Category Archives: Web 2.0

Teaching Writing, Technology, Web 2.0

Zotero

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I am often the last person to hear about the cool tools, but I don’t think I’ve seen Zotero mentioned in any other education blogs.

Zotero is a Firefox extension that helps “you collect, manage, and cite your research sources” within your browser.  Screencast tutorials at the Zotero site help you visualize what that means for your research.  I think students could potentially save a lot of time with Zotero.  It would be great for research papers.  I don’t know if I will need to write any scholarly papers for my ITMA program, but if so, I can see this extension can potentially save me a lot of time.

Zotero Screenshot
Zotero Screenshot

Zotero works for Firefox 2.0 or 3.0, Netscape Navigator 9.0, or Flock 0.9.1 for Windows, Mac, or Linux.  It is free and open source, and lots of good plugins can extend its capabilities with other software, such as Open Office, Microsoft Office, and WordPress.

My worry in using it with my own students is that it would be a learning curve for them.  As I have stated before elsewhere, it has not been my experience that students today are as tech savvy as we give them credit for, and many of them are not patient with tech tools either.

Everything I learned about technology, I learned because I sat down and played with it until I figured out how it worked, but my students do not always approach learning how to use new tools the same way.  I do have a few students I might recommend it to.

Technology, Web 2.0

Why Block?

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Dawn Hogue has a great post on blocking access to Web sites.

When schools block web applications, especially the newer Web 2.0 tools, the opportunity to use and teach how to use these tools is blocked as well. What would be better than simply blocking everything would be to acknowledge that there are some risks associated with accessing information on the Internet and in creating an online presence and teach students how to be responsible Web content generators.

Amen!

I checked out her resources page and imagine it will take me some time to sift through all the great stuff.

Blogging, Technology, Web 2.0, Wikis

Thinking Out Loud

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At my school, I am often sought out for technology ideas. For instance, my school is really good about publicizing the things I do with blogs and wikis. When The Atlanta Jewish Times called the school looking to speak with educators about their use of technology, my colleagues made sure the reporter, Suzi Brozman, talked to me. They are really supportive of what I do with technology, and they seem really interested in the applications available. My colleagues, in short, see me as a leader in integrating technology into the classroom. But I’m not nearly doing enough. So much more could be done! A cursory glance at the things Lisa Huff (no relation — I don’t think!) is doing with her students was enough to tell me that. I was quite humbled by what I saw — saving and sharing her posts in Google Reader left and right. Here is what I want to do next year:

  • More wikis. Some ideas: wikis for portfolios, wikis for collaborative learning, wikis for teaching.
  • Blogging. I would like my students to have individual blogs for reflective writing. I think having a student blog where I publish their work is not really accomplishing all that I want to accomplish.
  • Podcasting. You really should hear my students talk. I tried to talk them into letting me record their Socratic seminar on the deaths of Romeo and Juliet, but they knew I’d post it here, and they weren’t ready for that. It’s a shame because it was a great discussion. They debated the issue for well over an hour! I like what Lisa Huff is doing with VoiceThread, a tool I was introduced to at a conference in November and still haven’t experimented with.

I find myself feeling so excited about these potential ideas that I want to sit down and plan it all out, which is crazy because I’m not really sure what I’ll be teaching yet (for one thing), and I still have seven weeks this year. I know what you’re thinking. Go ahead and try some things. Better late than never, right? Well, I just might. My ninth graders will be studying poetry and short stories soon (May), and I see some potential there. I think the student blogs will need to wait for next year, but perhaps I can do a poetry project using wikis and VoiceThread and/or SlideShare.

It didn’t occur to me until I saw Lisa discussing it in her blog that the fact that students could display their finished work through these types of online portfolios might be the “something extra” that makes them attractive to colleges and employers — a pretty persuasive argument for, as we say down here, getting off the stick and making it happen.

