Week 1 Reflections

At the end of each week I will reflect on my progress discovering the world of Web 2.0. So here goes Week 1...

I'm an animal of habit, so when I opened D2L and found out that the Webtools for Teachers class was going to be taught in a whole different learning environment, I was a little thrown off and worried... When I opened the iteachSTEM wiki where the class was going to take place, I became even more worried. I like order in my life, and at first glance that site is anything but orderly. There are a bunch of pages, charts, discussion forums, links which cross over from one place to another, scattered lists of assignments..., in general an interface which I wasn't familiar with at all.

After playing around with it for a week though, I feel pretty comfortable. It's not too different from creating a wiki in wikispaces, and although it does seem to have more limitations, I like the fact there are no ads. Other than learning how to navigate around Wetpaint and seeing how a collaborative wiki works, I have also understood the importance of thread titles. I think my main issue with this specific form of collaboration is that there are so many different threads on each different page to keep track of! I think having one page for discussions, each thread having different titles (descriptive enough that you know what they're about) would be much more efficient... A point to remember when using wiki in the classroom.

I've also become a blogger, learning how to create, write posts and maintain a blog using Blogger. The Google Blogsearch has been a big help for finding blogs of interest (also looking at other blogs' blog roll), and I got great satisfaction learning how to embed a video into a blog post and how to decrease the size of the video screen.

On tap for Week 2...

-Learn how to use Google Reader, how to organize the blogs I follow and get the most of it. -Figure out what RSS stands for and how it works -Sign up to Twitter (which I have been reluctant to do thus far) and keep an open mind about its possibilities... -Find people to follow on Twitter -Start building my Personal Learning Network