Unconnected!!AHHH

I haven't been online since thursday night and I'm feeling a little disoriented. I was away coaching at a track meet. Spent the night sleeping in a gym with 65 students and other coaches. It was delightful!! Anyways I haven't twittered, checked my reader, blogged or even good ol'email! Glad to be back.

Found an interesting blog about our connectedness. I sympathize with both sides of the issue. Thought you might like a read.



I.Cringley

Podcasting

I'm excited about the podcasting as it fits in nicely with a marketing unit I am doing with the Grade 11 Vision & Ventures class. The students are developing three advertisements for their products and one jingle. The jingle will be podcasted and their ads will be posted on their wiki's. Hopefully it works out.

I am getting a pretty good response to the research about internet blockages in schools. Of about 60 teachers, I have 20 responses so far. It is good to see that everyone that responded uses the internet in their teaching.

I've added the link to my brief podcast. It was quite a process. Luckily I had a 15 year old to help me. So much for being the teacher.

mindmeister

Mindmeister is a useful tool that could be used in a number of my classes and for my own grad classes. A collaborative way to organize thoughts, concepts and examples could be quite powerful in the classroom. I am using a mimio board so to have this concept up on the whiteboard and have students add to it while we are discussing things would be great. I am in the process of finishing a unit in my ICT class and this would be a great tool to use to introduce the next unit.

Gotta Love Tech

I was looking forward to last nights class, when my phone rang and kicked me off of skype. I never did get back on. Sometimes even a simple web tool has problems with it. I never think of skype being linked into the phone since we are all connected online. I have set up a twitter account but I am struggling with a meaningful use of it in the classroom. The other issue I have with Twitter is that it is blocked from the school. What to do, what to do. I really like Diigo, very similar to Delicious. Still plugging along with Voltero. I have managed to save some articles in there but not sure how I did it. I need a couple of hours to play.

Until next time.

Always more

With so many great web tools out there, it is difficult to decipher what is useful in the classroom and what is not. All of the tools used today can easily be incorporated into a class setting. I am a huge fan of google docs and will continue to use it with my classes.Jing is usable as is wiki.Diigo seems to be similar to Delicious. I have used delicious in my classroom, but never found a solid use for it that the students would buy into. Hopefully networking with the class and Glen will help fill this gap.

Web Tools

Used Jing the other day in an ACT class demonstrating some Excel functions. I then saved the video and put in on my class wiki. It worked pretty well, but I will have to tweek it a little. I didn't use the microphone option which I may seriously have to consider. All this technology I don't know how to utilize it effectively in my class.

I use google docs every day. I send assignments out via google docs and all of my students have an account. I also use google docs for all of my grad courses. It is easy to use and it is always handy, you never have to worry about printing anything. If your internet connection is down, then that would be a problem, but only a temporary one.

Until next time.

I thought I knew something...

I've been using google docs for a while now and have all of my students use it as well. We have blogged and I am an active user of wikispaces as are my students. There is so much more out there. These couple of web tools change weekly, maybe even daily. To keep up with it, I would need time each day to check on new developments. Wow! Not sure where to go from here. The vast amount of information is staggering. Looking forward to Wednesdays class to see what else is out there.

If you want to see how I use wikispaces the link is
https://korchinski.wikispaces.com/

Week 1

I am really excited about the ICT course. I teach the ICT in my school and am anxious to learn and discover more. Already I have realized a couple of new uses for tools that I have been using already. The instruction along with the networking will only be beneficial for me.