By far the highlight of this class has been working with the teachers form my school. When I first knew I would be taking this class, I sent out a few emails to the entire school to invite people to join me in the class. I had a few takers. Michele is our librarian assistant and 6th grade technology teacher. She and I work together and talk through technology things all the time! Much of what I do in my own classroom gets bounced off of her because we love collaborating. She has dabbled in tech stuff but she feels like now she really gets it! Both of us totally LOVE Symbaloo and we can’t wait to use it with our students. We are going to show it to the entire middle school faculty and propose that all students and teachers use it for next year. It will be interesting to see how that goes over. It is funny to me that we don’t think twice about their being a standard paper planner that all students and teachers must use, but then we don’t want people to tell us a tech tool to use. Michele and I are going to try to present it well so we get the buy in. It really will be a great tool for our students and teachers to use.
One of the other participants really stood out. She had just learned how to attach a file to an email this year and has major computer anxiety. She isn’t opposed to using it, but has no confidence and requires a lot of support. For her PLE she wanted to learn more about teaching writing to her 5th graders. To keep things simple, I showed her the English Companion Ning so she could just hang out there and get used to connecting online. We also found a great webmix on Symbaloo for her next unit on Latin America. That was definitely a moment when she felt the power of the Internet for gathering resources. A huge moment for Patty was when she signed herself up for Twitter! I was so impressed considering how timid she was about using online resources, that she would sign herself up! We didn’t even help her! She had seen my Tweetdeck and I had shown how I use it and she liked it so much, she went home and created an account. That was quite a huge step. We are now working on building her community so she can use it to its full advantage.
The five of us in the group met most Friday afternoons after school at my house and either watched the Elluminate sessions or worked with some online tools and talked about how to implement a PLE in our own learning. Believe it or not, it was a great way to end our week. We had time to stay and chat and share ideas and stories. Really, building a community takes that. Event though helping my peers navigate the course took much more time and energy than if I had just done the course myself, it gave me great experience in helping others build a PLE and I enjoyed sharing the experience.
Working with my colleagues has been a definite benefit to taking this open course. In case you were wondering if opening it up was worth it, for us it definitely was!
I really enjoyed building my personal learning environment around wine! In addition to learning about different wines, I build some new relationships and had some fun with my friends. It was easy to find blogs to read from Twitter. It only took one request of people to follow about wine and I was off to the races. Twitter is my go-to place for making connections and it made it super easy to find people to follow and blogs to read. I even found some French people to follow and talk to. I got brave and even commented on a blog in French! Basically I have learned about the different types of wine and now have great people to ask if I have any questions.
A highlight of the experience was going to my first wine festival! A PLE doesn’t only have to include people from far away! Why not make the most of the people you have close to home too? So I gathered some friends and we went to a wine festival that was just a few miles from my house. It was great fun and I really learned about wines and found some local wineries that I will definitely go visit.
Bloom's New Version
Bloom's Old Version
When I first read the blog prompt about creativity and synthesis, I thought of the above two versions of Bloom’s Taxonomy from this site about it. I think of creativity as the same thing as creating. In my mind, getting students to the top of the pyramid happens when they have to take what they have learned and DO something with it. And not just filling in worksheets, but having to create something that brings together all of the concepts. Did you notice that Synthesis (or Creating) and Evaluating switched spots in the two pyramids? I think this is because there are so many new ways for students to create. I was reminded of the following comment by Stephen Downes on a Dean Shareski blog post that I read about just yesterday:
They are, of course, creative and imaginative and effective. Now for the kicker: ten years ago, not one student in a hundred, nay, one in a thousand, could have produced videos like this. It’s a whole new skill, a vital and important skill, and one utterly necessary not simply from the perspective of creating but also of comprehending video communication today.
Stephen is so right! Students not only have the means to use amazing content, but also to create amazing content! This makes the creating part of the pyramid that much more important. Students no longer just have to analyze other people’s content, but they need to create their own. Think about how students can now be authors online and gather an audience just with a blog. One of my students is a movie reviewer now and has a world wide audience! That wasn’t possible when I was in school.
To me, creating or being creative, is the opportunity to synthesize the content and use it in a positive way that can be shared with many more people than just the teacher.
