National Educational Computing Conference

So inspiring! The National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) in D.C. put on by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) was such a great learning experience. This was my first time at their conference and I was delighted with the presentations. Those that stood out for me were the ones by Vickie Davis on DIIGO, by Will Richardson on connective learning and Steve Hardagon on Ning and Learn Central.

In Steve's presentation he also elaborated on the new feature of Elluminate through with educators can have a free account which will allow them to have a virtual room for private sessions of up to 3 people and public sessions with a much larger number of people. I have attended many webinars in Elluminate and always wished I could make use of this tool. Elluminate also offers free training sessions. Definitely something to check out!

Review of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other ...

The updates in Will Richardson's 2nd edition of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms provide a lot of new information. Simply comparing the table of contents of the 2nd edition with that of the first (as I did), one might not appreciate all the updates contained in the newer edition

Richardson has now explored and explained the intricacies of social bookmarking tools such as Delicious and Diigo as well as visualization tools such as Flickr. He has also updated the chapters on weblogs and podcasting to reflect recent developments.

His book continues to be a stellar choice for teachers who want to enhance their teaching by utilizing web 2.0 tools to create more interactive learning environments for their students and it is rumored that a 3rd edition will be due out soon. Can't wait!

Wordle

This image was created with Wordle.  I can see many classroom applications for creating word images.  This program allows you to print out your designs, use them in a blog or save them in Wordle.   The Wordle image on the left  contains the names of teachers that I worked with recently and from whom i learned quite a bit particularly about literacy for very young learners.

Joe Dale has provided a quick Slide Share of directions for using Wordle. (This is best seen full screen by clicking the tiny screen at the bottom).  Nik Peachey has also posted some intriguing  ideas on how to use Wordle for English language learners.  One tip that will help you use phrases is to join them with a tilde in between.

Another tip is that if you want the size wordle you see here you need to take a screen shot of your creation, turn it into a jpg. picture through a program like Paint and then use the jpg. to upload to your blog.

Literacy and Web 2.0

www.wordle.net

I am just finishing teaching a course on writing in multicultural communities for teachers in Prince George's County, Maryland.  I've posted most of the lesson plans for the course in the sidebar of this blog in the same spirit of sharing that I have experienced through online courses in the Electronic Village Online, through contacts with other webheads, and through edubloggers such as Larry Ferlazzo, Nik Peachey and Vicki Davis.  I hope that some of the ideas in these plans will facilitate someone else's planning by serving as a jumping off point for their own creativity.  We all benefit from George Siemen's concept of connectivism which defines learning as networking and I'm hoping that some of the links in these plans will contribute to others' developing and everchanging networks.

Magazine Cover with Flickr Photo

My creation
Originally uploaded by Anciana

As part of the Images4Education course that I am taking through EVO2009, I am discovering more and more used for photos on Flickr. At the BigHugeLabs site you can create so many things with photos. I used one of my own photos to create the magazine cover on the right. You can also use photos to create maps, movie posters, puzzles, and many other items.

The creation of all of these items is free as long as you keep them in cyberspace but you can also pay to print them.

Flickr can have many pedagogical uses for language development. One suggestions that I learned in the Images4Education course are creating poems or paragraphs in the comment section of a photo. Some topics for thought are "where I'm from", "where I want to be"and "what my dinner table looks like".

Baby Joey(Sugar Glider)

Baby Joey(Sugar Glider)
Originally uploaded by Viper76

I'm playing aroud with Flickr to see how it could be used for language teaching. I found this picture when I searched for baby animals. Above the picture it said Blog this. I like that the attribution shows up directly below the picture.

Cute, aren't they!

Uh oh. While the attribution shows up fine when I am writing the post, it seems to get too tiny to view when I publish the post. I'll have to see if there is some way to fix that.

Notes Feature of Flickr

Jane Goodall's Camp
Originally uploaded by lewiselementary

I'm trying out a feature of Flickr that I just learned about in the Images4Education course of EVO. I had never noticed before that above many photos is a feature called Add Note. After you click on it, you can click on whatever item in the picture you want and add a note (a label, description, etc.).

This could be an excellent feature to use for second language teaching. I've posted an example here called Jane Goodall's Camp. The notes will not show up here in my blog, but if you click on the picture, you will see the photo with all its notes.

It seems to me that only the owner of the image can add notes, but I'm not sure about that.

Snowball Effect

Anyone who has ever made a snowman knows that you start with a small snowball. As you keep rolling it in the snow, it gets bigger and bigger until you have a "snowball" big enough to use for one of the parts of your snowman. This gradual growth of the tiny snowball into a much grander one is the "snowball effect." That is what I am experiencing this semester with my students.

This semester I started teaching a face to face class through McDaniel College for teachers in Prince George's County, Maryland. This is a face-to face class. We meet at Green Belt Middle School. I had never taught a class before where everyone had their own laptop and we had quite a time getting everyone on the Internet, especially those with Apple computers. (It's so much easier to work in a computer lab!) However, with the help of the IT person, Ms. Mitchell; the library media specialist, Ms. Butler; and Ms. Hammond, the Social Studies teacher at the school, we are slowly but surely getting everyone online through their own laptop computers.

The teachers in the class have all started their own blogs and I can feel the snowball effect as more and more of them are beginning to see the possibilities for using web 2.0 tools in their own classroom.

In order to provide a permanent record of the Internet assignments that we are doing, I've decided to create Googledocs and link to them in the sidebar under lesson plans. That way the students can have an easy way to refer back to what we did in class and to continue learning on their own.