Technology Wonderings

This might be a little redundant from my post from yesterday so please forgive me. My final project for the R/W web course is my blog. I will use it in many ways:
1. As a conversation/discussion tool with my students
2. As staff development for myself
3. To communicate & share information/resources with my staff

Each of these is a different form of collaboration that I look forward to being part of. I hope that blogging with my students will force me to “let go” more and really let the magic happen.

This week I’ve spent a lot of time customizing my blog with some cool features-links to my del.icio.us account, recommended reading and bloglines account, among others. In doing this, I’ve learned how to use each of these different web 2.0 tools. I’m excited to have all of these tools in one place on my blog. It is going to make it easier for others to interact with my resources but also easy for me to keep things updated b/c everything is in one place.

I’ve really enjoying working with everyone in the class. It is always nice to interact with people who are willing to take risks and be a little uncomfortable because it usually leads to really powerful learning. I look forward to continuing our conversations online! ~Stephanie.

I know, I know…It is Thursday and this is my first “project” post. It’s just that I haven’t really been able to decide what I want my project to be. I have learned so much this week:
-how to customize my blog w/widgets and sidebars and code
-del.icio.us and social bookmarking and tagging and networks
-setting up an amazon store to get a personalized reading list (and maybe make a little money at it!)
-google tools for teachers (mind maps, my maps, docs, photos, etc)
-bloglines to access and read lots of feeds in one place and then make my acct public through my blog

All this stuff is accessible through my blog so I guess my project is going to be communicating in web 2.0 ways through my blog. It has been really nice to be a part of this class and have time and assignments that force me (you didn’t have to twist my arm too hard) to explore tools that I’ve heard of or worked with a little but haven’t had a full understanding of until now. The reading has been great and helped me think of new ways for my kids to work with each other and with others across the world.

All good stuff. My brain is full and am trying to sort it all out and figure the implications on my teaching.

Mike A and I have been playing with adding audio files to our blogs. Mine is in the works, his is posted. You can then subscribe to the blog rss feed in iTunes as a podcast and every time there is a new audio file on the blog, the feed is updated in iTunes-SUPER COOL! I’m going to make a podcast telling my self-directed learning teachers how to interact with the ning site for our course. Check back, hopefully I’ll have something posted in a few minutes. ~Steph.

Update!!
Here is my podcast-directions to use the ning site for LTT-SDL:
ning.mp4

Thanks to Cathy Wo for this cool link: http://www.reasonablyclever.com/mini/kidsafe.htm

Here’s the new mini-me! What a neat way for kids to create their own version of “self” for their blog/wiki posts.

It is hard to believe that this class is only a week long. As I look through the topics and resources on the class wiki I’m overwhelmed (in a good way!) by how much “stuff” is there! It is so cool to know that my learning will go well beyond the end of the week thanks to access everything in the wiki that we’re all still adding to.

I was reading from the Fischbowl, one of the “must read” blogs for class. Karl Fisch is an educator who works with per-service teachers, presented at NECC, and seems to be pretty “with-it” when it comes to technology. He talks about a recent experience in an online chat: “I’m still learning how to be comfortable in real-time online conversations; they definitely don’t feel natural to me yet. It’s still hard for me to translate what’s in my head into relatively short sentences in real-time, and to keep up with multiple questions at the same time. And I do still feel somewhat at a loss without the face-to-face contact to get a better feel for how the conversation is going.”

I found this to validate what a lot of teachers are feeling. We’re told that we should participate in this chat or that webcast but for many people that is a huge, uncomfortable risk. It brings me back to the whole digital native/immigrant idea that adults are more comfortable talking face to face or atleast through some mode of audio. The fact that Mr. Fisch is recoginizing that he’s still a little uncomfortable with real-time online conversations makes me feel a little better about myself.

We’ve been having so much fun changing the theme of our blog and adding widgets and organizing sidebars that I’m worried that we’ll miss the point of the thing. This is a powerful communication tool but it is also something that we need to work at. I had the best of intentions when I set up my blog for school last summer. My goal was to get the kids writing and to update it every week. As school got started, it was easy to let the blog go. I hope that as I revitalize my blog this summer that people in the class will motivate me to keep posting. As we subscribe to each other’s blogs, it will be an easy way to stay in touch as the summer days end and the real work begins. Please help to keep me accountable for my posting here!!

I am officially del.icio.us! People have been talking about social bookmarking for years and I’ve heard but not understood until the 10 second (seriously!) demo in class. Now I’m a tagging-fiend! Am still working out my tagging system but getting really excited about the “social” aspect of this cool tool. I have used ikeepbookmarks for years but am finding the tagging concept to be very powerful. I can send links to my kids and teachers and then we can sort for subjects or topics or tags to put everyone else’s bookmarks to work for us! Brilliant!

This is a fun photo of me taken w/the photobooth app.

Some teachers at my school are participating in a class that we are creating called “Self-Directed Learning”. Each person can pick an area of interest and build their own learning. We’re expecting kids to be able to do this without a whole lot of tools so the goal of the class is to become comfortable with the process as adults so we can better grasp how kids construct knowledge. Already, this R/W Web class is a model in self-directed learning. It helps to have a facilitator who is comfortable with this sort of format-one who can say, some people who want to work with the instructor in the front of the room, everyone else could work at the back of the room or out in the hall. People are tucked into their computers and multi-tasking to the max. Not every instructor/teacher is ok with this.

For my class, I’m self-directing myself to learn about web 2.0 tools!