This is a slideshow of 10 different examples of a cow. I would play the slideshow for my students (without the captions - distracting!) and as each picture displayed, I would ask a student "What is it?" or "What does a cow say?", "Where do cows live?", "What do we get from cows?" (depending on the level of the student). I would then add 10 pictures of another animal (say, a pig) in with the cows, then a third animal - until I had 10 different animals with 10 pictures each (100 photos) in random order. We would practice until the students could name all 10 animals, then I would introduce another set of vocabulary words and pictures :-)
With that said, I usually don't use slide or rockyou to do the slideshows that I use in class, I stick to plain ol' powerpoint because then I can have the photo take up the entire screen with no distracting elements. I usually use slide.com for informal slideshows to post to my blog - when I want it to look more "professional", I use flickr slidr.
I really don't know how to reflect on my flickr experience lol - I've been addicted to flickr for over 3 years ...
I do use flickr frequently in class. My students have lots of basic communication goals - identifying pictures of common objects, animals, foods, actions, classmates, etc. Here are some activities that we do in my class using flickr:
we look at pictures of things we have done as a class and talk about it (working on communication, retelling past events, etc.)
we look at multiple pictures representing our vocabulary words for that week (ex: if we are doing an animal unit, we may have 10 different animals for the week - so we will watch a slideshow with 100 pictures (1o different pictures of each of the 10 animals) and the students have to tell me which animal is pictured)
I may show a slideshow of pictures representing different actions and students have to produce a sentence (ex: he is jumping) about the picture
I use Multicolr Search Lab to find pictures in different colors and have students identify the colors
I search for pictures of letters or numbers and have students identify them
Basically, I use flickr in place of flashcards. The images are much larger, photos are more realistic than most flashcard pictures, and there are practically endless examples of each thing I need a picture of! Because students with autism frequently have trouble generalizing, showing them multiple examples of the same thing is important. Using flickr to create slideshows saves me from having to purchase or make 10 different sets of flashcards just to get 10 different examples of a cow. Plus I can take my own photos (of classmates, objects in the classroom, places in the school, teachers, etc.) and incorporate those as well!
I also use flickr frequently to share what we're doing in class with parents. I give my students' parents my flickr web address so that they can look at the pictures that I take throughout the year. Then at the end of the year, I use Qoop (a flickr partner) to create photo books for each student. Here is a slideshow of the photos in this past year's photobook. (btw, I do have the parents' permission to post the photos on my blog)
Strange timing, but I got an email through flickr yesterday regarding creative commons! Most of my public flickr images are Creative Commons, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike ... because, frankly, if someone wants to use my pictures I'm flattered - but I don't want them to make money off of them (especially since I'm not making any money off of them lol). Here's the email: (btw, the subject of the email is "Why CC is bad")
Hello, I just want to send you a message on why CC photos are bad.
People can use your photos without paying to use them, all they have to do is give you credit. They do not even have to notify you.
now if it was not CC, you probably would have been paid about 100 bucks for this usage. Also, with you having your photos marked as CC, you are undermining the concert photography industry as sites like this would rather use a free photo rather than pay a professional for it.
anyways, hope this is a eye opener.
(end of email) Now - like I said before, I don't mind that my photo was used - I'm flattered! And if it weren't for CC, I probably would NOT have made $100 off of the pic, they would more likely have found someone else's photo to use ... then I would still not have the money and no one would have seen my photo, either ... so my wallet and head would be the same size, and at least with CC I get to have a big head :-) I actually enjoy going to flickr's stats page and seeing all of the places where my photos are being used - in my opinion, my photography skills can be legitimized by the fact that someone felt my picture was good enough to use, even if they didn't pay me for it. Now if I were a professional photographer and my livelyhood depended on getting paid for my photos, that would be a different story! I would obviously reserve all rights in that case. And I do reserve all rights on a select few of my photos, just in case I decide to try to sell them at some point.
