grogan508

I have set up several great links from my blog. They each for different and specific reasons.

I have Bob’s site because he has done several things on it that I can use in the classroom. Because of the some of the “rules” I have to deal with within my school I can not do everything. I would like to have the students write reflections on my blog. It will make it much easier to keep track of the reflections. They will all be right there for me to grade and be all catagorized. I also want to experiment with using it for kids to hand in other work also.

I have the tech for teachers blog that Alice created to use as an example of how a blog could be used in my school for teachers to communicate. I think if I can get some on board with a blog at first like this then we can work on getting it into the classroom.

Another site that I linked to my blog is psybeearth. It is a great example of a great blog that would be great to strive to have some day.

There are also other links on my blog. I really like how the blogs work and how I can link things together. This has been fun.

These will add to student learning in many ways. I think it will have the student interest so that alone will increase student learning. It is magic, students write more when they have computers in front of them. It will improve the thinking skills of the students. They will see what the other kids are writing and they will think about what the students are writing. The more the students are involved with their writing and interacting with there writing and the writing of others the more they are thinking. The only way to improve thinking is to think. It is simple.
Ray

The wikis went a lot better than I thought. I have set up project that I will use in the classroom and I will use wikis for other projects also. I am only using the wikis as a web 1.0 application. It has been easier than doing them in Mozilla. I would not be anywhere near as done in Mozilla if i was using it. I have really enjoyed all the time to develope some real projects that i will use in the classroom. It is great to walk out of a classroom and have something to use.

What I liked about this class.

1. I liked the time we got

2. I liked the different levels of learners in the class and how we worked together.

3. I liked how you worked with the different levels.

4. I liked that I could ask many people for help.

5. I like the project we did

6. I will use the things I learned.

No complaints ( maybe less people??)

Generation M. Wow.

I found several facts pretty mind boggling.

I know that we live in a tech and media world, but is it really that BAD.

6 1/3 hours a day on media outlets???????

that is an average, some are on it most of their awake time.

I don’t have cable tv. No video games. I limit my kids time on the computer to force them to play, go out side, just sit around and talk, hang out, be a kid. We are on the other side of the average. I check email weekly 9on a good week) in the summer. I have no cell phone. I like that I can just be somewhere and can enjoy the moment. I think about the people at the beach with their kids and they are talking on the phone . They are missing the fun.

63% of people have meals w/ a tv on. WOW . I have one non-cable tv in my bedroom. The livingroom, family room, kitchen and dinning room have none. My wife has a laptop w/ the neighbors wireless signal, I have a broken MLTI laptop.

I was very surprised to find that relationship between the kids with media and time with their family. I would have thought that would be different.

There must be a happy medium some where. These kids are spending too much time being entertained. When is their reading time? When are just going to sit down and enjoy a good book. Are their parents modeling reading books? I don’t believe all these hours add up we must be over 24….

10 hours sleeping

6.3 media

2.1 parents

1.21 physical activity

.56 hobbies

.52 Homework

.31 chores

I talked to Alice about my project and told her I was going to make web pages for the students to get all the information, then I heard the wiki presentation 2 minutes later and decided to try the wiki and see if I would like it.  I thought I have some time, so if I don’t like it I can just cut and paste out of wiki to mozilla and then play with  the fonts and I will not have wasted much time if I don’t like wikis.  Day 1 of the wikis has been good.  I have the description of the project on the wiki.(www.fired.pbwiki.com)  I am going to try to do it all on wikis.  I still have some more to learn.    This whole project is doing old things in new ways for the students and the teachers.  I am presenting them the info in new ways.  I was going to create an edublog for the students to do their daily feed back on, but I have been told I can use my wiki as a blog.  I will have to figure that out tomorrow

Background: I have a series of speakers from the community (who are alumni from the school) come in to speak to my students about what they do , the value of the education of they got and they talk about workers who don’t work and how they are treated. My goal is to get across to the kids that a Sanford HS educations is something to proud of and you can do great things with and that if you act like an idiot you won’t have a job.

Project: I would like my gifted and talented kids to present a series of skits to the 1st presenter. The skits have workers behaving a variety of manners (positive and negative). the speaker then will talk about how those behaviors will be tolerated at their work place. The students will write the skits, and have them on iMovie (or maybe springdoo) (depending on when the iBooks show up). I have picked the G&T kids for the first presentations to give all the kids a good example of what is expected.
Teacher Responcibilities: I will have the product descriptor, descriptions and rubrics for the project on my website for them. I will also have the regular work (the stuff the rest of the class is doing) listed on the website for them to do as homework. Set up a blog for the students to give me a daily reflection.

