Week 4 thing 11

TagCrowd and Wordle are both applications that provide a visual "cloud" of words that is created by the writer. TagCrowd is a "web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text" while Wordle is a "toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes."

I created a Wordle on an article from one of the journals on my RSS feed and posted it on Delicious as a bookmark. Success!

I could see this being used as a tool by students in presenting a research project or at the beginning or end of a unit as an antipatory activity or closing activity.

Week 4 Thing 10

Delicious would be great to create a set of bookmarks for research projects. I explored some of the science-related ones and noted how they were tagged.

Week 3 thing 9

I created a Twitter account and will follow a select few.

Week 3 Thing 8

I commented on Web 2.0 Immigrant regarding kymn's comments about wanting to better model and teach students about copyrights because I have to get better at this topic myself. I am too careless, admittedly, with using images and what. Given the many new tools I will have available through Web 2.0, it is even more important that I get this issue straight.
See my blog on her blog:

Week 3 Thing 7

I created a google reader account and subscribed to multiple science journal RSS feeds. I love this tool because it saves so much time that we would otherwise have to spend surfing or read ourselves. This way I have quick links to relevant articles that I can then quickly give my students access to.

Week 6 Thing 14

Voice Thread is pretty awesome. I voice and text commented on one of the pictures of the classroom. I created a voice thread giving instructions on one of the worksheets in biology and then posted both a link as well as imbedded it into pages on my class wiki. I could think of numerous ways to use voice thread: having students make observations of a picture, video or article relevent to content; creating their own group projects, posting lectures and notes for students who are absent or for review, giving instructions on assignments or even on how to navigate the class wiki, blog, etc.

Week 2 Thing 6

I created a glog (not a good one--with flying penguins).

Week 2 Thing 5

the FD toys is lots of fun. In doing a mini-lesson on lab safety, I thought this would be fun to use.

Week 2 Thing 4

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fortphoto/3423535319/

I liked this photo because my husband and I have recently taken up astronomy as a hobby. Students love "cool" or unusual photos as well and this would be a good one that you could also teach from (zenith, circumpolar constellations, etc.)

There is much to flicker and I will have to think about how I coul use this tool in science. One thought that occurred to me is to upload photos of student work, images of microscopic objects with a chance for students to guess the object, etc. I'm sure there are many other ideas. Serial pictures during dissections is also an idea.

Week 1 Thing 3

On the Advanced Google Search, the menu under usage rights can be selected for "not filtered by license" to find items that are not copyright protected.

As far as teaching students copyright uses. basically any image or files need to be checked for copyrights and/or cited in their projects as references. If in doubt, don't use unless it is original work.

Week 5 Things 12 and 13

Thing 12: Some uses that I found interesting were: ongoing vocab, using a page as a group site with multiple teachers (i.e. for a department), Hall of Fame showcasing student sample work, message board with posts and links to other multimedia/websites. Interesting uses also would include collaborative note-taking (students post responses to an article or question, comment on each others), Literature circle--like an online book club and extra credit assignments buried in the wiki.

I went to the D20 sandbox and added my comment to a page. So this is different than adding a comment because you're directly adding text to a page that is shared by others.

Thing 13: What did you find interesting? What types of applications within schools might work well with Google docs? I shared a document and then edited ones sent to me. Great tool for revising documents among staff. It would work well for students as well when working on a project. It's cool that you can type directly into the file you want to create and it is instantly posted as such. As far as applications, parental access, other staff members, students to access common documents it would be useful for. Instead of creating files, then uploading and providing a link, inviting others to share documents gets them direct access to the documents. I created a survey about class lessons and posted it, then submitted answers and viewed spreadsheet summary. Great tool.

Students and blogging

It's been a kick to see students posting comments on my wiki. Almost like blogging. They like reading each other's comments. So now to turn their online conversations towards more academic purposes--like commenting on each other's opinions on an issue or giving feedback to each other on an assignment. Lots of potential and fun to see how students "talk" to each other electronically while sitting 4 feet away from each other!

How to have members

I posted an article and an accompanying assignment on each of my blogs but I'm a little confused as to how to have members rather than have the blog open to the public. I worked around this by giving instructions to students on how to comment on the blog rather than create a new post. I need to do more research to figure it out--I guess i should read the whole handout on blogs! It will be exciting to use this tool once I make it as user friendly as possible for the students.

Week 1 Thing 1 and 2

Ok so I finally get it. This blog is for me to journal my learning experiences for this web 2.0 course. I have created 3 other blogs, one for each course that I am teaching--biology, enviro sci and anatomy. I am posting news articles of video clips about a relevant topic and having students post a response to a prompt on the story. The posts will count toward a grade on the unit test. I was wondering to myself if studetns can cheat on this type of "e-assignment" but then i will be able to track who is posting what and when I believe. so much to learn...so little time!
I've emailed my URL to nancy.