Personal Learning Network

In this class I was introduced to many tools and learned how to organize them mentally and electronically.  Delicious is extremely helpful to me because now I can access and organize the websites that I use or plan to read.  iGoogle and rss feeds are a great way to keep up with educational news and blogs.  I also  keep up with recent educational news in Twitter with education week and Governor Paul Ryan.  Blogs and wikis have proven to be another great way to communicate, creating opportunities to share ideas with others in class. We've hardly had to use the discussion forum at D2L at all!  Voicethreads and OneTrueMedia are also great ways to collaborate and I'm using it with my Spanish class to present their work.  Websprieation can be used to access background knowledge or organize concepts to review a unit.  These tools make me excited to be a teacher because, even though teachers are experiencing political poverty today in Wisconsin, technologically we are very wealthy!
There are even more tools to explore, and I feel that I have more organizing to do.  Learning about these tools will improve my teaching because now I can create lessons that are more motivating and relevant to my students.  These tools will also help to improve the ELL program at my school because I plan to use Survey Monkey to find out the needs of teachers, students and families at my school.  I also would like to use a wiki for teachers to collaboratively share their successful and stressful experiences in working with ELLs. 

Making and Argument for web2.0 Tools

In my group's discussion for class, many members brought up the fact that these tools are free.  In today's situation of education, schools need to save money in any way they can.   We could also show them examples of how they can extend learning and help them develop skills that students would need in the future.  This will show them how the tools are valuable to the students as well as the school.  I know that my administrator would value student safety, so it will be good to show how students are protected and monitored.

delicious

It was interesting to see all of the bookmarks of other people in this class.  I felt a little like an intruder, but I guess it's a good idea to keep in mind that anyone can access your bookmarks unless you mark them private.  I acquired some good bookmarks from Geri:  We Tell Stories and cooltoolsforschools.  It helps to look at the number of people who bookmarked a site.  If it's a large number, it's a usually a good site.  However when I see blogs with postings that are all over 4 years old and then I know it's not worthwhile to save!  I think that many of us are using similar tags.  I just bundled some of the tags to hopefully keep them more organized.  Some of the tags that I used most which aren't related to this class are ell, spanish, and socialjustice.  I haven't annotated any of my bookmarks, but I think I will when I share bookmarks with my students because it will save them time. When I teach them about tags, I think I'll use a concept map like a venn diagram to show how sites can be part of more than one tag. 

Twitter

Twitter can be a powerful tool for educators.  Teachers can use it to communicate with students and their parents, but more importantly, they can use it to communicate with each other. They can share resources, have discussions and give feedback to others.  They can also support eachother and collaborate to improve education and student achievement.  I think it's also valuable because people that have opposing views can make arguements and form new views.  Many teachers avoid trying new things in the classroom and use the excuse that they were not trained to use the technology.  Twitter is a resource for staff development that resolves this issue.  Teachers can search for training on Twitter so they don't have to rely on their school to provide it.

21st Century Tools

I really enjoyed exploring the topic of concept mapping for our class activity.  I used Webspiration to make a concept map of all of the web2.0 tools that our class investigated.  Much more needs to be added, but you can see it at this link:
http://www.mywebspiration.com/view/785761a34dc6
 Looking at all of the work of other students in class was awsome!  I made a survey using Survey Monkey and the instructions I got from Jessica's wiki page.  This is very valuable for my action research project because I need to give a pretest to the teachers at my school to find out what kind of staff development they need in working with ELLs.  It will also be great to evaluate the needs of my students.
 I explored immersive environments with Angela's wiki and was introduced to Secondlife and Secret Builders.  I also made a photo video montage using One True Media and liked it so much that I subscribed to it!  Thanks to Geri, I can use that to display my personal photos and my students can use it to present their classwork!  You can see my video of the trip to Chicago that I took with my son at this link:
http://www.onetruemedia.com/shared?p=d77952ff6cd8af22a33585&skin_id=1702&utm_source=otm&utm_medium=text_url
(I need to learn how to imbed videos)
There's still more of our classmates' work that I need to review, including timelines, Googlesites and Weebly.  I like the website that Emily made using Weebly and the Facebook page that Andrew made. 
This activity was a great way to introduce people to all of the tools that are available.  It almost feels like Christmas!

