Thing #7b

I found some neat things in my Google Reader over the past few weeks.

You Can’t Look at Just One – The title caught my attention.  When I went to the blog entry, I was thrilled to see a link to the 100+ portraits of iconic people of all time.  David Warlick was right, you really can’t look at just one.  i flipped through all of them.  Some that spoke particularly to me were:

Princess Diana

Anne Frank

Judy Garland

Audrey Hepburn

Adolf Hitler

Mark Twain

Summer Activities – Every summer, I make a list of the things I want to accomplish on my days home from work.  This summer, the Web 2.0 course is at the top of my list.  But, other things fall beneath it: clean out the guest room closet, make plans for our vacation to the Grand Canyon, finally make curtains for the den windows, etc.  The suggestions on this “top 12″ made me chuckle.  I can relate to #10 on the list; somehow, the major cleaning/organization is always pushed to the summer at my house.

Download free images for educators at Pics4Learning – I’ve talked about my love or photography a couple of times on this blog.  And, during our study of (cc), I mentioned that my anxiety over copyright laws often holds me back from using them in class.  Naturally, this blog post caught my attention.

Thing #14

Either I misunderstood or I got carried away with this assignment…Either way, I explored most of the tools suggested in Thing 14.  Here are some of my thoughts about ways to incorporate them into my personal and professional life.

Be funky – I’d love to play around with some of my personal photos and see what I can do with them.  I’ve already started turning myself into a cartoon!

Blabberize – Imagine what fun students would have with oral reports if they were able to give them as a speaking llama…or pet cat…or their baby sister?

Gliffy - I’d love to use the floor plan software to get my students to create a floor plan.  When studying proportion and similarity, I’ve had students make floor plans by hand, but on the computer is so much cooler!

Jigzone – I grew up putting together jigsaw puzzles with my family every winter.  Recently, my Mom and I have talked about finding a website that will turn our family photos (especially scenic ones from vacation) into jigsaw puzzles.  This website does it instantaneously, and it times you as you put the puzzle together.  I can also see how this would be a fun activity for my math students to do to stretch their minds a little.

Letterpop – My husband and I want to start sending Christmas Letters, rather than store-bought Christmas cards.  This is a great resource for that!  It’d also be good for putting togehter class newsletters to send home to parents, updating them on what’s going on at school.  Also, I can see students using it to create visually-appealling reports.  What a great idea for group projects, too, where each group member writes a column.

Mixbook – I love this!  Online photo albums are a great idea.  I wish they were an option when I got married!  I can see putting my personal vacation pictures together with this resource.  And, it’d be great to use for our school’s trip week photos.  The best thing is how easy it is to share with others.

Pikistrips and Toon Doo – Both of these are comic-creating sites.  I’m not sure which is better, but I like the idea of having students create comics to illustrate mathematical concepts.  It would be neat to include a comic on a math test and ask students questions about it.

Ta-da List – I’m the queen of to-do lists, so I’ve got that under control at home.  But, this might be a neat resource for turning a grading rubric for a project into a to-do list that students can understand and use at home to track their progress.

Thing #13

I chose to watch Steven Kimmi’s presentation “Traveling through the Dark.”  His presentation appealed to me because it focused on beginning to incoporate technology into the classroom.  He is also a fifth grade teacher, which is so close to the 6th grade level I teach.  I feel like I am certainly a beginner at all of this, so I was interested to hear what he had to say.

His presentation began by describing William Stafford’s poem Traveing Through the Dark, where a man comes upon a pregnant deer while driving along a dark, narrow road.  He must decide whether to push the heap into the valley and keep driving or attempt to birth the fawn, which still lives in the dead mother’s womb.  Kimmi relates the man’s tough decision to the one all educators must make when presented with the wealth of technological opportunities out there.

He argues that ignoring the technology and choosing to teach the way we always have has terrible implications.  We will create a generation of students who are unprepared for their future.  Our students will be disengaged in the classroom.  And, education will become irrelevant to our society.  Obviously we don’t want any of those things!  So, he goes forward to suggest what we should do about all of this.

Kimmi had an aha moment during a recent spring break from school.  He felt as though his students were not engaged in his lessons, and he felt he was to blame for their disinterest in his lessons.  So, he self-prescribed some professional development.  In the year that followed, he began blogging and experimenting with other technologies.  He talked about the ways he has incorporated them into his own classroom.

He uses video in math class.  While he was very vague in describing how he accomplishes this, he did say that he and his students use video to “go over math skills” they will need by the end of the year.  He also mentioned podcasting, suggesting that is the easiest place to start.  Cell phones can be used to podcast nowadays, so he pulls his students aside one-by-one to record their portions of podcasts during class.  He emphasized the importance of establishing a support group, and he suggested trying edtechtalk.com and teachers teaching teachers.  I see this Web 2.0 family as a kind of support group.

I was disappointed that Kimmi did not give more solid examples of how he incorporates technology into his classroom so I could borrow some of his ideas.  I was pleased, however, to hear from someone who was so recently at the very same place along this journey as I am.  And, I enjoyed seeing the passion he has for what he does.  If we all had that passion and the desire to do the best for our students, the educational world would be a whole lot better off than it is.

