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Friday, March 26, 2010

Glenda helps Dorthy and Friends!

"The Wizard of Apps" By Joyce Valenza discuss numerous useful applications for students, teachers, librarians, or anyone wanting to utilize the internet in a helpful and productive way.
Glenda the good witch discuss finding applications online that help Dorthy and her fellow friends to explore and collaborate digitally.




Being a good digital citizen...
What does that mean? Ethical Citizenship and Digital Footprint - People search tools like pipl, can show what images are available on people along with, information from social networking sites. This is important because potential admission officers for schools or people hiring individuals can use this information to find out more about individuals (123people) another site, thatsnotcool show videos that help students discuss privacy online issues.

Interacting with intellectual property means using copyrighted material under fair use... Creative Commons licensed materials means that people can share copyrighted work, allowing people to rework the copyrighted images while the original copyrighter still gets credit. Websites like flickr have creative commons search portal. The most liberal 'attribution only license' - means if you cite an image, you can remix it, legally. Some other helpful websites for interacting with copyrighted material are compfight, flckrstorm. When dealing with works cited pages bibme, citationmachine, easybib all aid in the citing process.

Helpful research applications... Researching various topic online can be overwhelming but sites like researchguide, researchwikis (mind maps, research content collecting), and pathfinder help in the research process. Students reflect in wikis on their research and teachers can see where the student's need help. Researching involves critical thinking, problem solving, decision making, and triangulation, and can be made simple through these research apps.

How to use google more powerfully... wonderwheel in google search shows related concepts and allows the exploration of other ideas related to the original ideas, timeline, google squared, and creating a google custom search are a few of the various ways to use google in a new and more productive way.

Some other helpful search engines are wolframalpha (useful in math and science learning), wiki, surchur (can search across social networks), and rss feeds like ebsco.

GIGO stands for "garbage in, garbage out"... Triangulation is developing a filter for "garbage" One website to receive negative publicity as a scholarly source is wikipedia, but it is not always a bad source, it is good for breaking news and can be a good place to start for a basic understanding of the topic being researched. PLN - personal learning network - easywhois (helps to determine where certain information is coming from) Finding primary sources in the past has become a little difficult over time but a site like demotix (organizing and gather new journalism) lead you to the direct source. Another way of having a primary source is to create surveys, these can be created in googledocs.

A database widget site is provided by nytimes widgets (where you can choose from various categories and feeds), along with netvibes (which is devoted specifically to widgets).

Digital story telling portals held aid in creativity and innovation: websites like digitales, Xtranormal,Voicethread, Goanimate, Bitstrips, Wordle, PrimaryAccess (links to database of artifacts), Blogster (poster-like digital storytelling).

Communication Collaboration...
Presenting in front of large audience can be intimidating but when given the right tools it can be exciting. Online global collaboration helps with communication. (can share slides and tools) Slideshare is a site where people can share various slides and tools with one another. Another great network is called skypeanauthor this brings the authors into the classroom digitally. TED is a great place to find video resources and also provides great models for presenting in the 21st century. Googledocs has templates in an archive that help students and teachers collaborate together at anytime of the day and anywhere in the world. Diigo is a social bookmarking website that allows students and teachers to tag, share, and annotate various links.

Another recommended websites for teaching and learning : ala.org
To view the "Wizard of Apps" in slide form it can be found at Slideshare

When citing and research various topics for school, I have found myself overwhelmed with too much information and not the right information at that. Where do you go to find it? Websites like Googlify, googlesquared, and surchur will be incorporated into my searches when researching information online. I loved this video because it will not only help my students in the future, but it is going to serve it's purpose in my life right now. This whole video was dedicated to bringing awareness to useful internet applications. I don't think I will have such a hard time navigating from place to place in the future, not with so many helpful apps.

In my classroom I want my students to understand how to access certain information safely, efficiently, and productively. I will definitely introduce this video to them and share these links with other teachers in the future. Even though my field is in Art part of my planned curriculum is to have the students write a paper over one of their favorite artists and present. Well with them applications I can share with the students and this can help aid them with this assignment along with various presentations and papers in the future.

Wordle is a fun website that lets you create word clouds. It could be used in numerous ways, like digital storytelling or brainstorming. You can change the size and fonts of different words in the word cloud you create. I went to wordle.net and created my own word cloud about Giant Pandas!

Wordle: giant panda!

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

A Survey: First Memory


First Memory Survey

For Week 9 in Technology for Teachers we learned how to use google documents. It's quite simple: Find the tab that says 'create new' then select 'form' and instantly you can create an online survey. Another fun fact: You can pick your question types: text, paragraph text, multiple choice, and others. I chose to ask questions involving the individual's first memory.

So far, the feedback has been limited. One person who took the survery answered, "their brother being born" as their first happy memory. A first memory and family link we share; my first memory was a happy one of myself and brother, as well.

:D

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

A Digiworld described by Digiteens

Digiteens: Digital Citizenship by Digital Teenagers



Students research digital topics and write on a wiki, research with friends around world, then create offline action projects in the area of their digital interests. The students are involved in a project based program called Digital Citizenship.

The students of Westwood Schools in Camilla Georgia give us an insight into Digital Citizenship. They covered various topics briefly about digital literacy, online safety, internet access inside schools, posting personal information online, communicating with students from different cultures, and other subjects. The students of Westwood Schools use websites like Skype, Wikispace, and Google Docs. Some of the more specific digital citizenship sites like Digiteen Island, Woogie World, and Digiteens.

I have been using the internet for many years and had to educate myself on things like online safety and posting personal information online. When I first had access to the internet back when AOL had first arrived on the digital scene I found myself giving away private information that put my safety at risk. Educating our youth on online safety is extremely crucial and would have benefited me when I was a child.

I would like to involve my students in Digital Citizenship by having them help to educate other students who are less educated on these carious topics. The most important thing in my mind emphasized during this video was properly educating children on online safety. Children need to understand what information is appropriate to post and what is considered to be unsafe information to share with the digital world. Continuing this project-based learning is a way to spread awareness to students who may be unaware. Emphasizing the dangers of internet is important, but it also important to emphasize how helpful a tool the internet can be. To obtain important information along with a helpful communication tool, among other various digital avenues. My goal will be to get my students involved with projects like Digiteens and letting students know that the internet is useful when used properly and for the right reasons.