Module 7

Delicious. As first I was hesitant to use delicious. I have been using igoogle for bookmarking to store all my bookmarks together and I can also access them from anywhere. After watching the tutorial on delicious i realised how fantastic it was. I love that I can tag and organise bookmarks so easily. I am about to invest in a new computer and I have been worried about loosing all the bookmarks that are stored on my old laptop. In the future if I can bookmark directly to delicious that will save all future problems in this regard.

I also am a big fan of the social networking aspect of delicious. Especially as a learning tool. I can't wait to get hold of the bookmarks of my peers as well as more experienced teachers who may have some wonderful online resources. Often searching the web for tools feels like such a time waster because of all of the bad teaching resources floating around. By using the social networks its a kind of quality filter and I'm sure I will be able to access so really wonderful stuff. I can't wait.

The other wonderful this is that students and parents could also access teacher's bookmarks as study tools. I'm often having parents and students asking me for online suggestions. It would be great to set up a delicious account for this purpose and send people to it. Wow.

Module 6

http://yunishigawa.glogster.com/web-20/

Here is my wild glogster page. It was lots of fun creating it and I could see the kids getting right into it... projects, book reports, open ended maths tasks and science investigations could all be "jazzed up" with glogster. The main problem I encounted for children was that they had to be over 13 to use glogster. Is there a version for schools/ teachers? I have been told that if you sign up as a teacher you get 100 free glogs. That would be no good for my 21 10 year olds though. I must investigate this more.

Bubbl.us is great. We have been using this with year 4 for shared reading contract work, HSIE brainstorming tasks and general brainstorming lessons. I have also been using it as a guide for public speaking tasks with a high school student who gets a little nervous speaking in front of the class. She puts bubbl.us brainstorms into her powerpoint presentations to help organise her thoughts.

The main thing i am enjoying with this Web 2.0 course at the moment is discovering all of the links between the different web based tools. For example how gloggster will recognise blogger which recognises Flickr etc etc.

Module 5

I am going to register with YouTube it is a wonderful teaching tool.  I didn't realise that i could bookmark my favourite videos. It has also been fun to discover teacher tube, I had a big giggle at the teachers who had created timetables raps for their students.

Students in my class are often telling me that their parents have uploaded videos of them for all to see. It really is quite a long way off the private home movie nights where super 8 films were projected onto Grandma's living room wall.  These children are growing up with a very public projection of their daily interactions and mishaps. Teachers of my generation perhaps are quite shy and guarded with their online presence. Students today, from a very young age have a very public online persona. As well as YouTube  videos, there are baby blogs, flickr sites and many other forums for parents to "upload their children".  In schools we should continue exhibiting the child's educational development online. It is really important as teachers, that we make use of this online confidence in our pedagogical practice as well as equipping the students with strategies to manage their online presence safely and ethically. 

Digital story telling, podcasts and vodcasts are great to use with students of all ages. It is a particularly valuable in our school with the high ESL population. Down loading podcasts for listening tasks during guided reading has been great as well as using vodcasts to create short animations for our narrative unit. The uses are endless, its just the access to the equipment that can be limiting.  

pirateboy

pirateboy
Originally uploaded by QueenDanielle

Ferris Wheel Tokyo

odaiba
Originally uploaded by QueenDanielle

Module 4

I had forgotten that I had uploaded some pictures to Flickr a couple of years ago when I was living in Japan. It was really lovely to discover them again and lucky too (I have just changed some of the privacy settings on some unattractive photos that I don't really want to share with the world). I'm not sure exactly why I stopped using Flickr. I think it probably happened the same time I started using Facebook and I didn't feel like I had a use for it anymore. 

As a teaching tool I would usually prefer to use a blog, a wiki or another social networking tool to upload pictures. I guess when the students are looking for images for their projects it could be a better option to use a safe search within Flickr to prevent stumbling across inappropriate material. It is also great that the photo's are copyright free, they can blog any photo they see on flickr,  so the students can upload with the knowledge that they are doing it legally. I have also just uploaded photos from Flickr to my blog and I have realized how easy it is. It could be great to create an album of photos from a school excursion and then get the students to create blogs which comment on the photos. 

Module 3

I love google docs. The more I explore it the better it seems to get. I have been using it to organise itineraries and budgets for overseas trips I have done with friends. 

I now use it with students who I tutor after school so that they can let me know about assessments that are coming up and they share their documents with me so I can prepare material for them and also give them feedback on how they are going. In particular It has been a great tool for a student I tutor with Aspergers. She was having issues loosing her usb drive, forgetting which computers she had saved her assignments on and also wanting myself, her mother and her teachers to check her assignments. Being able to upload and share Google docs has been a wonderful organisational resource for her. She is also now using iGoogle to store bookmarks we collect during research and she can access them from home, school and the library. 

As a teacher, working collaboratively on documents is something we do on a daily basis. So having an online storage and sharing site such as google docs is fantastic.  Being able to add student grades and diagnostic testing results online and share it with the relevant parties would be incredibly convenient. I do worry about privacy issues though, storing school files and student details on line. How easy is it for a third party to access these files?  Another issue is that some of the tools on google docs are very basic. I have had some issues using tables and speadsheets. 

Module 2

 I am quite familiar with blogs, although using them as a personal learning journal is something I haven't done before. I'm a little shy about sharing my thoughts with others and during the Web 2.0 course I haven't been blogging as diligently as I had hoped I would. I tend to do the learning components and then catch up with the blog way later. It is interesting as an assessment tool. I love the idea of blogging and if I am going to expect my students to blog, I'm going to have to put myself out there and give it a go.  

I have used blogs before to post images and organise communications around different art projects I have been involved in. I also regularly research people's blogs when I am organising overseas trips, looking for somewhere great to eat in Sydney and to research specific artist's ideas. I have 3 blogs that are floating around in my head yet to eventuate. I will eventually blog about my food excursions, document some of my overseas adventures and create a website for creative children interested in arty stuff.

In Year 4 this year we used edublogs to communicate with a class in Korea for a HSIE project. I think it was one of the best teaching experiences of my career.  The students were all engaged, they were all in control of their own learning, it was student centered and best of all they could work at their own pace. I really enjoyed using the blog more as a social networking tool than a online journal. There were many simultaneous conversations going on at once. It was incredibly interactive and the students had very quick responses to their questions. I am interested in the different ways that students and teachers can use blogs. Many teacher blogs out there are still very teacher centered. By having all of year 4 and also the Korean students communicating on the same blog it did open up the communication channels and made it  a student centered project.