My Eyes are Burning!!!

No, I didn't see anything inappropriate on a Wiki, I'm just REEEEAALLLY tired(: I bookmarked the 21centuryedtech wiki and the Bear Den wiki. the Bear Den wiki has several great rubrics for note taking which is something that we will be doing when we do our 8th grade research project. I did not read a great deal on the 21st century wiki but I would like to go back to it. I like the idea of a wiki space. I liked the Bear Den use of the Wiki as an organizational tool so that things students need are all organized and put in one place. I can see myself using a wiki for this as I have a horrible ability to lose a piece of paper (Or a whole stack) in less than a minute!!!!! I would love to use the wiki for collaboration and writing but I fear that my students would not be able to stop themselves from writing something inappropriate or erasing someone else's work. I wonder how difficult it is to monitor as I have organizational skills issues as already mentioned. I am going to find out what our policies are pertaining to wikis, and see if anyone else in our building uses one. Yes this is all one big long paragraph and because this is not a wiki you can't go in and edit it for me and I am too tired to do it (:
Peace

There are Books Out There

I am excited about the websites that offer free e-books. I don't know that much about adolescent literature that would be available free because there is no more copy write law. I liked the site, great big library that cost 12.95 per month for one classroom. I did not look into it extensively but I like the fact that they have children's books online for a low cost because then the students could have the books read to them using a reader which I'm assuming that we will find out about sooner or later in this class. Many of my students struggle with reading and do not do enough of it. They do like it if I read to them and they like a good story. I Think they would listen.

I really liked the British On-line Library and the ability to see and hear famous books and have them explained. I can see this being useful in Social Studies for primary sources and for a comparative religion class.

Many Books on the places to get free books looks similar to the other free ebooks web sites in the titles that they offer. I thought the Book crossing website was fun. Leaving books in different places for others to pick up read and then leave for someone else. it would be interesting to see where a book might end up. I would like to look into this.

pod people please leave a message

Well now I see the edit HTML tab which I did not use when putting my links into my last post. Was that bad? I clicked on the links and it took me there. Am I the only one who can do that?

Are you a POD person? Are you? How about You?

I liked the explanation of pod casts, that was helpful. It sounds as thought they are easy to make so I can see using them in the classroom as a learning tool or means of assessment. I think the kids would like the idea that other people could see what they had made. Parents could access it from home so it would help connect the students to the outside world.

I subscribed to one pod cast about middle school teaching strategies. I have not listened to one yet. I keep coming back to the overwhelming factor. There are a LOT of pod casts out there. I think if I were going to use this technology personally I would want someone who had a podcast that they found valuable to recommend one. I don't feel like going through and trying to find the golden POD!! If YOU are a POD person and have found some golden pods there's probably one about, "On Golden Pond," let me know what they are!!

I am going to attempt to put a link to a YouTube video about a way to multiply quickly and accurately without a calculator. I think there are a great many YouTube clips that could be brought into the classroom to spark interest or help teach a concept. I also watched two other clips about math. One position was that students need to learn standard algorithms and the other felt that algorithm were good but that the students need to understand the ideas behind the math. This went along nicely with the math foundations class that I just took. As with everything except ice cream, I think that a balance of both would be best, rather than coming down far to the left or far to the right.

Here is the link, I think: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLdKsKep1og this was a neat way of looking at multiplication that really is faster and I intend to show this clip to my math class.

Since we're trying this why not go all the way. The next link is a weather person who does not believe in "New Math" and feels that children just need to learn standard algorithms.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1qee-bTZI



This link is an answer to the woman in the above link by a college math professor. While he is not as well spoken, he isn't reading from notes that "Big Brother" wrote and he believes that ideas and algorithms are important.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9skRrnN2_HU&feature=related

I have used You Tube before and like it for personal use. For the classroom you have to preview and probably save the file because you never know what might also come up on the page that could be inappropriate.

Link for week five

Here is the link to the google doc. which is not accessable in my previous post. hopefully this will work (: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AUIBacLDEf7-ZDhwdGpxYl8wZmN4ejgzY3I&hl=en

LuLu is a LOO LOO!!

I looked at LuLu a self publishing web site. I can imagine using this to create a class book, something that I do now with another company, but this would give students the ability to access the internet for images etc. and everything would be done online. The way I do it now, I have to have the students create their writing and then photocopy it onto the pages that the company sends me. pictures need to be hand drawn or scanned onto the pages that the company sends me. I am going to investigate this more when I have a minute. If I could do it this way it would save paper and time. I have not investigated the cost to publish what you write. More on that later.

blog post week 5 - Google Docs

blog post week 5 - Google Docs