Flick Flick Hooray!

I love Flickr and I have learned so much about photography because of it. Now I can start considering the possibilities for using it with my classroom.

I signed up for Flickr about a year ago and, after Facebook, it is easily my most commonly visited site.

The most pleasant discovery for me on Flickr was the groups. I had known that it was a place to store your pictures and share them with others, but I didn't know about the groups and, most importantly, the disscussion topics within groups.

They have groups for every photography-related thing you can think of there. I have found some of the most wonderful people who have helped me immensely. I am part of the Sony Alpha A200 forum and I have learned (and now teach others) tons about the camera we have in common.

I just joined a new group that seems just as active: Alpha Strobist, a group dedicated to learning to use my brand camera with various flash units. Flickr is a great site.

I not only examined Flickr, but also Photobucket and Picassa. I like Flickr better because it is just so much bigger than the others; the community really makes Flickr what it is.

I can think right off of a couple ways to use Flickr in education. Every year I assign a project on the play we read in our textbooks, "The Diary of Anne Frank." I hadn't been as in tune with Flickr previously, but now I can recommend that they find photos on Flickr to decorate their projects as I am sure that there are photos of Anne Frank's hiding place and other things from her life.

I also know that Flickr can be a nice writing prompt. I can see students using the site to find a photo to then make up a story, or describe a scene. I am always trying to get them to use more descriptive words in their writing, so maybe if they pick the photo, they will do a better job. I think if they find the picture on their own, they will have better buy-in on the rest of the activity.

Activities such as the last one would help foster creativity and collaboration, the first of the NETS-S Standards. The fifth standard, promoting digital citizenship, is promoted as they also learn about safely using Flickr's search tools and about copyright issues involving the use of content created by others.

Social Bookmarking Re-visited

I am a fanatic about clutter. What's that have to do with social bookmarking tools such as Delicious.com?Well, clutter is why I had to start over again with for this assignment.

I had a Delicious account and the button was right on my toolbar, but I was cleaning up my toolbar and eliminating things that, well, cluttered it up.

That's why  had to start again, and I am glad that I did. I got stuck in the old way of doing things and had a ton of bookmarks--some I don't remember why they were marked in the first place--that I should have had organized with a social bookmark.

I sure wish I had continued marking, but at least I am back into the groove. I have a ton of photography web sites I need to keep track of and I really wish I had been using it. When I was using it previously, it was usually to keep track of interesting articles that I wanted to blog about or about marking the blogs of friends.

I think that social bookmarking site will be excellent for when I assign a persuasive essay. Students usually have a hard time committing to and/or picking a topic. I could give them a choice of four or five topics and assign them to even numbers of students. Then all the students who have that topic can be looking for links and marking them for use by the others.

This would address a number of the NETS-S Standards: Communication and Collaboration, Research and Information Fluency, and Digital Citizenship. It will be interesting to see how they work together while they also work on their own toward their own essays.

Feed Me!

I can't believe that it took me so long to get on board with RSS. It is silly, really.

I am a champion web surfer and I visit a lot of blogs; that was especially so when I was writing one of my own. I seem to recall that I tried one or two times to set up a feed, but something didn't work and I wasn't that desperate to have one, so I moved on.

I am so glad that I had no choice this time.

So I set up accounts with Google Reader and Bloglines. I am probably go with Google Reader because I like to stay with one team as much as possible: I already have used Chrome, the Google browser, for a long time, I am a big fan of Google Wave, and I have always used them for searches, so why not keep everything in the same place?

I don't know if it is because I read our textbook first or that I had something on the "to-do" list, but it was very easy to set up the reader in both Bloglines and Google Reader. I had a bit of a struggle with Bloglines because I couldn't figure out how to make it so that there were only headlines in my inbox instead of digests like I have it set in Reader. I still couldn't find that function even after searching help. I am sure it must be there and I am just missing it. Anyway, set-up was fairly easy.

I can see now what I was missing all of this time. I am really big into photography and my bookmarks are littered with things I wanted to remember, but now I feel I can clear up some of that clutter as long as I have a feed to that particular site. So I found some photography sites and added some of my favorite news sites and technology site. It was very simple and I am not done yet.

For the classroom, the benefit will be obvious. Imagine when students are working on a topical essay and they get a daily dose of the newest news and opinion right to one place for their viewing pleasure. I think they should be excited about that.

The technology standard on research and information fluency can be reached and practiced much easier with an RSS feed. There is definitely a great advantage to using an RSS feed. I am glad I finally did it.

