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A few common Google Sites questions I wanted to make everyone aware of. I’ve been asked how to embed the Goodreads widget into Google Sites. You do it by creating a new page, inserting the embed gadget (the same one you use to embed anything else–it’s a “featured” gadget), and then paste in the code from Goodreads. I have created a quick tutorial that is on the class website assignment page that shows you how to do this. Don’t forget to then link to your Goodreads page (or any extra pages you create) in your website sidebar or I won’t know it exists! It’d be cool to embed the Goodreads widget directly into the sidebar of your website, but Google hasn’t made this very easy. If someone figures out how to do that, let me know, and I’ll share the information with everyone else. I can’t remember if I talked in the voicethread (for the online students) about why I’m asking you to do a website AND a blog. Steve posted a nice thought on his blog about how he saw the difference. In a nutshell, these two tools are similar, but they each do something different better than the other. If you want students to be able to interact more easily with your website and leave comments, a blog is better. If you want to be able to upload information often—perhaps every day—then a blog is easier. If you want a static (non-changing) website where you can post information for your students and have it look nice/professional and stay there all semester, than a website is better. Yes, you can have a blog in Google Sites, and you can morph blogger to create extra pages that could be your website pages. But in their core, these two tools are different and are built for different purposes. I wanted you to learn both so you could better choose which you might use as a teacher. (A whole other option is to use a wiki to create a website, which also has its own purposes. We’ll talk more about that later in the semester). Just a quick note, because sometimes new bloggers forget about this—but be sure to check the comments left on your blog. Danny and I occasionally leave feedback on your assignments or just reply to questions or thoughts you have by leaving comments on your blog. If you want comments automatically emailed to you (that’s what I do), go to Settings > comments > Comment Notification Email A few ideas from your peers in our class! After our discussion on RSS feeds, Katie started looking for them in her favorite websites (yay!) and found a fun site with daily book reviews, sent to you by RSS. Alyssa had a thought about using Facebook as teachers.
Liz gives a good example of how you can use screen capturing to capture pictures from online videos. If Blogging is new to you, Catherine posted a cool link to “blogging for dummies“! Thanks for all your great thoughts and ideas! OK, just a few responses to the online students’ comments in the voicethread for least week, as well as the first few comments on this week’s voicethread. Kelli mentioned her 7-year-old niece (I think it was a niece?) who has a Facebook account, email account, etc. already. My daughter is also 7 years old, and has her own email account! She left behind some friends in Georgia, and she uses email to communicate with them. She actually doesn’t know her password to log in, only I do, so she can’t do it by herself, which I think is important because of her age. But she is quite Internet-savvy. She also finds information on the Internet for her homework, personal craft projects, and can look up assignments from her teacher. Cool! A couple of students mentioned that the best way they communicate with their peers is through texting. I think this will become more prevalent in educational communication as well. If every student has a cell phone, then why not send them texts to remind them about homework and tests? Might as well! And even if students don’t have a cell phone, there are technologies like Google Voice where you can receive and send texts for free through the Internet. So likely access would not be an issue. My thoughts are usually, “if the students have the technology already, we might as well use it for teaching/learning!” On this week’s voicethread, Ashley asked if we could use the blank template option for Google Sites. Yes you can! Do whatever is easiest. We assumed the class website template would be easiest, but if it’s not, then let us know and maybe we’ll change up the default option for next semester. Dasily mentioned that it is tough to have to do the assignments according to a rubric, instead of just playing around with a technology in more of a free way. I’m all for playing with a technology, because that is how many people learn best (including me). The rubrics and guidelines I have are just to encourage you to play with certain features, but I try to be as open as possible about how you do it. In other words, I don’t care WHAT you put on your about me page, only that you play around with that feature and do something! And keep in mind that if you turn the assignment in on time, if it’s missing something, I give you the chance to resubmit it for full credit. So no worries. Play around with it, and have some fun with it. If you’re looking for a good resource for English Teaching, I just discovered this blog on literacy, maintained by BYU. One technology that can be very beneficial to helping all students learn in English classes is that of audiobooks. For example, I had a friend who struggled mightily with dyslexia, but succeeded in school because her mother read her homework to her every night. Now a days, there are more audiobooks available to help students such as those with learning disabilities, as well as any other students who do not read well or who simply learn best through auditory means. For instance, I read an article a couple of years ago that said 1 in 7 ADULTS do not read well enough to comprehend a children’s book. Audiobooks are one way of helping students with reading difficulties to not fall further behind. Here is a website I found recently on a blog that teaches some of the educational benefits of audiobooks.
How could YOU use a technology like Librivox in your classroom? Besides helping students use the site to find books to listen to, you might also consider having students “interpret” and record narrations of their favorite public domain poems. I found when I was in school that being asked to give a “reading” of a poem greatly increased my understanding of the piece. If you are still working on the PLN assignment, Dasily has a good example on her blog of how to complete it. She has her screenshot, and really good descriptions of each resource so we can see why she subscribed to them. The only thing that she forgot is to directly link to each blog so we can click on it and go directly there. But everything else is really good! Shane also has a good example of describing why he picked different blogs and then linking to them. This is just a reminder to everyone. If Rick or I have received a link to your blog, your name as a link to your blog should now appear on the left side of this web site. If your name isn’t there we need you to get us the link to your blog as soon as possible. If you have sent it already and it still isn’t there I apologize, but it looks like some e-mails may have gone to my spam. To prevent this, please make sure you include ‘IPT 286′ in the subject line of all e-mails that you send to me. It doesn’t seem like this has happened to Rick so if you send them to him you should be fine. Also, we are going to start grading them, so please make sure you have completed the full assignment as specified, including the links to your groups blogs. You should all have received an e-mail with the spreadsheet of the group assignments, if you haven’t please contact us so we can get everything straightened out. I appreciate your time, and I’m grateful to be here. I’m a student learning about teaching just like most of you, so don’t hesitate to ask for help if you need it. This week, I talked about Personal Learning Networks, including Twitter as one possible technology that could be used to create a PLN. By the way, I am not necessarily tied to Twitter, and there are similar services out there (such as Plurk). I’m more interested in the concept, which is called “microblogging” because it is like blogging but limited to very short bursts of information. As it turns out, someone in my own Personal Learning Network (a friend who works here at BYU designing instructional materials), posted a really great post on his blog about how to use Twitter in education. He collected ideas and resources from several people in HIS personal learning network and put them together in one post. What a great resource for us! So if you are interested, click on his post and read about using Twitter in education. Here’s a question to reflect on your blogs: How might YOU use Twitter (or some other personal learning technology that we talked about) to improve your own professional development? To help teach your students? To stay in contact with parents? In this week’s class and voicethread, I mention that RSS is everywhere, and can be used to subscribe to lots of different things. It’s the same technology that allows you to subscribe to podcasts, for example. Another example is you can subscribe to someone else’s calendar. I told you that I would post a screencast about how to subscribe to your ward calendar, as one example of this. Well, here you go! As I looked at it again, lds.org actually doesn’t have the little RSS icon I told you about with their calendars, but I have heard that RSS will soon be a feature they will provide. For the time being, they do have a link that you use to download the next 12 months of events on the ward calendar and import to your own calendar. This brings up a good learning point that explains the benefit of RSS. Right now you can download the LDS calendars to your computer, but they will not automatically update. With the new LDS calendars coming out in a few months, they will–everytime someone makes a change online. That’s what RSS does for us! This screencast shows how to download your ward calendar. |
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