This week’s module could not have come at a better time! My students are in the middle of their World Religions project and as part of that they have to interview someone who practices the religion they chose to study. Finding people for them to interview hasn’t been too bad so far. Here’s what I have:
Islam – a student from my adult ESOL class who is from Egypt and is Muslim will Skype into my class.
Hinduism – I found a nice person on Twitter who lives in England who is willing to Skype into my class next week! Thank you, @KhandBapa! @KhandBapa has a great blog too! We also have a fifth grader who is Hindu and we are going to talk to him. I think it is important for our students to know that we have people in our own backyard who practice these religions.
Shinto – I have asked on Twitter and will do so again, but we are rather leery of this. With everything going on in Japan, my students and I talked about being respectful of everything that they are going through. We decided to ask one more time, but will just go with the flow if no one offers. I have a friend who lived in Japan for a few years and we may talk to him.
Buddhism – I didn’t get any responses to my request on Twitter except for some really funny jokes from @woodenmask. I also follow the Dalai Lama on Twitter so I asked him if anyone could talk to my students, but I haven’t heard back yet. :)
Judaism – Students will interview a 7th grade student in our school who is Jewish. She has done presentations to our school before about special holidays and was thrilled to be interviewed by my 6th graders.
The interviews are happening next week so I’ll keep you posted on how they turn out! My students last year interviewed Jabiz Raisdana, @intrepidteacher, about living in Doha, Qatar and it was a wonderful experience. I’m hoping these will be the same! My students will be writing their interview questions on Monday!
Continue Reading »
For me, Twitter is where all of my PLE connections begin. I even found out about the program at Florida on Twitter!
Wow.
Really that is all I can say. I LOVE Symbaloo. I think it is funny that I’ve never heard of it before. I really wish I had this long ago. I am using it constantly to organize my own websites. I haven’t shown it to my students yet, but Michele and I are going to propose having all of our middle school students use it. We have a planner that they all use, so why not have an online place for them that we all use? Makes perfect sense to me!
I love how I can make a webmix and then share it with my students. What a great way to share resources with them! Michele and I helped Patty create her own and we stumbled upon a gold mine! She is getting ready to do a Latin America unit in her Geography class and we found this amazing webmix that Mrs. Burgess made.
Symbaloo is definitely a tool that I can’t live without now! I can’t wait to show it to my students. Check out my webmix. I also found a great webmix of wineries to visit! What great tiles or webmixes have you found?
For my digital literacy plan, I created a lesson that I will be able to use in my adult ESOL class in May. For the last three weeks of the year, we can do a special module. At that time of the year, it is difficult to get students to attend class so anything we can do to make it more appealing helps. In our regular class site, we have no internet access which just kills me! For our last three weeks, we are going to meet at the local library so we can use their wireless Internet. The class will consist of intermediate and advanced adult students. Another teacher and I are bringing our classes together. We have put together a brief outline of the entire module. All of the links and videos will be on a wiki (still a work in progress) so the students can get to them easily.
The computer skills of these students vary greatly. A few are very Internet savvy and use Facebook and email regularly. A few of the students don’t even have a computer. One of the challenges with the module will be differentiating and being able to help all of the students. Some won’t even know how to turn the computer on! We definitely have our work cut out for us!
The students will have already learned about checking for valid sources on the Internet so this will continue that conversation into how to find photos. A large goal of this module is to get them to question what they see on the Internet so they can be more savvy users.
Here is a general outline of the lesson:
Objectives:
The students will be able to distinguish between real and doctored photos.
The students will be able to use and cite Creative Commons photos.
The students will be able to create a photo that looks, but is not real.
Procedure:
Students will look at photos from the Life website that are real and doctored in small groups and decide which ones are real and which ones aren’t.
Come back together as a group and look at the photos. Show ways that you can tell if they are real. Include other examples of doctored photos and videos.
Students will work in groups to create their own “What’s wrong with this picture?” photos, using their cell phone cameras. When finished we will come back together and share them.
Creative Commons – present why we need to use CC photos for our online works.
Students will use CC to find photos for their blog posts.
Students will write a blog post about why we use CC photos and upload a photo to go with it.