Thing #12

This summer, I’ve been thinking about different ways that I can incorporate projects and hands-on activities in my sixth grade math class.  Amont other ideas I may try, one involves a Ribbon Project.  I hope to incorporate the ideas of fractions and decimals in a project where students are given the creative freedom to create a project out of ribbon.  The slideshow I created can be used as a introduction to the project.  I embedded the slideshow in my wiki page.

Thing #11

I have always loved photography (although I’ve never claimed to be very good at it myself), so I loved looking through Flickr this week.  It was so much fun!  I nearly jumped out of my skin when I read about Darren Kuropatura’s idea on the Cool Cat Teacher blog.  I can see so many applications for this across the grade levels of mathematics.  When I taught high school, I used to love showing my geometry classes how geometrical shapes and theorems could be seen in the world around them.  I can see how my 8th grade Algebra students could look for linear and quadratic functions in photos, and my sixth graders could find representations of fractions and percents.  I’m so excited to see how I can use this!

photo by december snowdrift

photo by jek in the box

photo by Jen Chan

photo by terriseesthings

photo by jek in the box

photo by Photos By Zoe

Thing #10

In my three years of teaching, I have heard at least five lectures or presentations about fair use and the dangers of copyright infringement.  My solution to the dilemma?  I avoid using other people’s work like the plague.  When creating powerpoint presentations for my classes, I try my hardest to use my own photos to illustrate the concepts.  I’ve even begun trying to take pictures for that purpose, for inclusion in my classroom in order to avoid breaking copyright laws.  I’ve been taught about the rights granted me as a teacher under the policies of fair use.  My husband is an attorney, and he has reassured me of them as well.  Nevertheless, I’m a wimp, and I don’t want to get in trouble or offend the original creator or author of the work.

So, this whole creative commons thing is pretty cool.  I have never seen (or at least noticed) a (cc) symbol (By the way, I did check…My computer’s version of Microsoft Word does not acknowledge that symbol in the way it does the copyright symbol when I type it).  But, I will be on the look-out for it.  I think that creative commons has fantastic potential for helping teachers and students share with one another.  Its implications for the Web 2.0 tools alone are incredible.  I do see potential negatives, though.  Students have a hard enough time finding good, solid information on the web.  It used to be (back in the good ol’ days) that solid copyright and publishing details were a good head’s up that the source you found was “legit.”  With the absence of that now, we will need to have even stronger, fool-proof methods for identifying solid, reliable sources of information.

Stretch Exercise: I searched Flickr and found this.  I find it to be hysterical!  From what I can tell, I have followed the rules of the creative commons license in using it in this blog.  Please let me know if I’m wrong.

Photo by Tidewater Muse

Thing #8 – Stretch

Just for fun, I looked for my high school on Wikipedie: Lakeside High School in Evans, Georgia.  I was pleased to see that the information included seems (from my recollection) to be accurate, although the tone was somewhat dry.  There was a variety of information presented, including history, feeder schools, administration, school website, extracurricular activities, notable alumni, and athletics.  I laughed when I saw that “traffic problems” was set aside as its own category because, when I was a student there, the traffic problems were of great concern.  I checked out the discussions tab, and only one person has mentioned anything.  It seems a new notable alumni was added to the page, and there is some question about whether he is notable or part of our alumni.  When I went to the history page, I noticed that there have been a pretty good number of changes made to the page since its birth in October 2008, most of which were made by the same two or three people.  I wonder who those people are…and why they’re so interested in Lakeside’s page on Wikipedia!

Thing #8

It’s wiki-mania!  I have seen wikis before, and I’ve always thought they were the neatest idea.  To allow a whole host of people to edit and manage one website to benefit the group is a really clever idea.  I investigated many wikis through this week’s discovery exercise, and I found some neat things.

Great Debate 2008 – Being married to a “political junkie,” I can appreciate an online forum for discussion and debate about political ideas.  Anything that keeps CNN and CSPAN off my TV for two minutes is fantastic!  In all seriousness, I love that this wiki gives sutdents the ability to debate ideas and present both sides of an argument.  I noticed that several of the students provided thorough bibliographies for the information they included, but others did not.  This wiki did a great job of imbedding videos.

Kindergarten Counting Book – I don’t teach kindergarten (and hopefully never will), but I couldn’t resist the temptation to see how in the world 5-year-olds would participate in a wiki.  This is the cutest idea, using photos instead of written words to express ideas and understanding.  I would be curious to know if the students contributed to the wiki in the classroom or at home.  And, were they able to do it alone or with the assistance of an adult?

