Yes – I can imagine endless ways to incorporate podcasts in the classroom.  Using exisiting podcasts to augments actual instruction, and having students create podcasts is another.  I am finding (through a collaborative Moodle website project in my class) that students enjoy projects which required them to synthesize and create content, and, student retention is improved because they are more deeply engaging with the content

LibraryThing is one of the most useful and intriguing websites I’ve been introduced to in this course!  Ingenious!  I will find it helpful when recommending books to my students, friends, and family, and for identifying new books for myself.

I envision it will be useful as the faculty considers books for summer reading, as a tool to help students understand and appreciate the art of a written book review, and as a refreshing tool to invigorate the love of reading and books in our more and more digital world.

Made using Blabberize:

Above images created on BeFunky.com