Thing #6 - Photo Sharing

I have explored and played with various photo sharing web sites. The usefulness of a photo sharing web sites for our students is that you could put up various images that you could use for lessons. By putting up images you preselected you are saving a lot of time, because from experience students will spend way to much time looking for the "perfect" picture, rather than just grabbing a picture that satisfy the requirement and then getting on with the lesson. Also, I don't care how great your filtering software is, inappropriate images will get through, then another thing your going to deal with.

Thing #5 Managing your RSS Feeds

If your like me, you sometimes get overwhelmed and have to just start over. I can see this happening with RSS Feeds. Less is more has always been something I tried to do in my professional life. Do something good instead of a bunch of stuff okay! Now, like I said in "Thing 4" using RSS feeds to track student comments in a blog is one thing, but if your trying to track to many blogs or to many things, it could get overwhelming. Now, I'll have to see how this works as I follow the progress of my fellow Teachers in the 23 Things project. I'm suppose to comment and encourage y'all. So I'll use the RSS feed and subscriptions to keep track of whose where and what your learning. Now, management of the new content is key and if you can provide timely feed back, then I think that is something that will help our students learn in the long run.

Thing #4 RSS - Managing Your Online Content

RSS was one of those things that I always knew about but never took the time to learn it. Now as I myself become more and more of a "Digital Teacher" what a wonderful way to track and document my students online participation. I surely envision a way to use this in the future, when I tell my students to comment on "My Blog" for class. A nice neat way to make sure everyone is participating.

Thing #3 Blog

A Blog can be a very helpful thing, especially for a classroom, especially for our Middle School Students who would rather look for on their phone or computer than look at it in a book. What did we do in class today, or what was that the Teacher was talking about.

Students can ask questions and hopefully spur a discussion where other students will answer each other questions. It could be a beautiful thing.

As Educators become more comfortable communicating with their students via electronic means, I think you'll see student interaction become more increased. Why, because they're comfortable with technology. It's the over 40 year old educators that's would fall in to the category of note being savvy with the Internet. Even myself, I see myself getting left in the dust, when I don't take time to try new things.

Thing #2 "The Blog"

Well, my blog is actually very old about 3 years. I created a way for my fellow pilot friends to share information about where we going to go flying on the weekends, in the hopes that we could fly as a group or go places to meet up. Previously we used email but that was usually in the past tense, in a mass email that one of guys would send out to tell where everyone had gone and done when flying.

I started the 100 Mile Per Hour Club, as blog and took the name from the guy who started the email list, because most of our airplanes are lucky to do 100 miles per hour.

The blog sort of died, when the older non-techie pilots couldn't figure out how to leave a post.

In school, we have tried blogs before, but weren't real successful, because our students didn't use it appropriately. This two was about three years ago. Hopefully as Google Education comes online, we can give it another shot.

Thing #1 Web 2.0

"In the past we were primarily consumers of information but Web 2.0 allows us to also be producers of information using tools such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, and media sharing." Okay, I just copied the previous sentenchttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife from somewhere http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifin the first "Thing" for this 23 Things for 21st Educators.
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As I read the article and watched the video, I reflected back on my pity party that I through for myself this past week. Not, that I invited anyone, but I sure I complained about enough to annoy some of my co-workers, who I'm sure were also having a pity party themselves. This thing called Public Education is caught in a Catch 22. There's an "Educational Team" out there, but unfortunately all the team players have created their own teams. Parents, Students, Teachers, Administrators, Politicians, Government Agencies and the General Public are all trying to tell us hey your doing it wrong and you need to join my team. Frustrating to say the least.

As, I watched the video, I was reminded as to what I was doing as I approached the Christmas break, in my first year as a Social Studies Teacher. I'm lucky to be sort of Beta Testing a "hybrid Social Studies Class." For some reason, we go off to a bad start to the second tri-mester. The lack of time for me and my colleague to meet this past two weeks, sort of put me in a tail spin. Reflecting back, I what I saw worked just prior to the end of the first tri-mester, I think I'll switch up and try to get with my colleague and see if I can put together some plans as how to attack the next unit. Text books are great and I think sometimes I need to get my educational mentality out of the 1950's.

Feeling like I have my educational compass realigned, I see that I need to see what's out there on the web, to help keep my kids engaged.

More educational drool to come later!

Now as I read the article a Day in the life of a 2.0 learner and watched the video, I have been reminded to what is what we're trying to do.

Learning New Things 23 Things for 21st Century Teachers

Well, revived the old blog! I'll be posting here on how technology has helped me. Having been moved to Social Studies and been given the opportunity to use technology to teach it, here is how I'm using my web page to aid student learning. http://bit.ly/moorehome