The Village Green » Link Collections

TIE 2009 – Create, Communicate, Collaborate – Howie DiBlasi

Matthew Woolums — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:29:32 +0000

http://www.drhowie.com

Started with Green Eggs and Ham. More statistics about jobs moving from the US to overseas, from Friedman’s “The World is Flat”. Also mentioned Pink’s “A Whole New Mind” and Jim Collins “Good to Great” – get the right people on the bus, get them in the right seats, get the wrong people off the bus. Howie says we also need to get a driver. Short video about people who failed before achieving greatness (lincoln, etc). Can we still reward kids for doing anything rather than allowing them to fail? If you want change, be the change.

Will change happen if we don’t change our classrooms? Short video “Is this what the future in the US looks like” from ScreamingFrog. Skills for success:

creative problem solving
critical and analytical thinking
information gathering
team work and collaboration

These skills are all analytical. Video: “We are sinking”. Overview of outline in distributed documents. Interesting, Howie is talking about using Google Docs, but distributed files as an outline. We used a blog as a form of assessment – collecting comments as an assessment. http://mytooltest.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-do-you-assess-you-students-teachers.html

Web site evaluations - http://www.wiredsafety.org/wiredlearning/Evaluation/evalcriteria/index.htm#slide=1 It is important to foster critical thinking on the part of the web surfers in our classroom.

Web 2.0 100 tools for teachers – http://snurl.com/web2tools (slow loading). AltaVista use of host: (limit the results by domain) and link: (who links to that link) as tools to validate web sites.

Short demo of Jing – screencasting. Scratch – simple programming environment. Audacity – podcasting (This I believe example). What are my beliefs?

Everyone is not the same
Conflict isn’t always negative
Learning is individual to each person
Naps are important
We all deserve the opportunity to share our stories
Failure is a powerful teacher

Don’t be afraid of the technology, give it to the kids.

Podcasting in Plain English. Leads into a curriculum review with Bob Sprankle podcasts as an example. http://www.eduhound.com and http://www.curriki.org. Freeplay Music and others for sources of music to include in presentations. Curriculum links exploration. Google Docs presentation adding examples of ’six words that describe me’. My six words? “relax, reflect, don’t let other restrict you”. Other tools shown: Wordle, VoiceThread. Howie has an interesting style where he brings up a ‘newbie’ to demo the tool and the ‘experts’ in the audience provide support in using the tool. VoiceThread only lets you have 3 free threads. Brain is getting full.

Online tools, 280 Slides, PhotoShow, One True Media, Moblyng, Animoto, Rock You, My Jugaad, PhotoPeach. Look for the Educator (sometimes free) options in many of these tools! ePals. We would have to find a way for ePals and Gaggle.net to work with each other. Anyone using both? Contributions to your community. Johnny Lee, Wiimote interactive whiteboard, video from TED Conference. Ask high school electronics classes to make these for every classroom. Contribute back.

Stay connected (communicate) with Twitter (Texas teacher Twitter Experiment). Creates a back-channel. Increases number of participants in any conversation.

Dreaming. Building planes in the Air video from EDS.

Reflection: There was a lot to digest if you didn’t know about any of this. It would be nice to see the document posted in an online version instead of distributed as a file. Where would teachers start? Is there one best practice to implement?

Keeping Up With the Joneses

Matthew Woolums — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:55:26 +0000

From time to time I’m asked how I know so much. I really don’t think I do, and most of what I know comes from somewhere else. So where does what-I-know come from? Below are some of my current favorites in no particular order:

iLearn Technology – An edublog about integrating technology into the classroom. iLearn Technology
Free Technology for Teachers – A review of free technology resources and how teachers can use them. Ideas for technology integration in education. Free Technology for Teachers
Larry Ferlazzo’s Website of the Day – For teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL. Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Here are a couple of others from outside the realm of education:

KillerStartups – Reviews of 15+ Internet startups per working day. Today | KillerStartups.com™
programmableweb – Mashup directory of the newest mashups. ProgrammableWeb – Web 2.0 Mashups Directory

What are your favorite sources of what-you-know?

Indispensable Tools

Matthew Woolums — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 13:49:37 +0000

Looking for a collection of great online and downloadable tools for use in the classroom? Drew Buddie has compiled a pretty impressive list on a PB Wiki. If nothing else, you could use this list to see just how ‘up to date’ you are. See how many you know about or are using.

indispensibletools / FrontPage

Another Bookmarking Tool

Matthew Woolums — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 15:06:04 +0000

TechCrunch has a brief (elevator pitch) post about a new social bookmarking tool called Sqworl that collects many bookmarks into a single link. It is very simple to use. Just create a sqworl, add links to sites along with descriptions, and you get a public link that you can share. Here is an example I made with links to other social bookmarking sites. sqworl | bookmarks

Elevator Pitch Friday: Sqworl (One Link To Rule Them All)

Cool Web 2.0 For Beginners

Matthew Woolums — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:50:14 +0000

Vicki Davis, the Cool Cat Teacher, has published a nice introduction article on Web 2.0. If you are just getting started yourself, or if you know someone who is ready to get started, it is an excellent beginners guide. Resources are linked, and the article includes assignments that provide a helpful focus.

