Wikis (Thing 7)

Wiki Wiki
Originally uploaded by elkit

(In my previous post (not really thing 7) I discussed how I would like to use a wiki in my classroom - and in another previous post (wordle, polldaddy and bubbl, oh my!), I linked to my bubbl map on that same topic. So this post is just the rest of thing 7 - observations from my exploration of other wikis)

Schools in the Past was very interesting, and seems like the beginning of a great idea - and I liked how it involved the parents, grandparents, and other people directly. It was a pretty simple wiki with just the one page, kindof bland ... I would have liked to see other pages with perhaps student-created material (maybe have the students draw what they think schools in the past might have looked like?). Maybe some students could even take home a flip camera/vado and interview their grandparents then post that video clip. I would also have added some visuals (photos of old schools). As far as learning outcome, I didnt' see anything that shows that the student applied what they had learned - or even that they had read what was posted.

I loved the Kindergarten Counting Book. I would have liked to see a byline for more of the photos, just to show that multiple children participated ... and the OCD part of me would have liked it if all of the photos were the same size :-) I also would have either added content to the pages tabbed at the top, or removed the tabs. But I think the idea is great and may even "borrow" it :-) But I think the idea might be better suited to another format (perhaps bookr? or a slideshow? maybe even a voicethread?) that could then be posted to a wiki rather than making it the only content on the wiki.

The third wiki that I visited was Code Blue - I think this is a fantastic job. You can tell that the students put a lot into it, it's obvious that they learned about different diseases from reading the patient pages. Looking at the hospital/doctor info pages it also looks like they had a lot of fun and were creative. I like the list of links on the front page, as well. They did a good job finding different resources. Finally, I enjoyed the hospital "signs" and other visuals on the pages - enough to make it interesting but not so much that it detracted from the information. Kudos to mscofino and her students! I explored some of her other wikis, as well, (like this one on Native Americans) and was quite impressed :-)

Stone Mountain Voice Thread

I'm trying to figure out why the volume is so low - I had the mic volume at it's highest ... but you can barely hear me and sometimes can't hear Chuck's comments at all ...

YouTube and TeacherTube (Thing 14)

I use YouTube a lot when teaching college courses or doing inservice presentations on Autism - there are a ton of great videos out there (manyby people who have Autism), describing and explaining the disorder. Some of my favorites are:
A Way of Describing Autism
If You Can Do X, Why Can't You Do Y?
About Being Considered Retarded & In My Language
My Experience With Autism

I also sometimes upload videos of things that my class has done so that I can embed them in my blog or on my class webpage (in the future - my class wiki!) such as when we sang This Land is Your Land on the morning announcements.

For use in my class, there are videos of public places that I can use to "prime" my kids before going on a CBI or field trip. There are also social story videos like this one and this one that I can show. And my students love this phonics video and I can't wait to use this one on symmetry.

Usually, for sharing things with parents of my students, I use TeacherTube since I can access it from school. (And of course now, I will embed the videos in my wiki).

I also watch videos from members of my online PLN that they have posted in their blog through youtube and teachertube. One that I really enjoyed (though not educational, it's nice to know I'm not alone in my struggles lol) was this one by Daniel Dage at The Life That Chose Me.

And, just for fun, here is my current all-time favorite video on YouTube :-) Enjoy!

My first VoiceThread (Thing 13 stretch)

I'm trying to figure out why the volume is so low - I had the mic volume at it's highest ... but you can barely hear me and sometimes can't hear the kids' comments at all ...

This summer, I'm taking each of my students to do one fun activity - either alone or with one other student. (Actually because I'm doing private therapy with Seth and Sam, two of my kiddos, they get to go to more than just one fun place - because that way I can *sneak* lots of communication and academic practice in without them knowing that they're working). Anyway, I was thinking - a voicethread would be a fabulous way for them to share memories of their fun when school starts back! So I made this voicethread of the trip Sam, Seth and I took to White Water last week. And when they come back over (Tuesday), I'll have them add their comments!

Tomorrow, I'm taking another student to Stone Mountain and plan on doing the same thing with him, and with all of the rest of my students after each "playdate"! Stay tuned!!!

VoiceThread (Thing 13)

The first time I ever heard of voicethreads was at the CEC convention in 2008 in Boston. Kate at Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs "live blogged" that session and has some excellent ideas on her post and in the comments. She also has a great post on how VoiceThread is helpful for parents of children in special education classes. My students, for example, can't go home and tell mom/dad/whoever about what they did in school that day. But I can post a voicethread (or video) to my class wiki and the parents can then see it. I can only imagine what it must be like to have no idea of what your child does all day at school. I mean, even the kid who answers "nothing" every time you asked what they did that day will occassionally give you a little more detail. I think that Voice Threads would be a great way to collaborate with parents - let them see AND COMMENT on what their child is doing! How wonderful would it be to go back to the voice thread the next day and let some of my students listen to their parents (or Uncle Fred miles away in California) commenting on their work?

Kate also posts voicethreads of activities -such as the Princess Bride unit, snow activity, and texture lesson - that she does with her high school class of students with severe and multiple disabilities. (Can you tell that hers is one of my favorite blogs? lol) I think this is an awesome way to collaborate with other teachers!! Especially in classrooms where we do so many "nontraditional" activities, it helps so much to see ideas that others have come up with.