On another note, I do sometimes use material from the web when teaching. People with autism often have difficulty generalizing - so a generic picture of a restaurant has much less meaning to them than a photograph of the particular McDonalds that we are going to be visiting. I've gotten kicked out of a Publix before for taking photos of items on the shelves (I have since learned that if I call ahead and explain what I will be using the photos for, they are happy to oblige) so I have to find photos of specific brands of items to create picture shopping lists when we go on CBI trips. And I find lots of pictures of environmental print to use during reading lessons.
One thing that I have run into regarding fair use/copyright involves Boardmaker pictures and files. Boardmaker is a software program used by almost every special education teacher in the world - and lots of teaching materials that I (and others) create use Boardmaker pictures. I have seen some teachers save the boardmaker files as a PDF then upload them to the web but I am hesitant to do that, because the images are copyrighted. If I upload it as a boardmaker file, then at least anyone who downloads it also has to own the software to open the file. For now, I stick to uploading my boardmaker files to Adapted Learning the online sharing site that Mayer Johnson (the company who makes Boardmaker) has created.
Here is an example of a wiki created by a special education class about a CBI trip to the grocery store. I LOVED this!!! I was kindof stuck when thinking about how my students could create a wiki - all of the usual ideas (class discussion, sharing notes, etc.) don't really apply to my kiddos. But we can certain take pictures and share our CBI trip adventures with parents! Or other activities we do in class! My mind is now reeling with brilliant ideas of how I can use a wiki with my students.
I had planned on creating a wiki for my class - one with information for parents, basically taking the info from my class website and putting it in wiki form, because updating and adding new information (like the videos I mentioned in a previous post, demonstrating how to do homework activities) would be so much easier than with a traditional website (not to mention that Barrow County Schools won't let me link my webpage to the school's webpage lol). But then adding in the student participation element brings a whole new level of excitement :-)
I'll be back later (probably tomorrow) to do the actual Thing 7, but I wanted to look for at least one wiki created by special education students and there wasn't one on Madame O's list of links :-)
My main problem with diggo (and delicious) is that I am too OCD lol. I try to keep my tags to a minimum because I still fall into the habit of thinking of tags as "folders" and I want everything to fit neatly into a folder. I'm not a good tagger at all - not on flickr, not on diggo, not on my blog, etc.
Here's a story to illustrate: Let's say I find a cool web-tech website/blog post/whatever. I tag it with web2.0. Now if this particular website is specifically about plurk, I should tag it with "plurk", right? But in my mind, the conversation goes like this: "But there are a couple of other sites that I've bookmarked that mention plurk - so I guess I should go back and add a plurk tag to those - but they also talk about twitter, so I should tag it with twitter too ... but then that meas I'll have to go through ALL of my links tagged with web2.0 and tag them with whatever specific tool they mention" then I look and see that I have hundreds of sites tagged web2.0 "Geez - that's gonna take FOREVER! And then, I guess I'll also have to see if any of my inks tagged with productivity mention plurk, twitter, etc. - oh and those should really be tagged with GTD if they mention that! And I think there's one somewhere about jott - I should see if any others need that tag too" etc. etc. - and because in my brain, EVERYTHING is all or nothing (no way could I tag just that one website that started all of this with "plurk" without tagging ALL of them!), I end up just tagging it with web2.0 because I have to be at work in the morning and don't have hours and hours to go through and retag all of my bookmarks.
I also try to only keep sites that I refer back to in my diggo and delilcious accounts (I will admit that I usually save to deicious unless I'm at school where it's blocked - then I just import my delicious links to diggo periodically). Sites that I find interesting and may want to come back to when I have time, I usually just add to my google bookmarks - then if I find I'm going back to it frequently, I will add it to delicious/diggo. And I don't often bookmark blog posts, I will star them in google reader ...
