Collaborative Applications

I really enjoyed the collaborative applications lesson in class on Tuesday. The Vyew power point that we could make changes and comments on was really cool to see in action, and I felt that notemesh and google docs were a cool tool to have in a college classroom because it would be a great tool to use when having classroom discussions or doing a collaborative project.

However, I do not think I want to implement these in my classroom. I am planning on teaching forth or fifth grade, so when thinking about the students I am going to have I am not positive that I can trust them to use these technologies properly. On applications like notemesh people have the ability to change anything that is written. If I were to put up homework notes and a student were to change them, another student could have a chance to see the incorrect notes before I noticed. This could seriously hinder the learning process because they will not have the right notes. On this same application if two people are posting at the same time only one of the posts will be able to show up and will replace the other person's post. I feel that this will frustrate the students, as it was frustrating people in class on Tuesday. The chance of someone posting something profane or inappropriate is also a risk I am not sure I want to take.

The same things hold true for Vyew and Yugma. These are very neat applications, but I do not think I could risk using them with this age group. I could be in a lot of trouble if someone altered my presentation in an inappropriate way. There is no way to censor what can and can't be drawn on the screen. I also feel that the ability to draw and comment will take away the attention of the presentation being given. We modeled this very well in class on Tuesday when Fei was presenting, with our conversation of how hungry we were and the drawings we were making. I feel that with 9 and 10 year olds this attention span will be even worse.

HELP: Google Earth on Wiki

Hi!
I can't seem to get my google earth mashup to link onto the class Wiki page. Could anybody explain to me how to do this?
Thanks

Images, Copyright, and Mashup

This week I learned a lot of useful things. One of which was a copyright site called creative commons. It gives you the opportunity to place copyrights on your internet material such as blogs, or pictures that you upload. I think this is really good because then you can let people know what you want to be reproduced and what shouldn't be.
Images, using flickr, was very fun. This is something that I think I will use for my personal use as well as for school use. I love pictures, and having a place to store them all online will be great.
Finally using Google maps and Google earth was fun. I love the sites especially Google earth. I was able to recreate my whole cruise in the matter of minutes. I was also able to load it onto Google Earth and look at it from a different perspective. While I was looking at this I was thinking about all the great Social Studies lessons and learning tools I could come up with from this one easy site.
The best thing about all of this technology is that it is free to use which means that we will be more able to use it in the classroom. I think that the children will be able to use it as well, but the biggest challenge, in my opinion will have to do with censoring. I was just looking up random things in the search on Flickr and when I typed in "cheesecake" a naked woman came up. This worried me, because that is not appropriate for a student in school to end up looking at. A challenge in helping them look at things more critically will be to get them to see the educational value of the image and not just play around with the technology. They also may not understand that they can't just go anywhere and take pictures from any site. They will have to be careful about respecting copyrighted materials.

Social Bookmarking and Calandars

Both social bookmarking and calendars are useful pieces of technology. For my personal and professional use I would use social bookmarking so I could have all of my favorite sites, or sites that are useful to me in one place to be able to access anywhere. The thing I like about social bookmarking is that no matter whose computer I am on I can access that list, unlike with bookmarking/favorites on my personal computer. I could also use it in my professional life by finding sites for my students to use in one place and allowing them to use them as a reference. Calendar is also a great tool for both my personal and professional life. In a personal aspect it can keep me more organized, which is something I tend to not be all the time. In a professional aspect I can put the homework assignments and announcements all on a calendar and make it public to view for my students and their parents. I can also print these out and place them around the classroom so everybody knows whats going on. Field trips, assignment due dates, students birthdays, test dates are all things I would put on these calendars.

Students will find these tools very useful. They can access my social bookmarks in order to do assignments or they can form their own to show where they got their information for research from, sort of like a bibliography. They will also be able to share information to one another this way. Calendars will allow them to always have access of assignments and announcements. If a student is absent they will not have to worry about what they are missing because it would be right on the calendar for that day. Students themselves can make their own calendars as well. They are very easy to do and they will be able to put their own important schedules and reminders in a calendar. This will help them become more organized and aware of the things they need to get done. It might also be a fun activity to perform as a class if computers were available to the students.

