Computer Illustrations & Web Page Design

I am a “Digital Immigrant.”  When I read the definition to my husband, we both had a good laugh.  It describes us perfectly!  However, after taking this course, I hope to take flight into the cyberworld of the Read/Write Web.  Even the terminology is all new.  I had heard of blogging, but was not clear about wikis and podcasting.  Thanks to Will Richardson’s book, I have a much better understanding of it all now.

The week was filled with information overload!  We learned about blogging, tagging, wikis, Rich Site Summary, Aggregators, Social Bookmarking using del.icio.us, nings, and podcasting.    My head is spinning with the possibilites!  We were exposed to Second Life (which is still beyond my grasp) and I created my own blog and bloglines account.  Who would have thought?  I have learned so much about these new Web 2.0 tools and best of all, they are FREE!

I will need to spend some time utilizing these tools and thinking about how I can best use them in my classroom with my students.  I am most anxious to share them with my department members and colleagues at my school!  I am sure that I will continue to use my blog and expand upon it in the future.  I definitely want to utilize my wikispaces, also.

When I was looking at course offerings for the summer, there was nothing in the brochures that jumped out at me.  My department chair suggested that I take an online course, but I opted for this one instead.  I am so glad that I did!  It was so great to meet everyone; I feel like we created a network of collaborators that I will continue to utilize.  Thanks to everyone and especially to Alice for making it an interesting and engaging week!

What? I am going to use a class blog for my Computer Illustrations/Web Page Design class. This will allow students to post comments about student work that is presented in class. I hope that students will also make comments about what they are learning and make suggestions for future learning. I will also have some static pages on the blog for course content, expectations, and assignments.

Why? This is a class that does not have a textbook (per se) and in which my students do not do alot of writing; although our district is focusing on ways of encouraging literacy throughout the curriculum. What we do is to create several products that each student presents in front of the class. I do encourage student evaluations and self-reflection. So the blog would provide an excellent tool for this aspect of the course!

How? The class blog will provide a collaborative tool for me and my students.  The primary audience will be the class members; however, I am hoping that the site might attract the students’ parents and other teachers and students in our school. 

What is going to change is that student comments and writing will be more visible to all of the class members.  This should be an excellent tool for learning and collaboration!

Here we are at the end of the week and I am still undecided about my Final Class Project. I have been thinking about how I could use a wiki with my Web Page class students, but can’t come up with a really great project idea. So. . . I am back to my original idea of using a blog.

I have learned so many great things in this class, but I need to think about how I can utilize them in what I teach. Hopefully, I will continue to work on this in the future but for now I am going to start small. . .

Will Richardson (Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts) suggests that “a great entry point for Weblog use is to build a class portal to communicate information about the class and to archive course materials.” I think that this will be the best way for me to get started, especially since I am not sure about getting all the permissions and contracts for student blogging at my school. I teach a Web Page class at Sanford High School, so I think that using a blog for this class only at first would be a good beginning. I also think it will provide a great place for communication with parents as well as students.

On Tuesday we learned how to insert an image into our blog. We used the Photo Booth program on the i-Mac computers to take the photo.

Today’s question is about how I would use Delicious in my classroom. I think the best way would be as a Professional Development tool to save articles about education and/or technology that I could share with my colleagues.
Here is a link to my Delicious page!

I read David Warlick’s blog on virtual presentations (David Warlick) and thought about what teaching will look like in the future. Will we teachers all be sitting at home doing presentations over the Internet?

I also read Karl Fisch’s blog (The Fischbowl) about his presentation at the recent NECC. I would like to watch the Podcast of it when I have the time.

Today I started my first class at USM learning how to write a blog. My goal is to eventually be able to use this in my classroom as a tool for making reading and writing more interesting and fun for my students. Hopefully, by the end of this week I will know alot more and be comfortable with using this tool.

http://www.usmsummer2007.wikispaces.com

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