Connecting about wine has been really easy! Apparently lots of people like talking and learning about wine. I started my wine search on my “go to place”, Twitter. I sent out a quick tweet asking for suggestions of people to follow and got a quick response from a fellow teacher in the UK.
Then all it took was a quick look at @thirstforwine‘s Twitter stream and now I have a bunch of people I follow who are wine enthusiasts. The one with the best Twitter ID is @sipswooshspit. Love it! I created a list of the wine people I found and I follow what they are saying on Twitter in a column on Tweetdeck. So far I’m trying to build some relationships so I can better connect with them. I’m also hoping to find some people in France to follow. I speak French and French wine is AMAZING, so I’d love to find some wine enthusiasts in France.
I also joined a Ning about wine. I’m interested to connect with people in the Ning.
Of all of the online tools that I use, Diigo is one of my favorites. I absolutely love using it to save my bookmarks and it came in particularly handy last year when I was working from 3 different laptops at the same time. No matter where I was, I always had my bookmarks handy. I also like it because of the highlighting and sticky notes that you can put on websites. Especially with all of the online reading I do, it is a great tool for note taking. That way the highlights and notes are with the site and I can easily get to them if I have to go back and look at the article again.
Diigo Screenshot
I actually used to like Delicious better than Diigo. I loved its elegant simplicity. I didn’t need all of the extras that Diigo offered like notes and highlighting. But then I wanted to start using Delicious with my students and it was a disaster. There is no way to create student accounts with Diigo and I even emailed them to see if they could make some for me and the answer was a resounding no. In order to create accounts for them, I had to make them yahoo id’s and that was not going to happen with my 6th graders.
So I jumped ship to Diigo and haven’t looked back. Diigo lets you create student accounts without an email and they are simple to create. My students love it! They save their sites in it for my class and for their other classes too. They put in annotations and share the sites to our class group so everyone can see them. It is a great way for them to share good sites they have found. When the Egypt revolution started, I had them find articles about what was going on and share them in our class group. Then we started class each day reading through the articles we had all found. They often put annotations to describe why the article was helpful. They are 6th graders so sometimes their annotations are funny. I had to agree with dafa17, though, the Egypt situation is insane!
Diigo Annotation
In my own learning, especially for my #PLEK12 class, I am using Diigo to find good sites about wine. Google is overwhelming. I got over 316 million sites when I searched for wine. In Diigo, I got many sites, but I also can see what other people have said about that site and how many people bookmarked it. That narrows down my search considerably and makes the search manageable.
Diigo is such a great tool. How are you using it?
For my #plek12 course I get to learn about anything I want!
That should be a great thing, right?
So why am I so stressed out about picking a topic?
I think part of the problem is that I am way too obsessed with being the perfect student. I definitely have major perfectionist issues. If I don’t pick the perfect topic, how can I do everything I need to do?
Plus, I already learn about things that I am passionate about every day. I love learning about teaching and learning. But it feels like I should do something different.
That lead me down the slippery slope of…what do I like to do? It is a Saturday night and I am at home doing my grad school work. That should explain it all. I teach full time, teach English at night, and am getting my MEd. Pretty much everything I do revolves around teaching and learning.
The only other thing I do a lot is drink wine. Now that sounds really bad, but I am fascinated by wine and love drinking learning about it. We have a great wine store with a wine bar here in Fredericksburg and they have wine classes. I took one with my friend Deb on French wines and I really enjoyed drinking learning about it. I’ve always wanted to visit a vineyard and learn about how wines are made and see how it all works. I think there is something very romantic about wine.
So, there it is. I’m going to build a PLE around wine. I am looking forward to finding some good wine blogs and friends who are also interested in wine. I’m going to start a new blog just for my wine musings. This will give me a chance to try out the Blogger that is in Google Apps for Ed (which I’ve wanted to do) and to have something that is about learning, but not related so closely to my teaching specifically.
I also am going to try using Symbaloo as my Wine PLE hub. I just learned about this today in our readings and I would like to try it out to see if I would want my students to use it.
I’ll link my new blog here as soon as I upgrade our Google Apps for Ed stuff. I just really know how to hav a good time on a Saturday night, don’t I?