Technology gets me Excited!

I don't know what it is, but technology really excites me. It can even be useless technology.

But when something comes along that I feel has a great application to my work or my life, I get really excited and I can't wait to try it.

That's what happened this weekend when I finally decided to dig in and see what Google Wave was all about.

Now I still don't think I really know what's up with the Wave, but the picture is becoming clearer to me. You see, to me--if I understand correctly what a wiki can do--Google Wave is like a wiki on steroids.  I was excited this week to learn and scheme about how I can use wikis in my classroom, now I am really excited.

I can't show you my Wave because it isn't available for public launch yet. If I link to it here at my own computer, it automatically takes you to my personal list of Waves, so if you want to go to the information site, watch a video on it or something, well,  just Google it.

I may be wrong but the Wave is going to be big. It is like a wiki in many ways and, in fact, after looking at the various wiki applications available, might have exactly the same sort of things a wiki has: the ability to have a number of people collaborate on a document, the ability to add links, pictures, video, maps, etc., to said document, and the ability to control who is allowed to do all of these thing to the document.

I think the advantage of Google Wave are not necessarily what it does now, but what it might do in the future. Since the project is open source, Google will have thousands of people putting their creative energies to work to find ways to make cool applications for Wave. In fact, they already have quite a few: You can play Sudoku, chess, plan a trip, and many other things I can't recall. Oh, you can even have a weather widget or a poll inside the document.

Google wave is going to be big, and I am excited, but for now I have created a page on Wikispaces.
My page is called What's the What? and refers to a saying I have to help my students remember a grammar rule.

I chose Wikispaces because it had a clean and simple user interface and that is important because I know 8th graders very well, and if there is any little roadblock to using something, they will give up and figure they have a good excuse for not having accomplished anything. Wikispaces looked simpler than Wetpaint  and PBworks mysteriously didn't work for me. When I got the email that I needed to click to activate my account, it never went to my account. Oh, well.

My first page on Wikispaces is a simple page for students to collaborate on understanding, defining, and providing examples of metaphors and similes, a skill they that is part of the 8th grade language arts curriculum.   I figure that we could collect quite a data base that would rival anything I tell them to write down in their notes. Not only that, but I don't have to do all the thinking! They get to think!

This note-type wiki is the most obvious and I imagine, most common use of a wiki; however, I am also excited about the implications for students to discuss literature, ask questions, answer other's questions, and otherwise interact with the text in a higher-ordered thinking kind of way.

I also think there is something that I can do on a wiki that will make writing essays a more valuable experience for them too. I have to investigate that a bit more though. If anyone has a step-by-step tutorial on how to use a wiki to teach students essay skills, I am all ears.

The use of wikis in general address a number of technology standards: Students will be communicating and collaborating (standard 2), they will be strengthening research and information fluency skills (standard 3), they will engage in critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making (standard 4), they will be participating in digital citizenship (standard 5) and they will be strengthening their overall technology skills (standard 6). Wiki's are great on so many levels!

Check out wiki's, catch Google's Wave!

I Love Blogs!

I have always been a bit ahead of the curve when it comes to technology in many respects and I think blogs are a wonderful tool that will play an ever-increasing role in education in years to come.

I first started blogging in 2005 when most of my friends had never even heard of one. I continued for a few years before I finally gave up the blog and let it die. Now Facebook has filled that need to some extent.

I have toyed with the idea on many occasions of using a blog or Facebook or Twitter or something web 2.0ish with my students but have yet to really make the move to do so. (I did try something earlier this year, but more on that later.) The biggest barrier to increased use of these tools is access to computers. It is really a tremendous hassle to get the computers out and get them all working. It is very time consuming.

It is a different story if you want them to do it from home. Probably over 95 percent of our students have the internet, but what do you do about that other 5 percent? Also, it is shocking how many supposedly tech-savvy kids can't seem to find the right web site when it is written down for them!

Maybe it is a case of just needing to work through these problems and keep plugging away. It is bound to get easier.

I did have one assignment this year at the very beginning where I asked them to go to a photo blog that I know (OK, mine) and comment on one of the photos there. I asked them to use the photo to tell me something about themselves as a way of introduction.

I think the assignment met the first two standards set for student use of technology because coming up with a way to use the picture they chose to tell me about themselves involved creativity and it also involved communicating with me and the others who logged on to the site.

It was fairly successful, but I was mostly disappointed with the students who were bound and determined not to complete what I thought would be a fun and engaging way to do something that is usually tedious and boring to them. I plan on trying again.