RSS and my Diaago http://www.diigo.com/user/jcr091?dm=simple

I new that there was a way to subscibe to blogs and news cites and have the new information sent to you but I had not idea how you would go about doing it or that it could be so helpful in the classroom. RSS are what does that and its much simpler than i thought it was. It takes almost no special computer knowledge. The RSS would be great to lead students down interesting new paths in any subject area. If your school has department websites the students should have an RSS subscribtion for each department in order to stay up to date. The RSS reader would also be great way for students to get started on research projects. For examlpe if at the begining of the year you had the students sign up for subscription to several cites they would then get up to date information on what is happening in the world of history. Then the teacher could have them do a research project on how our perspective of events change over time.

When deciding what social bookmarking cite to use I choose Diigo. I choose this because it seemed to be simpler and easier to use without losing any of the features of the others.
My page is in the title... ic ould not get it to paste in the body of the blog.

I think social bookmarking could be a valuable tool in the classroom. It will alow you to direct your students to specific readings on a topic in quick an easy way. It also could allow you to share online documents and things that could be worked on as a class. I think the greatest advantage of these cites is that it allows you to get the students using technology and feeling as if they are not really learning but rathe playing on the internet but they are actually getting information that you think is valuable.


Some ideas for using Excel in the classroom could be having the students put their grades in a excel spread sheet. By doing this every student would be able to get farmilar with the program and at the same time be able to keep track of where they are as far as grades go. They will also be able to see their progress or where they slipped up. A second excel assignment could be imputting the number of casualties in a particular war and another factor such as tempature and see if there is a coralation. (teacher would set it up so their is ie. Napolean's march into Russia- by charting the numbers the students will be able to see the magnitude of his blunder). Another Excel progect could be having the students imput thier diets for a week then look up approximate intake of calleries from those meals and chart how many calleries they eat and when. This would be a good health class assignment. Another assignment using the same numbers from the last one could be plotting a "healthy diet" for a week from an online source and comparing the students to a healthy diet on several types of graph. A fifth assignment that students could do with excel is imputting the colleges or options they are considering once they leave high school. They could then imput criteria important to them and score each option and then plot the options on a graph to see which seems most sensible.

Goggle apps

I found the goggle lesson plans really interesting. They had many great features and lessons on their but the two i chose were rather simple. The first was actually intended for fine arts but with simple adaptations could be both social studies and fine arts. The lesson required each student to create photographic tour of the United States using famous photos. I felt that if the lesson was presented as a social studies lesson the students could use the same basic idea to outline westward expansion. The lesson also required the use of goggle earth which would help the student understand the landscape the people who he or she was finding pictures of was crossing. I think that this could be a fun and inciteful lesson for a highschool american history class. Many children do not get to travel to the west and even if they do they go by plane so they never seet the terrain that the settlers crossed.

The second lesson I found was about pandemics and global disease. It was a group project that would use several of the google apps. The groups would be assigned a different part of a pandemic. For example one group would do the history of the pandemic where it started why all the simple factual stuff. The second group would be responsible for saying how governements both nationally and localy reacted to the situation. The third group would track how the news media reacted to the pandemic and wether this furthed the pandemic or lessened it. Once they had done their research they would be required to make a video as a group showing this information and put it on the class website as a pod cast.

I think the podcast idea would have been really neat for several projects I did while in highschool. One imparticular was a video project we did. It caused alot of problems trying to play all the videos in the classroom because they were all saved to different devices (VHS DVD on a jump drive on a computer) it became a mess where as if we all had posted them as pod casts all the teacher would have had to do is click on it and away it went. Another thought I had was that for student council elections highschools should record and put up speeches as a pod cast. I think this might help to ensure that students actually listen to what is said and don't just remember the funny jokes.

Net Gens "next greatest generation?"

When I first read the questions I needed to answer in my blog all i could think about was the "language" that our students are going to speak. I am a person in the net generation I i have seen the rise of iming and texting first hand and honestly I think it has not been a completely positive thing. Texting and iming are extremely helpful because you can do them while doing other things where as talking on the phone or in person pretty much takes all your attention but i feel as if some people have become so unwilling to make a phone call or meet up in person that they are loosing some of their social skills and ability to have a conversation without thirty seconds to assure that their response is correct. The language question for me also centers around the short hand everyone uses i hate it. If you send me a text that says idk lol I dont have a problem its quicker simpler whatever but if I am standing next to you and say where do you want to go for dinner and you look at me and say "idk lol" there is a decent change my head will explode. First of all idk is not any easier to say than "i don't know" and second of all I can see that your not laughing out loud so don't tell me you are. I think it makes people of my generation look terribly dumb and very lazy. No wonder we have an obesity problem if people have become to lazy to say whole words. Another problem with the net gens is that they write papers how they write blogs and ims. Proper or atleast close to proper English still needs to be used sometimes.

As far as the technology being used in the classroom I think its great to an extent. Its great to get kids looking things up and using webquests and podcasts to learn but i still feel there are times when reading a page in the book and taking notes can be the best way to get the information. The way in which I would like to use technology in my classroom is to reinforce those dreadful notes I make my students take. Something that reading the articles made me think as that using blogs would excite the students because they know people out there can read them. I never thought of this. Without that thought i probably never would have even thought of taking time out to set up student blogs but knowing that excitment i feel that it can be worth while, expecially in a high school social studies class. The one thing that frightens me is that the blogs can be read by everyone and there are alot of "wierdos" out there. But i feel that as long as the students are warned before hand not to share personal information than they should be able to avoid the "weirdos". I feel that my perspective on the whole thing is similar to the students but not identical. I grew up with ims and texts but todays students almost need those things to be able to have freinds. Its crazy how attached to these things our youth have become. I feel that if i could not email, text or im for a month I would be fine I would not lose touch with any close friends, but i feel that these kids would be lost.

The technology that I found fasinating that I had never heard about before these articles was the "google docs". The thought of an online document that a group can edit and create together never crossed my mind but it is a wondeful tool. I feel like so much of the stress that kids had over group projects could be avoided with these. They are remarkable I mean if four kids had a project together they could all do it at their own pace an own time and still come up with a project that is all one and not splintered. I have never used this program but i am sure i will in the future.

Digital Native

I am most certainly a digital native. Reading the article that mentions waking up and checking ims made me think of how many mornings i have done the exact same thing. I am sitting here on my computer with two internet browsers open and each has three tabs. I have been to two different old freinds one on facebook and one on aim getting caught up on life at the same time that i read about my generation is basically the first to be able to multi task with technology. I think about it and multi tasking is by no means new but that tasks we are doing are very different. My dad can do almost anything i can with a computer but he can only do one thing at a time and still yells at me when i open more than one browser on his computer because he worries it will slow it down (like it did back when we had a computer with almost no memory compared to todays). The article made me laugh out loud (or lol to a digital native) when it talked about calling someone into your office to see a cool website my dad does this all the time. My mom who is a digital native always yells at him and tells him to just send her the link.
The article about using technology in school and the panel discutions really made me think even though i am a digital native i don't really know how i will be able to make my class interesting enough or use enough technology to satisfy students of today. I feel like the teachers have somewhat of a point when they say school is boring. Sometimes there is no way to get information to a kid other than here it is take some notes and kids today hate that so much its almost impossible. I want to be a teacher that uses technology and has a fun class but sometimes i wonder where the line between fun and getting the information they need is drawn?

1st blog

Sitting in ed tech...blogging