Movies in English Class, Reflection, Web 2.0

Week in Reflection: March 10-14, 2008

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This week, one of my ninth grade classes finished The Catcher and the Rye, and we began discussing it in class.  We also studied adjective and adverb phrases.  The students really enjoyed the discussion of the novel, and I think they liked the book a great deal.  That novel always seems to be popular, especially with boys.  It brings up a good point.  A lot of what we read in school isn’t necessarily appealing to boys.  I think my male students enjoyed Romeo and Juliet and The Odyssey.  I really do try to think about how to draw boys in when we study literature.  The discussions this week went very well.

My tenth grade writing students watched The Freedom Writers.  I know a lot of people don’t like the movie, but I do, and the students were rapt.  We had a really good, insightful discussion about the movie on Friday.  One student in particular really seemed to be able to understand the motivations of Erin Gruwell’s department head.  He said he was playing “devil’s advocate,” but his points were all well taken — why shouldn’t the students move on to a new teacher?  Wouldn’t that be the ultimate test of how ready they were?  Is it really good to have the same teacher all four years?  He also wondered about the issue of seniority.  Was Gruwell getting a “promotion”?  The department head certainly considered it to be one.  Laying aside the assertion that she deserved one (I think she did great work), she had only been teaching two years.  Another issue that concerned the students was the practicality of what Gruwell did — in the movie, her marriage falls apart due to neglect on her part, and she has to take two extra jobs to pay for what her students need.  My students saw the good that resulted from these choices, but they were, I think, right to question the cost.  I thought the students had some really good insights into what they were seeing.

My seniors finished Death of a Salesman.  I wasn’t sure how they would like it, but I think discussing how it is the story of many people today really hooked them, which isn’t terribly easy to do with seniors at this time of year.  I am really excited about this unit, so it could be that my own enthusiasm showed.  I also spent a lot of time planning it — thinking of questions for discussion, assessments, etc. — and that always pays off.  It was remarked by someone who shall remain anonymous that I had put a lot of work into the unit, and I think the insinuation was that given the climate (seniors just ready to graduate and move on with the next stage of life), I probably wasted my time.  I don’t think so.  I think we have to work even harder as teachers to engage students when they are distracted by this future that’s just out of their reach.  They can’t help their feelings — and I had the same ones when I was a senior.  It’s a really exciting time.  I envy them getting to go off to college for the first time, learning so much, figuring out who they are.  I had a great college experience, and I wish I could do it again.

I obtained permission from one of my ninth grade classes to post their writing at a blog I have admittedly only occasionally used for student writing.  The last posts are reflections of the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn done a year ago.  The writing I will be posting is collected from creative writing diaries from characters in Romeo and Juliet.  I plan to post one diary entry a day beginning on Tuesday.  If you are interested in reading them, you might want to pop over to the Room 303 Blog and subscribe to our RSS feed.  I don’t have e-mail subscription set up on that blog.

I have been approached to do a blogging project with a teacher in Hawaii, and I am really interested.  I would like my students to have their own blogs for written reflection, but sometimes I feel like I should have established that early on, and how do you do that?  I should think it would be great for interaction, discussion, exploration, and reflection.  Does anyone know if I can do that with Moodle?  I hesitate to put students in the position of public reflection if they feel uncomfortable about it, but if we can do it just within our community, I don’t think there would be a problem.

Blogging, Web 2.0

Google Reader

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I have been using Bloglines to keep up with my RSS feeds for as long as I can remember.  I decided to play around with Google Reader today to see if I liked it better, and I have to say I liked it a lot better.

I like the way Google Reader enables me to click on a feed and see all the posts in that feed, even if I have already read them.  In Bloglines, I had to go through an extra step (selecting from the drop-down menu next to “Display items with the last x”) to view feeds I had already read, and even then, I couldn’t figure out how to review just one feed instead of all the feeds in a folder, which I frankly didn’t want to do.

My feed subscriptions all imported properly in the folders where they were on Bloglines.  Navigating was a snap.  The look was pleasing to the eye — it seems like a small thing, but the display looked so much nicer.  For example, pictures, embedded audio, embedded video, and the like all seemed to “behave” better in Google Reader.  Subscribing to new feeds and organizing them into folders was easy.  If I click on a feed to read the post on its blog, it opens in a new tab in Firefox.  This is nice because in Bloglines I had to right-click (control-click) on the feed, select “Open in New Tab,” and then I could look at the feed.  If I didn’t take this step and opened feeds in same window, then hit the back button to go back to Bloglines, I became confused about which feeds I had read already and often missed some I hadn’t read yet.  I always found this very frustrating.

