This post is for those students who are not able to make it to class today. First, a warning! If you can make it to class today, I think it will be much to your advantage. Usually when people have trouble the first few weeks in class, it’s because they didn’t come the first day and are then confused about how the online class works.
But, for those who couldn’t make it, here is a Voicethread presentation explaining everything we talked about. It is long … much longer than they will normally be each week. That’s because there was a lot to talk about and I needed to show you how to use Voicethread, how to navigate my website, how to do the first couple of assignments, etc. So please pull up some lunch or dinner and view the whole thing. It will make the rest of the semester go much easier!
If you are enrolled in IPT 286 with Rick West for Fall, 2010, then you have found the right place! This will be our class website. On the right you will find links to websites we’ll use as a class, as well as your peers’ blogs. You’ll also recent updates from your peers to this blog through comments, or to our Diigo group. Up above, you’ll find links to the assignments and the syllabus materials.
Remember that for the wiki assignment you need to make TWO contributions:
1. Contribute your lesson plan and artifact and
2. Contribute the best blog resource that you followed in your Google Reader this semester and why you liked it in one sentence. This needs to be a BLOG that you subscribed to with an RSS feed, not a website that you found because someone recommended it to you.
These need to be put in two different places on the wiki. The following screen capture shows you the Language Arts page where there are two links: the first is for the lesson plan and the second is for the blog resource. The other subjects are similar.
Note: Make sure to post on your blog links to both your wiki contributions so I can give you credit! These need to be links to the pages you created on the Wiki, not to the the things themselves (for example, not to the blog resource itself). This is so I can quickly find the wiki page you created for the assignment.
A few more neat ideas from your peers as I reviewed the blogs! First a shout-out to the team from the face-to-face section (Becky, Rachel, and Alison), who took third place in the IIC competition! Way to go! Judging from your blogs, many of you liked their project the best, as well.
Krista discovered the “interesting” button in Flickr and found that this leads to the “best of the best” pictures. I’ve enjoyed surfing through the interesting photos many times myself. Some are simply stunning!
Catherine, and many of you, noticed the Mighty Authors website used by one of the IIC groups that seems to be an easier and better way to have students self-publish their work.
Here are the finalists from this year’s IIC competition! Great ideas for using technology in classrooms.
SS6 – Road to Revelution – multiple technologies
SS2 - Revolutionary War - google earth, blogs, etc
SS1 – Civil War Debate – many resources
Lit6 – google wave
Lit4 – social media diigo and mindmeister
Lit2 – mobile device (ipad) for early literacy
Lit1 – kidsperation, Mighty Authors for child publishing
I have graded all of the videos, copyright assignments, personal technology projects, and so on that I have received. Please check your grades on Blackboard and the comments I have left on your blog and email me if you have any questions or if I accidentally missed something you have completed.
In reading the blogs, there were several great ideas from your peers that I wanted to share!
Jessica posted about Google Buzz, and made an interesting comment, “I realize that this technology has been out for a little while, but I just discovered it.” The funny thing is that Google Buzz has only been out for about two months, and yet already it seems like an “old” technology of sorts. That’s somewhat the nature of the beast as technology is continually evolving very rapidly.
One student (I can’t remember right now!) posted this great timeline showing the history of health care reform. It’s another great example of multimedia, as it uses images as well as text. There are programs to create timelines, and something like this would be ANOTHER great activity that students could do to represent their knowledge on a subject in a more visual medium.
If you didn’t know, Facebook changes its privacy policy every few months. Now they’ve changed it again so the default is to give you personal information away to 3rd party applications/sites you didn’t sign up for. Yes, you can opt out of it, but how many will? By a show of hands, how many of my current students have adjusted their Facebook security settings in the past?
This can play into our discussion this week on Internet Safety. It’s astounding how much personal info we share online with websites we trust but probably shouldn’t because they’re trying to figure out how to make money.
I blogged last week about a presentation I attended by teachers from the Utah Online High School. This isn’t the kind of school that would work for everyone, but they’re having a remarkable amount of success and have a very innovative teaching model. Check it out!
Do you think you might ever like to teach for an online high school?