Cool Cat Teacher Blog: Basics for Beginners: What is Web 2.0?

Creative Commons for the Educator

Matthew Woolums — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:59:59 +0000

Very nice collection of Creative Commons resources for use in the classroom on the Drape’s Takes blog. There are 4 short parts: understanding the rules, resources for using CC in your curriculum, encouraging remixing, and teaching students about CC. By way of a tweet from Angela Maiers. Twitter / Angela Maiers: Great post on creative com …

Drape’s Takes: The Educator’s Guide to the Creative Commons

10 + 1 School Web Tools

Matthew Woolums — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 01:10:40 +0000

Just in case you missed getting that present you had your heart set on this year, here is a consolation present in the form of a list of 10+1 web tools for use in school. Note taking, bibliography, and even specialized paper tools are available, including one on how to delay turning in an assignment by turning in a file that won’t open. I found this collection from Lucy Gray’s delicious links.

10+ Web Tools To Save Your Butt In School | MakeUseOf.com

Best of 2008 Collections

Matthew Woolums — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 01:29:55 +0000

This is the time of year for reflection and the ‘best of 2008′ posts are popping up all over. Here are a few worth checking out:

The Best Posts Of 2008 | Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… Larry Ferlazzo’s collections of classroom tools are always worth a visit.
The Top Gadgets of 2008 Just in case you were looking for a new cool gadget, here is a ‘best of’ collection from Wired.
CrunchGear’s Best of 2008 plus the People’s Choice Best of 2008 Gala Awards Ceremony, and People’s Choice awards. The readers have spoken!
Most Influential Edublog Post 2008 The Edublog Awards This is the list of Edublogs posts nominated as most influential for 2008.

Edublogs 2008 Awards

Matthew Woolums — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 22:06:01 +0000

Edublogs has posted their 2008 award winners. This is an outstanding group of blogs in this year’s collection, a great place to look for bloggers of note to follow. Be sure to check them out.

http://edublogawards.com/and-the-2008-winners-are/

Where Am I 2.0?

Matthew Woolums — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 02:02:04 +0000

I don’t know if you have ever experienced this or not, but from time to time I hear about a cool new tool and when I sign up I find I’ve already set up an account. I don’t know if there is a cool French term that captures this experience or not, but since déjà vous is already taken, how about a similar déjà tu? Any way, if you aren’t sure if you’ve been somewhere before, thanks to a TechCrunch article - Is Your Username Taken? Usernamecheck Will Tell You - there is a tool that checks a large number of popular Web 2.0 tools to see if your username is already registered. You can use this to see if you might have already created an account, and it is also another way to see a sample of what other tools are out there. I was surprised by one or two of the places where I didn’t realize I had an account. Check to see where your user name is registered!

Where is Your Username registered

Flowgram

Matthew Woolums — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 14:09:06 +0000

Trying out a new presentation option called Flowgram. Yesterday I started putting up a presentation as a page on the blog (see new page: Beliefs) and wasn’t entirely satisfied with the way it looked. So I thought I would try Flowgram as a way to collect web pages as part of the presentation. It also allows you to upload PowerPoint presentations, link to YouTube videos, etc. You can also record a voice track. This should be useful for digital story telling as well as more traditional forms of presentations in the classroom. Here is my Flowgram.

http://www.flowgram.com/p/xya4ch23fxgnid/

No More Auto-posting Delicious

Matthew Woolums — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:03:48 +0000

I’ve decided to discontinue auto-posting my del.icio.us link as a blog post. I know, it is now just delicious.com, but my fingers refuse to leave out the punctuation marks. Besides, the old address provided a great opportunity to talk about domain names. Anyway, the daily posts from delicious seem to clutter up the blog, and this way I also remove the fall back position of not blogging because I saved another link that day. No more excuses. You can always follow my links through the RSS feed: feed://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/mwoolums or just adding me to your network.

By the way, here are a few more to track while you are at it.

Lucy Gray, also known as elemenous: http://delicious.com/elemenous
Silvia Tolisano, also known as langwitches: http://delicious.com/langwitches
Vicki Davis, also known as the Cool Cat Teacher: http://delicious.com/brightideasguru
Vicki Davis, while not a del.icio.us account, she also moderates the educator group in diigo, another social bookmarking site: http://groups.diigo.com/groups/educators
Larry Ferlazzo, while this isn’t a social bookmarking site, he is one of the best collectors of educational links you can find: http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/