I like the shared and starred items features.  The discover feature is nice, too.  It’s fun to be able to keep up with how many subscribers follow a feed, and a new feature in Google Reader enables users to do this; however, in Bloglines, you can also see the names of the public subscribers, which was nice.

Check out this comparison of Bloglines Beta and Google Reader for more information.  I should point out I was not using Bloglines Beta, but rather the older version of Bloglines.  I think Bloglines Beta has more features.  I’m not sure Bloglines compares as well with Google Reader as Bloglines Beta does.

Delicious and Diigo, Teaching Literature, Technology, Web 2.0

Book Glutton

Book Glutton might be my new favorite website (via Classical Bookworm).  Here’s a demonstration:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/TkCoknkwua4" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I can see all kinds of exciting potential for literature studies.  Literature circles would be great on Book Glutton!  I love the proximity chat and annotation features.  Caveats: the site is still in beta, and according to Sylvia (Classical Bookworm), only works in Firefox (though I admit I didn’t test the site in other browsers, nor could I find information on the site that states the site doesn’t work in other browsers — still, I thought it prudent to pass the warning along).

The first thing I wanted to do was dive in and form a reading group with my students.  Social reading networks.  I love Web 2.0.

Professional Development, Web 2.0, Wikis

UbD Educators: Suggestions?

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I have mentioned before that the UbD Educators wiki has grown quiet.  I think there may be two reasons for this:

  • We’re all busy educators who have difficulty finding the time to create, post, and/or comment on others’ posted UbD units.
  • We’re not getting what we need out of the wiki.

It’s not in my power to alleviate the first problem, and believe me, I hear you there.  However, the second problem is much easier to address.  The wiki is only as good as we make it.  If you need a feature that the wiki doesn’t have, add it.  If you have trouble keeping up with new pages and discussions, try subscribing to the site’s various RSS feeds (you can keep up with all changes or just changes to one page).  If you want to make a change, but you aren’t sure, ask the wiki members about it on the Suggestions page.  the majority of the wiki’s members have not yet contributed either unit plans or discussions.  I want to hear your voice!  I don’t mind lurkers, but we have the potential to make this wiki a huge repository of ideas and discussion about UbD, and we can only do that through teacher contributions.

Teaching Literature, Web 2.0

Live Theater: Romeo and Juliet at the New American Shakespeare Tavern

J.C. Long and Veronika Duerr as Romeo and JulietI took our ninth grade class to the New American Shakespeare Tavern to see a production of Romeo and Juliet today. My students were well-behaved, which is always a concern for every teacher on a field trip. We all really enjoyed the production. As a long-time fan of the Georgia Renaissance Festival, I am always excited to see GARF performers at the Tavern. J.C. Long, who has played with the musical group the Lost Boys, played the part of Romeo, and he was excellent. Nicholas Faircloth as Mercutio was also brilliant. In fact, the whole cast was wonderful; if you are ever in Atlanta, you really must try to catch a production at the Tavern.

One of the things my students said they liked about the theater experience was the interactivity. The actors frequently played off audience members, which made us all feel like a part of the show. Of course, I know it is often said an audience is a critical part of a successful show, but I’m not sure I always feel so necessary when I’m in an audience. Actors at the Tavern have a way of making you feel as if you are necessary.

This evening as I was talking with my husband, I realized I had made a connection between Web 2.0 and theater. I forgot to keep one of the handy cast lists that the Tavern places on every third seat or so, and I was researching the names of the cast members online. I found the Tavern’s MySpace page as well as those of some of the cast. I added some of them as friends. In his reply to my friend-request message, J.C. Long complimented my students’ engagement and enthusiasm, and I thought, when else have we been able to take down walls like those between actors and audience? Five years ago, I never could have imagined I could see a production, find one of the actors on a social network, and personally compliment him on his performance…. AND receive a personal reply.

It’s an exciting time to be alive, isn’t it?