Parents can use social bookmarking to see what types of sites are available to them from their child's teacher. The teacher can put up sites that will appeal directly to parents. Parents can also see what type of work is going on at school by looking at what type of sites are bookmarked on the teachers social bookmark account. Calendars will be very useful to parents. They will be able to always have access to due dates and events at school. The age old question from parents is, "What did you do at school today?", and usually the most common response is "Nothing". We all know this is not true, we all went through school and their was never a day we did nothing. This is a way to keep the parents involved even if the student is not making as much of an effort to.

Research Using Search Engines

One thing I am very interested in at the moment are Bichon Frises. They are the breed of dog that my puppy Jasmine is. I am going to use my new knowledge of search engines to find some information about them.

Some things I learned that I really did not already know are:

• Bichons are hypoallergenic dogs.
  
• They have a long life expectancy of about 15 years.
  
• All websites describe them as gentle mannered.
  
• Bichons do not shed so they are highly prone to matting in their fur.
• They are extemely sensitive to ticks.
  
• Bichons love children and people in general.
  
• The Bichon breed was once used in circuses so they are very easy to train new tricks to.
  
• The Bichon breed has the ability to walk on its hind legs.
  
• The Bichon is one of the top breeds used in Nursing Homes and Children's Hospitals therapy work.
  
• Bichon's were depicted in royal family photographs from France because they were highly popular in that area.

After learning about different Google search features I have a new outlook on searching for internet data. Before I would type in a bunch of words and usually get back websites that were not of much use to what I was actually searching for. I can now narrow my search using operator tools. I think that the + operator and the "" operator will be most useful to me. The + operator allows me to search without receiving any variations on the word. The "" operator allows me to do the same thing. I also find the ~ operator useful because it allows me to search synonyms of the word I am searching for. Learning about how to evaluate websites also helped me a lot. I now know some things to stay away from when I am conducting research and some better choices that will allow me to find more reliable information.

Affordances and Constraints of RSS readers

Before taking this class I was not aware of RSS readers and I was very interested in them once I started exploring them and using them myself. An advantage of them is that you can subscribe to different blogs or news updates and be able to see them as soon as they are updated in one place without having to click around to visit each site separately. This is especially great for classes that have introduced blogging such as CEP 416 and my TE 448 class, as well as others that I am not a part of. In both we are keeping blogs to post our work and we are expected to look at what others have posted as well. The RSS reader enables us to see when someone has updated and easily allows us to read each post. Without the RSS feed we would all have to click into each blog to see if that person has updated and continue that process until we have read all of the responses. In my opinion that is a waste of time and the RSS reader really allows the most efficient way to read the posts.
One constraint of the RSS reader is that every single update is shown from your subscribed blogs. Not everything will be of interest to you and this may cause you to have to look through a lot of posts to find what you want. For example, if you set up a RSS reader in your classroom for a project on the Civil War, and everyone had separate subtopics within that subject, not everyone will need to same information. The information that is being posted may not be useful to certain students and may put them at a disadvantage to finding sources since other students are able to use the information that they are finding through the RSS reader.

Advantages/Disadvantages of Blogs

Of all the advantages of blogs, I feel that the biggest one is the fact that a person can post what they need to very easily and other people can see this and comment immediately on the post. With a website updates take a little longer and to post comments you almost always need to email the person instead of just leaving it on the page. In a classroom setting, this makes discussion very easy to do outside of the room. It keeps the classroom connected and can cut down the amount of time used within the classroom to hear everyones points of view while still having everyone hear the views of their peers. It also allows for everyones opinions to be heard without making anybody feel uncomfortable stating their views in class.
The biggest disadvantage to a blog is that anybody can have access to your blog and the discussion that is going on. In a classroom setting it may be better to have a private discussion board on some topics so that the wrong people do not get a hold of the conversation, especially if there is a controversial topic being discussed. With your blog available to everyone, this may set up some security issues if full names and locations of your students are available.

CEP 416

Hi ! Welcome to my CEP 416 blog. This class is about technology in the classroom. I'm taking this class because I am very interested in incorporating technology, such as blogs, into my future classroom. Here is a link to our class:
http://416-001.blogspot.com/