Math 12V Outcomes Portfolio – I teach in a private school, so I am not held to the strict QCC/GPS nightmare I spent so many months learning about in college; however, I understand and appreciate the need to set standards that your students should achieve by the end of a lesson, unit, and school year.  What this wiki does so well is get the students involved in explaining those standards.  In mathematics in particular, it is very important that students learn to summarize their learning.  Mathematics is a tricky language to learn, and this wiki provides a great environment for expressing it.  By turning the wiki into a collaborative project, the students summarized what they learned in a creative, safe environment.  I also like that the teacher commented on the students’ submissions and created a “Hall of Fame,” where he picked the best of the best entires.

Room 15 Wiki – I like how this wiki combines everything related to the classroom (homework assignments, student work, class expectations, brain teasers, etc.) in one place.  It makes it easy for the students and parents to find what they need.

Small Stones - This wiki is incredible (It’s also very easy to navigate)!  It’s the best example of incorporating Web 2.0 tools into the math classroom that I’ve seen to date. What a fantastic idea to take the day’s lesson, summarize it in an easy-to-navigate format, and archive it for students to access at any time.  One thing – I couldn’t figure out who created the daily entires, the students or teacher.  If I were to create a wiki like this, I think it would be neat to have the students create the entries, reflecting on what was introduced in class each day, explaining the new concepts, making connections to old material, etc.  After seeing this wiki, I am very optimistic about being able to use one in my own classroom!

Thing #7a

I know I have said this in the past, but “Thing #6″ was a little overwhelming for me.  There are so many blogs out there.  Filtering through them and picking the best ones to incorporate in my own reader was difficult.  After reading Shelley’s comments about skimming the information in my reader rather than actually reading it, I kept thinking, What blogs do I want to pick to clog up my Google reader? Haha!  I did find some good stuff, though!

Education-Focused Blogs

2 cents worth - I have heard of David Warlick several times during this Web 2.0 course, not to mention the times his name was mentioned prior to this experience.  I ran across this blog while searching through the 2008 Edublog Award Winners.

Cool Kat Teacher Blog – The real reason I chose this blog is because I kept running across it over and over again.  I didn’t find anything new on it that I really liked; however, the fact that it kept showing up in my searches over and over again gave me hope that in the future I’ll read something interesting from that feed.

Open Educator by Graham Wegner – I read Graham’s blog entry Immunity, and I kept laughing because of how much I related to it.  His comments about educators who think we’ll be using paper-and-pencil forever, the idea that we may lose the need for handwriting in the future, and the possibility that education may not be face-to-face one day rang true with my own doubts and insecurities about this new technological age.

Interesting Blog

NCTM Conference – I have been a member of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) since I began teaching, but I’ve only been to one national conference.  This blog interested me because I saw it as a way to remain connected to what happens at the conferences, even if I don’t attend.  This entry informed me that NCTM has issued an updated version of their Guiding Principles for Mathematics Curriculum and Assessment.  Even though I teach in an independent school, where I am not bound by state and national standards, I want to make sure that what we teach in my school will keep our students in-line with others across the state and the country.

Just for Fun Blog

National Geographic: Photo of the Day – When I was a kid, I told my parents that I wanted to be a photographer for National Geographic one day.  I have always been mesmerized by the amazing photos that appear in their magazine.  When I ran across this blog, I just knew I wanted it in my reader.  I don’t know why there haven’t been any updates since December 2008.  It doesn’t matter, though.  I like the pictures anyway!  This is one of my favorites.

Thing #5

So, I’ve been reading and feeding…And, Shelley’s suggestion about just skimming through the reader content (rather than reading it thoroughly) is great!  I’ve never been good at skimming, so it’s good that I have a reason to now.  I found some neat things on three of the feeds:

Successful Teaching

Summer Professional Development – It is very true that, as educators, we owe it to our students and ourselves to become more educated about our profession.  It is in that spirit that I enrolled in this Web 2.0 course in the first place.  And what better time is there to accomplish that goal than during the 2 months we have “off” in the summer?  It is no accident that I signed up for this course during the summer.  While I have not created a regiment to follow, as the author of this blog post has, I can see the merit in her suggestions.

I Can’t Hear You – I have always believed that it is important for students to explain what they think.  No matter what subject matter they are studying, it is important to voice their thinking.  In some class settings, this is easy: discussions about a novel in Literature class, presentations about stories from History class, demonstrations of scientific processes, etc.  In math class, I call students to the board and have them work through a problem and explain what is happening at each step.  Or, I have one student work the problem and another “narrate” it.  Or, we work on what I call a “popcorn problem,” when we work out a problem as a class and I call on students all around the room to explain it one step at a time.  Whatever it takes, students should be given the opportunity to verbally express what they understand.  The author of this blog post seems to share a similar opinion.

Infinite Thinking Machine

We Need Our Earth – What a fantastic way to get students to take responsibility for their education!  And, I love the idea of giving students a Google Earth Scavenger Hunt!  I can see how easy it would be to incorporate geography (history class), unit conversion (math class), and land formations (science class) into one cross-curricular project.  Great!

Instructify

Munsel Hue Test – This is so neat!  I didn’t have a lot of time to work on it, so I only spent about five minutes.  I scored 99, which is dreadful!  I will go back and try that again, for sure.  Try it…it’s so cool!