For general education classes, Leila Weir blogs at edutopia that Bill Ferritter (a 6th grade LA and SS teacher) says he is able to get more students to participate by using voice threads in his class, and is able to get students to write about things they normally wouldn't.

I'm excited about voicethreads and can't wait to start using them on my class wiki!

Wordle, Polldaddy, Bubbl - oh my! (Thing 12)

Probably the most obviously useful of the web2.0
tool choices to explore for Thing 12 (to me)
was bookr. I could use this to make books about
content (as above), to create personalized social
stories for my kids, to have them create books
about their experiences - the ideas are seemingly
endless.  A very simple, instant-gratification
way to publish simple books online - I love it!


I put the URL of my 23 things blog into wordle
and created the above image -pretty cool!
Nothing immediately comes to mind about how to
use in in myclassroom (because my students cannot
read), but I can think of several applications
to a general education class.  The first thing
that I thought of was to introduce a new topic -
create a wordle with different words relating
to that topic and see if the students can guess
what the topic is.  Similarly,use it to practice
finding the "main idea" or other inferencing
activities. Sort of the reverse of that, you
could assign a topic and have students create
a wordle of words related to the topic, as well.


I have, on several occassions, "meant to"
check out bubbl.us but it's one of those
things I never got around to (like so many
things lol).  I am always drawing mind maps
about something (ever since my ADD coach
recommended it andI realized what a
sanity saving technique it can be!) and,
I think Bubbl.us will now get lots of use
because it is SOeasy! I assumed I would
need a long stretch of time to sit down
and figure itout, but I was able to create
an account, log in and then create
the mind-map above (on ways I can use a
classroom wiki) in less than 15 minutes.
I think it would be a great tool to allow
students to brainstorm (similar to inspiration)
for a paper or project.  Plus,you can
share access with your "friends" so that
others can have input.  For example, if
anyone reading this has ideas for how I
could use my wiki, please add them to my map!

More on being technologically illiterate teachers (Thing 5b)

I found this post from Pat at Successful Teaching (linking to this post from Bill Ferriter) to be an interesting extension of the post from the Fisch Bowl that was one of our choices to read for an earlier "thing". I particularly loved Pat's analogy comparing computers to automobiles: both in that we need to teach students how to use them responsibly rather than just saying "the kids don't use the internet appropriately so we'll just not let them use it"

By learning how to use the tools and ways it can improve our lives, we can help the students use them responsibly too. I believe that when the automobile first came out, that society frowned on the use of them when young people used them irresponsibly. Then eventually we started to teach our young people how to drive responsibly (Driver’s Education classes came about). The automobile wasn’t going to go away and neither is technology.

and here:

When educators refuse to learn digital forums for communication and growth, it is like showing up at school today with a horse and buggy because you refuse to learn how to drive. The world is constantly changing and educators need to be able to look at the big picture and see the changes that are coming. We need to be the “go to” people for our students and not the “left behind” people.

From Bill's blog post, I was amazed to find that the Met Life Survey of the American Teacher found that:

To be specific, less than one out of every three teachers (28%) report having read or written a blog about teaching even as blogs become an increasingly common forum for conversation and resource sharing between experts in every field. Making matters worse, less than two in ten (15%) teachers have participated in online communities or social networking sites like Tapped In, Ning or Facebook.

While principal responses to the same questions were---surprisingly---higher, less than half of our leaders (42%) are reading and learning from blogs and less than one quarter (22%) are participants in online communities.

I guess that's why the 23 things course exists, to try to get teachers involved in using technology so that they can discover how useful and vital it is to our profession, as well as to see that it's not as scary and difficult as people seem to think.

Most of the students in my class function below the kindergarten level cognitively, so the way that I use web2.0 tools in my classroom differs from the "norm". My students don't research, they don't write papers or responses to literature, they really don't create much "tangible" work without significant assistance. I can't imagine if I were teaching a literature class, or a science or history class, especially at the high school level and *not* incorporating web2.0 into my teaching repertoire - to an extreme degree! There are so many resources out there and so many opportunities that allow students to collaborate with each other in ways that weren't possible when I was in school - and I truly feel like witholding those opportunities is doing the students a great disservice. Yes, students need to know how to write "traditional" papers - but even those are becoming less important. In college and beyond (in the "real world"), things are done more and more on the computer. The student who can write an amazing term paper but doesn't know how to participate in an online community (for example, ULearn or WebCT) is not going to do well in many college courses. I know that for some of the undergrad and graduate level courses that I and my colleagues teach, participation in the online portion of the course (even though it's not an online-course per se) counts as much as class participation, written papers, and tests.

Beyond college, this article from BusinessWeek points out, web2.0 is infiltrating the corporate world. I love the quote at the end of the article:

It may turn out that keeping up with the slick technology won't be the most important thing to master. Corporate folks accustomed to clear lines of authority may have to tolerate bottom-up Web 2.0 technologies in order to help their employees reap the potential productivity gains. After all, notes Dave Girouard, vice-president in charge of Google Inc.'s (GOOG ) enterprise division, which sells search and other technology to corporations: "This isn't people fooling around. It's people trying to do their jobs better."

I think that, similarly, *teachers* who are accustomed to clear lines of authority may have to tolerate bottom-up Web 2.0 technologies in order to help our *students* reap the potential productivity gains!