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.