Summary

I can't believe I did it!! Thank you so much for an amazing class. I can undoubtedly say that I have never learned so much in one staff development class. It took a long time to work my way through the course but I found most of the things surprisingly easy to use once I played around with them. I appreciate that you gave us just enough directions so that I wasn't completely lost but you also didn't spell every single thing out for us. This forced me to play and figure some things out for myself and I learned so much as a result. I cannot even begin to narrow down one favorite thing. There are too many that I absolutely loved! I will definitely be using Delicious, GoogleReader, and GoogleDocs as staples. One of the things that I really appreciated was learning how to blog! This is something that I will be implementing for this coming school year. I will probably either reinvent this blog or create a new one altogether to keep parents updated. Hopefully I will get my students blogging too!

I would absolutely take another course like this if it was offered! There is nothing that you should change--you have created a fantastic course. Thank you for inspiring me to continue staying up with the world of Web 2.0. My resolution is to start my blog for my class and to continue looking for opportunities to integrate technology into my class through the tools we have learned here. I know I won't be able to conquer them all at once, but I am going to do my very best to weave them into my lessons. This is definitely not the end, it is only the beginning!!

Thing #23

Wow!! Ning was not really what I was expecting it to be...I had NO idea how much information was going to be there. It could quickly become information overload! I really did enjoy exploring the site. I liked the forum tab that allowed you to look at the discussions that were going on and there were plenty of them, that's for sure! I came to especially like using the tabs on the sidebar that allowed you to search by subject, tool, area, etc. I chose to focus in on blogging because it is something that I am definitely considering using in my classroom next year. I am thinking of a blog to keep my parents informed, but I am also wondering about having my students blog as well. I found a really great blog through a member on Ning. She is a teacher who has her students blog about the books they've read. It was fantastic! I tagged it on my Delicious account and will be going back to it. I was excited to find so many resources at my fingertips. The conversations were so diverse that I know that Ning could prove to be an invaluable resource to me. It is something I will be exploring further to continue sharpening my technology skills in the classroom and for advice on other topics we face as educators as well. I am glad to have been introduced to Ning!

Thing #22

I recently joined Facebook at the encouragement of family! My whole family was on Facebook and kept asking my husband and me what we were waiting for. I was reluctant at first...it can become so time consuming and sometimes seems so silly! I know this because I used to do MySpace in college to keep up with church friends and some high school friends. I enjoyed it for a while...until I realized once I started teaching that all of my students were on there and it just seemed weird, so I deleted my account!! After seeing both MySpace and Facebook, I definitely prefer Facebook. The content typically seems more appropriate. I have seen some frightening things on MySpace and it often worries me for my students to use it.

I like that you can set all of your privacy settings as you desire. I do not like the idea of the whole world being able to see my profile and photos, so it is nice to be able to set those for friends only. I like that you have to confirm before a friend is added so that you have control over what is on your page. Personally, I do not like many of the quizzes on Facebook. They seem really silly, but I guess to each his own!! Overall, I think Facebook is nice. I like that I can keep up with family and I have found a few friends from high school. It was nice to reconnect and see how they are doing!

As far as educational purposes go, I am not so sure that I am sold! I have a hard time seeing how Facebook would work for that. I know that there would be options to set up groups for a specific purpose, so classmates or group members could collaborate for homework help or projects. I don't know how often that actually happens, but I'm sure it could be a possibility. Regardless, I do think that it is important to be aware of Facebook and MySpace because our kids are definitely in the know and we need to be too!

You can find my profile here.

Thing #7b

While perusing through my Google Reader, I found something that I thought was really great and I wanted to share it. One of my feeds is Free Technology for Teachers and the author always shares great technology tips and education applications. This time the author posted a link to a post entitled Wordle in the classroom. It caught my attention, of course, because we have looked at/explored Wordle in this class. The post included a slideshow of 38 Ways to Use Wordle in the classroom. It was fantastic! I got several good ideas of how to incorporate Wordle into my class and I am noodling over how to tweak some of the presenter's ideas so they can work for me and my students. Hopefully this slide show will be helpful to others as well. Obviously, not every idea will work for every classroom, (some were way above my 6th graders) but there are a wide variety of ideas and they can also be a great springboard for new ideas. I am embedding the slideshow below in case you are interested.

Thing # 21

I had no idea Google offered so many great tools!! As I scanned the list I recognized several of them from this class or previous knowledge; however, there were many that were new to me. I explored a few more thoroughly and I already have a short list of tools that I will be going back to in my "spare" time! ha!

I worked with Google Calendar some because I immediately thought of several uses for this tool. Personally, it would be an effective way to keep up with our family's schedule and would also aid in planning family events because everyone could see each other's calendars. Professionally, this would be great just to keep up with meetings and classes for myself. Also, I instantly thought that Google Calendar would be absolutely excellent when we are scheduling grade level parent/teacher conferences. Since we departmentalize we each schedule conferences for our home room students but we all participate in each conference. It can become such a headache to call and schedule times only to realize that you have inadvertantly double-booked. This will be a tool that will make scheduling across our grade level so much more efficient.

I also explored Book Search. As a reading teacher, this tool thoroughly excites me! I am wishing I had known about it sooner. I love that you can preview the text before you purchase a book. This will definitely be useful to me when I am looking for texts to use in the classroom. I did find, however, that several books I searched did not allow you to look at the text. Yet, it could still be useful in seeing a summary of the book and reading reviews about it. Sometimes, though, the reviews aren't always of good quality. Nonetheless, I am still sure I will be able to utilize this tool.

Some of the tools that are still on my short list for exploring are Picasa and Sites. Sites looked like an easy, great way to create a classroom website, but I am not quite ready to take the plunge. I am still trying to decide if I want to implement a class blog or website. Decisions, decisions.... :)

Thing #20

GoogleDocs is something I have only become familiar with in the last few months. I have found it very useful throughout this course to be able to keep track of my progress. Today, however, is the first time that I have actually created a document of my own using GoogleDocs. It was very easy! The format is so similar to Microsoft Word and Excel so I was already extremely familiar with the tools on the toolbar. It was really quite a seamless transition to using GoogleDocs today. I did find one thing that I was unhappy with as I was working and experimenting. I do not like that you cannot see margins and where your page actually stops in terms of printing. I created my whole word document and then clicked print preview. It was completely off! Because I couldn't tell where the page stopped my document took 2 full pages instead of 1. That was a bit frustrating. Is there a way to actually see the margins and where your page stops on GoogleDocs? Despite this setback I still think that GoogleDocs will be extremely beneficial to me professionally. I thought of several ways that I could use this collaboratively with my teammates already. I am in charge of doing the weekly newsletter for our grade level. I, of course, always want feedback and contributions from my team as well as extra sets of eyes proofreading for me. This always consisted of attaching in an email to my team or printing it out and waiting for feedback. GoogleDocs will be a much more effective way to share this task from now on. Also, the end of the year becomes quite crazy for our sixth grade activities. (I know this is the case for every grade level!) We have multiple events where we are coordinating parent volunteers, donations, and keeping track of permission slips, money paid, etc. GoogleDocs is going to be a great way for us to see as a whole grade level how we are doing and to keep each team member informed easily. I love that we can compile all the important info in one place. This would also work well for teachers or students working on a project together. They can work from different places but have all of the information in one place that everyone can easily access. I know that this is a thing I will be putting to good use next year!