Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Week 4 Reflections

Week 4 was a little hectic for me and didn't see too much action in terms of connecting with my PLN. We had to stay in the hospital for the whole week after my daughter was born because she needed extra care. She's doing great now, thanks to everyone for their warm wishes! Here are a few pictures of her (created with Photopeach).

Sofia Pics



I did get a few web tool tips here and there through out the week from my PLN... Here they are:

Dinkypage.com- A free service which creates disposable webpages (thanks to @skipz)

Medtropolis.com
- The virtual body allows you to take a tour of the human body in English or in Spanish (also thanks to @skipz)

Vocaroo.com- A voice recording online tool. REALLY easy to use, no sign up needed, just click the record button. Sound recordings can be downloaded as .wav files, share them via email, embed them into a website... (thanks to @Teachakid)

NSTA Lab Out Loud Podcasts for Teachers- "Lab Out Loud is a podcast and blog that discusses science news and science education with leading scientists, researchers, science writers and other important figures in the field." Episode 26- Stories of Evolution with Sean Carroll is interesting.

If you like Podcasts... check out The Naked Scientists podcasts, these guys are funny plus the British accent is a nice bonus. A good podcast is the one for 24th of May 2009 called Getting Under Your Skin about albinism, toxic komodo dragon bites and link between cancer and depression.

Through @Teachakid I found a blog post called Twitter Transforms Teaching which has tons of links and references to other blog posts on the topic. This is how I found TwiTip (a blog about Tips on Using Twitter). I like this video of how a professor integrated Twitter into her teaching.






I was planning on attending the webinar on Glogster this weekend but wasn't able to. I went back and listened to the recording. It's definitely a neat tool and one that I will be using. I have always incorporated a lot of poster work into my teaching, but they are time consuming and the amount of effort students put into them varies. Interactive, virtual posters seem like a great idea for making PSAs, summarizing project research, creating review material... and the tool is easy enough that it can be mastered in minutes. I love it, can't wait to have time to play around with it (it seems like the kind of thing you could be suckered into for hours though, so I have to approach it with caution).

So much to learn... so little time!

5 comments:

  1. I looked at the Twitter experiment video, and I must say initially that I was skeptical. WHY would you want to have a discussion on-line when everyone participating is actually THERE IN THE ROOM??? It seemed nuts. But as the video played on, I realized that there may be a place for this in my class as well. The point was made that the kids who may be shy or hesitant to comment in person could contribute to the discussion in a meaningful way. I wouldn't use this mode for the whole class period, but I could see where it could be useful for a short period.
    Thanks for the great links in this post. Sofia sure is a cutie. Best wishes.

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  2. The twitter experiment would be fun to try now and again. If for no other reason just to mess with students' heads that I wanted them to use their phones in class! Ahhh, the screams of the administrators....

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  3. I can see the value of having all the students commenting. I was unsure how it worked because I doubt if the class could read the posts on the screen. Would it take having a laptop every third or fourth student so they could read others?

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  4. As always, thanks for such an informative post! (And, what a darling your little Sofia is!) I thought the Twitter Experiment was very interesting. I liked the last comment about recognizing the experiment would be messy, but messy is not always bad. I think it is something that I need to remember as I implement some Web 2.0 tools into my courses.

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  5. Congrats! Your slow week is more productive than my best. Makes my excuse for for a slow week (on vacation in CA) seem lame. Great stuff here. Check out WISE when you get a chance. Awesome source of WBI projects.

    http://wise.berkeley.edu/pages/intro/wiseIntro01.html

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