Web Tools Now

I have always been a little cautious with Social Networking for the most part, but with the ability  in this Ning to focus your networking to education people I found it most intriguing.  The group function was what I enjoyed the most.  Listening to questions and discussion of education topics was very helpful.  I can see this being a part of my knowledge toolbox  for teaching.

I really like this Pageflakes thing.  It allows you to have many things up and running at the same time.  I think it would be very useful in a research project for students to have the page set up for them to use with the reference place you want them to look at.

I really like Google Docs it is an easy way to share a document that many people are working on.  I have some ideas on how to use this in the classroom.  I would like to use it this week because my Social Studies class is in the process of creating a Civil War newspaper and it would be great to collaborate with the students adding to the document in real time instead of writing it and then putting it together by cut and paste.  I think this will be something that I will be using in the future.

I really have mixed feelings about You Tube. I did find some good things that I can use in my Social Studies classes. However, filtering through all the junk that is out there was a little time consuming. Also, even on safe search some of the content if you strayed just a little was very inappropriate. I could see using site with the teacher finding content but I would be very concern about letting students search on their own. Teacher Tube was much better with finding content but it was painful slow.

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I have created a podcast which hopefully we will start doing next year at the Lower School. I am going to try to get the 6th graders that do the announcements on Tuesday and Friday to help me create and post a podcast of the announcements twice a week. Here is the 1st podcast that I created to explain the idea of doing the morning announcements at the Lower School on a podcast.

I think there can be some limited use for podcasting in the classroom.  If you find a good pod cast that is clear and concise with good information it would be a good supplemental tool for a subject. I listen to some of the tech teachers  pod casts.  I thought they talk a little too much off of the topic.  Also a little too much failed humor.  I also listen to the Smartboard podcasts.  They were pretty good but those guys were pretty chatty as well.  I did also subscribe to the Nova podcast on PBS and I have been listening to NPR’s “This I Believe” on my Itunes for a while now and enjoy them.  I have thought about how my school can use podcasting and I think next year we will somehow incorporate the podcasting into the students doing morning announcements.  I think the students would enjoy doing it and with all the students having i-pods maybe with their friends on the podcast they would listen to announcements.

I did not like this concept.  I think creating list and goals are a very personal thing.  Not sure I want people seeing my to do lists with my life.  This might be someone else cup of tea but not mine.

I really enjoyed working with the Library Thing.  It is an easy way to search for titles and authors.  I joined and have started my own library with the authors I like.  I can see using this in class by having students research authors for book reports.  I will use this in my personal life to cataloged the books I have read and want to read by reading reviews.

I have used delicious before and really like the capabilities it gives the user.  Being able to use the tagging feature really allows me to narrow my searches more quickly.  My delicious account username is tela_locus.  I can see an application idea for my next year’s social studies classes using the tagging feature.

The program I chose was Toondoo.  It was really cool and fun and I thought of several applications that I could use in the classroom.  However, when I was preparing with another teacher how and what the things the students were going to do in the lab we found some inappropriate material on the site.  But, after looking at the site the next day we decided to go ahead and do the assignment.  Our next problem was the how slow the site loaded.  In Several classes we could not even get the site up and running.  So, I think it is a cool tool but needs a great deal of work on some of the features.  I just think it wasn’t set up for a whole class to access it at one time.  However we finished the assignment and the students thought it was a fun and exciting activity.  The final flaw was that they don’t have a print feature so it was difficult  to  evaluate the student’s work.