preparing students for their future

The articles that we've read for class reflect another of our class readings from last semester.  John Dewey's beliefs written in Experience in Education support "Four things every student should learn..but every school is not teaching" by Pierce and "Technology-Transformed Learning Environments" by Warlick.  Dewey writes that in traditional education, students are taught facts outside of their experience.  He believes that what is studied should be derived from materials in life, including experiences.  He wrote that it is the teacher's job to select things from the student's experience that will lead to new problems.  Warlick shows that this is still true when he describes learning experiences as "fueled by questions,"  problems or barriers that need to be solved.  He also states that the end product of a learning experience should be of authentic value to the learner and/or to others.  He believes that grades are irrelevant and aren't an authentic way to respond in a learning environment.  When I read this article I can see why some students have not been motivated in school.  The majority of their learning activities do not come from their experience, are not authentic problems and do not provide students with meaningful responses.
After reading Dennis Pierce's article I think that it is very important to use 21's century technology standards in addition to state (& or national) standards when planning learning activities.  This way we can ensure that they're getting everything they need before they graduate.  I really appreciate the value he placed to global empathy because I would like to see more people understanding and respecting eachother's point of view, especially those of other cultures. 

delicious and diigo

I'm ready for spring and the spring cleaning of my favorites!  I really like the way websites can be saved, organized and shared on the computer using Delicious.  I would like to share some of mine with you and my username is saramcarothers.  I've already found some people who have really interesting bookmarks that I'll look at in the future.  It will be great to see which websites my colleagues have bookmarked.  I think that using delicious or diigo in the classroom will save students time in researching as well as help them to find more relevant information.  I haven't had much experience with Diigo yet but plan to experiment with it.  I figured out how to highlight but still need to learn how to make annotations.  This will be very useful in teaching students how to summarize text and prevent them from plagiarizing.    I read that a teacher can use Diigo Educator to create groups and student accounts.  There is a lot of potential here.  I just wish that I could have installed a toolbar at my school, but right now at my school, the computers restart "from scratch"  and we're not allowed to make permanent changes.  I'll have to talk to the tech person about that!  I'm going to look at ipads tonight because I think I could get more work done for this class.  It's really frustrating when youtube is blocked and, although I know how to override it, that only works on teachers' computers SOME of the time.  Then you have to restart the computer and log in to 5 different places all over again!  It's funny that the blocks are meant to protect students from harmful content but it is also protecting them from learning!

Googledocs

I had fun working with my group using Googledocs.  It seemed very efficient because we were able to brainstorm and edit our ideas without straying from the final goal.  The communication that our group had made me worry less about the presentation not getting finished.  I was able to share my ideas without worring about being too controlling (I hope!)  and it felt good to see that some of my ideas were used in the final result.

Blog about wikis

I signed in to Wikibooks at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page and it has many topics, including ESL.  I'll be able to explore the information and contribute to it.  I can also share it with other teachers to help them work with ELL students.  I also am going to use the wiki that Rachel discovered:  ESL Awareness at http://diversitygroup-esl.wikispaces.com/.  I registered for delicious and added them to my bookmarks.  I think this will be a great way to organize all of the websites and save them for later because sometimes I don't have time to read them thoroughly.  I look forward to looking at the bookmarks of other people in class.

Blog about Blogs

Chapter 3 of New Tools, New Schools really helped to put all of this information into perspective. Now I have a better (but not full) understanding of the functions of different tools and what can be done with them.
Blogs can be used by administrators to communicate with the faculty so it won't be a top down or bottom up distribution of power but rather a mutual process in decision making. Teachers can use blogs to communicate with students and their parents. Students can use them to improve their writing skills, learn from other students, form their opinions, and share their ideas with others.
With wikis, students can read, collaborate, peer edit, and make electronic portfolios. With both blogs and wikis, there is a danger that information and writing are inaccurate. There is also a danger that the content is subjective or trying to support a point of view. A good 21st century skill to have is the ability to evaluate content and question the accuracy of information and the purpose of the author.
The teachers at our school are being trained in Moodle next week and I plan to use it for my capstone project in training teachers to work with ELLs. I think this tool would be best because I read that you can include blogs and wikis in it, divide the content into modules, make quizzes, and have discussions. I also want to conduct a survey with the teachers as a pretest to determine the content of the training and a posttest to measure the results of the training. I learned that zohopolls would be a good tool to use for that. I also want to start using this stuff in the classroom!

Blog Subscriptions

I am coteaching ELL U.S. history this semester and borrowed Emily's choice which is
http://ushistoryeducatorblog.blogspot.com/
I also think that http://www.elearnspace.org/ will be useful to find effective ways to use technology in the classroom.

course goals

I hope to become comfortable with using new technology in the classroom and for my personal life.  I finally broke down and got a cell phone this year, which shows my resistance towards adapting to technology.  I associated lack of personal communication with new technology but this class has already shown some of the benefits that technology offers, and as an educator I need to learn about it before I evaluate it.  I think that potentially I can use what I learn in this class with my students and the teachers at my school.  I just fear that my computer will break down if I try to do too much with it and that our lives are becoming too simulated and less authentic.  Hopefully this class will prove me wrong.