In other words, I guess I don't really use diggo as a "social bookmarking" tool like it's meant to be used, but more as a "personal bookmark organization" tool - which I should change now :-) Which is partially why I'm taking this course. I may have to increase my zoloft, but I'll try to be a better tagger and share more bookmarks that I find interesting :-) Perhaps I should use google bookmarks to handle and organize the frequently used bookmarks I've been saving in delicious and diggo and start saving/sharing the ones I've been putting in google bookmarks ... that might make more sense :-)
And/or - I could use lists as "folders" ... hmm... hadn't thought of that one ...
So here is the link to my diggo bookmarks - which I've just looked at and there are several untagged items - my delicious site is much better organized It's a good thing it's summer - my diggo may be getting an overhaul lol
As I mentioned in a previous post, I tend to get lost in the blogosphere when reading my RSS feeds - I open links in new tabs as I come to something that seems interesting, and before I know it I have 20+ tabs opened - and in each of those tabs are more links that I open ... etc. etc. etc. ADD is not my friend when reading blogs :-)
When I first started using Google Reader, I would literally stay up all night reading through blogs in each of the categories I have set (political, friends/family, education, ADD, productivity/lifehacks, autism, and humor/fun). Now I just have a set hour each night - I actually have to set a timer - devoted to it. I've become much more adept at skimming and skipping posts, which helped a ton ... When the hour is up, any tabs I have opened from links, I just bookmark to read later. Then when I have free time (like during that 6.5 hour class I'm taking every Monday this summer) I surf through them. It's much less information overload and I'm better able to process what I'm reading.
I've found that the personal blogs of friends and family are the quickest - they're usually just updates, pictures of kids, etc. - so I do that first. Then I skim through the autism blogs (blogs of parents of kids with autism) - again, mainly updates, stories, anectdotes. Those two plus the humor/fun things take about 15 minutes and not a lot of brain power lol. I've weeded out my political blogs because most of them link to each other and say similar things, so those plus the ADD and productivity blogs take me about another 15 minutes, which leaves 30 minutes for the education blogs - the ones that lead to linky-ville and churning brain gears :-)
I used to have lot of news feeds in my RSS reader as well, but I now only have one for autism-related news. Anything else I will either find out in my political blogs or rely on my husband to fill me in on (and the big stuff shows up all over plurk and facebook too - like Michael Jackson's death).
Pat writes her response to another blog post about teaching being a calling and not a job. I completely agree with Pat's points, I'm not so sure about some of the points that Tom makes.
Like Pat expressed, I also find that whenever someone finds out what I do, I frequently hear "it takes a special person to do what you do" - and I as I said in a comment to Pat's blog - I think it takes a special person to come fix my toilet after my husband clogs it up, too! I think that it takes a special kind of person to do any job ... and particularly, people say "I could never do what you do" - well I probably couldn't do what they do either! Especially general education teachers - I have very little patience for "typical" kids who KNOW BETTER lol. At least when one of my students misbehaves, it is often out of a lack of understanding or an inability to communicate or frustration ... and I'm pretty sure they didn't sit at their desk and devise a plan of how to do it and not get caught, etc. It is SO much easier to forgive and be patient when I know it's unintentional (which is why, when one of my students looks at me, smiles, then pushes a desk or shelf over and laughs, I have a completely different response than when they push it over in a moment of utter frustration at not being able to communicate something).
Now - on to Tom's point about teaching not being a calling, just being a job. I think that, yes, teaching is a job -a career. And I don't think teachers should be *expected* to make all of the sacrifices that many of us make, I don't think we should be martyrs, or be nailed to a cross. However, I think that many jobs can be considered "callings" without making professionals who do those jobs martyrs. And I don't necessarily think that all teachers were called to teach. There are plenty in our profession who are only here for the summers off or because the classes for an education major were considered "easy As". And you can tell who those teachers are pretty quickly. Then there are the ones who were called to teach, who do feel that they are doing more than just putting in their time and doing a "job". I think if you get beyond the religious connotations of the word "calling", and just look at it as a "strong inner impulse", I certainly am called to teach!
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