Student Responcibilites:
Students must do all the classwork listed on the website to stay in the group.

Students will work independently. Students will be willing to act out a skit.

Old stuff in new ways: This is a project I have done in the past w/o iMovie, iBooks or a rubric. Last year I added the iBook to write the skit. This year I would like the skit written on the iBook and then I would like the skit recorded and put on either iMovie or springdoo. It adds some technology and makes it that much more fun.

A successful project will be the playing of the iMovie for the presenter. I will give the students 5 days to write, edit, act, record, edit. The students will be able to check in with me frequently to ask questions and make sure they are going down the right path. I will be checking their blog every day.

Morning:

I have never used the RSS feed before. It was a very good learning experience for me. I will use this for personal and professional reasons. I don’t yet see a need to do this in the classroom yet. There are not sites that I would want my 7th grade social studies students to use that have the feed. All of the history sites that I have the kids use do not have an RSS feed. The only sites that we use that have a RSS feed are news organizations. When we do current events in class it is very focus so I would not want the kids just reading any new article (most of the time). I will share this wth my staff. There are several staff members that will like this option.

Afternoon:

delicious: I see some great advantages to using delicious, but I am not ready to give up my portaportal yet. I like the structure and simplicity of portaportal. I like that students can just go right into my portaportal and get the site very easily. Maybe delicious is just as easy, but I have not used it enough to have that level of comfort yet. I will play with this some more this week and the rest of the summer and we will see about the fall.

Our goal is to teach kids how to think. If they have the ability to think they will be able to do what ever the world presents them. We can not prepare them for the what the world will present them, because we don’t know what that will be yet. Things are changing to fast. All we can do is teach the kids how to think and solve problems, so they can apply it to future issues.

MacKnight says that we can not assume that students will come prepared for our class ready to do an online class discussion. Students need to be able to do have the skills to do the same thing w/o a computer. They won’t get the skills to have a discussion just because you put a computer in front of them. Teachers also need to make sure they have ability to host an online discussion. It will not run it itself. So there is some things that need to be in place on the teacher and student end before starting to make it work.

She gives a list of social skills a kid needs to have to do an online discussion. This list would be the same for an old fashion classroom discussion also. She does a very nice job of providing some guidelines for using an online discussion for the first time. I will be sure to reference this article again before school starts when I am preparing for online discussions. And then I will use this article again when I present to the staff about using blogs and online discussions.

The biggest thing that surprised me about this article was the date of it. I assumed while I was reading it that it was from the past year. I was shock to see an ad for a conference in 2001 on the last page. I guess I am behind

I had never made a blog of my own before. I did go with the group that had made them before (I like trying to figure out things on my own). It went very well. Still need to learn some more on the set up end to be able to use it in my classroom. I want to see how students would log in and I can manage, but I bet that is easy enough. I just need to see it happen. I also did some good reading that reconfirmed some of my thoughts about why it is important to be using and improving technology in the classroom.

I have come to accept that I will never catch up with technology. I am a technology intergration specialist for my school of 700 kids. There are presently no teachers using blogs in our school. I am here this week to learn more about blogs and hopefully use one in the fall. I know when I present the idea of blogs to the staff at a training I am going to get a lot of responces like Chris Burnett (from the article). They will want nothing to to do with this. They will think this is just one more thing the computer guy is throwing at them to give the kids more control and make their job harder. The way the flow of technology normally goes in my school is a couple teachers try something cool and the rest think we are crazy and then the pressure from the students gets them to try it. Some things we try work out others don’t. I think this one is going to stay. I think when Chris Bennett talks about how the global audience makes the kids more invested in their work is very true. Kids at my school need more motivation to do well. They are not getting the pressure from home to do well. Our town still has less than 50% of the town with a HS diploma. I look at this as one more way to raise the bar on expectations, without them knowing.

I am a 7th grade social studies teacher at Sanford Junior High School. I am also a technology intergration specialist at the school with the MLTI project. My school has much more confidence in my computer ability than i do. I am asked questions and asked to teach other teachers all the time. I feel like I need to learn some more about computers to do this better. They are very happy with the help I provide, but I should know more. I have grown up in the computer age. I have never used a typewriter in my life. I would like to learn more about using blogs and self-made interactive webpages to use in my classroom. i would like my web use in the classroom to be more local. I don’t like always sending the kids to other people sites. I want it to fit my teaching perfectly, not adjust my teaching to the websites I can find.

Ray Grogan