Web 2.0 Technology Blog Assignment

I feel there are many challenges for educators with keeping students up-to-date with the vital 21st Century skills needed.  How do they #1 keep up with the times #2 find effective ways to incorporate these into their lessons but effectively cover the curriculum?  In the past, educators had to cover material with lecture and maybe some overhead projector notes.  Now, educators not only have to cover the curriculum, but are tasked with incorporating over hundreds of different types of tools that students need to know in order to be more successful in the future.  What a task!  When I sit down and prepare a new lesson, I can't imagine how easy it would be just to make some Power Point notes and then give a lecture.  I know that not only do I have to be making sure the students are grasping the new material, but know it is my duty to incorporate some sort of technology or Web 2.0 tool to facilitate in that learning. The profession of teaching is evolving: g...

After reflecting on all the cool tools I learned about in this course, I would have to say Prezi stood out to me.  When students have to create a presentation, they immediately think to use Power Point or Google Slides, which is fine, but, it would be nice to see some different platforms used.  Prezi is great because it almost allows the audience to be more "immersed" in the presentation rather than staring at the same old boring themes on Slides or Power Point. After investigating more into Prezi, it is a bit more time consuming to create a presentation and sometimes the "paths" the presentation takes can be confusing to fix if they are ever mixed up.  I find the number one drawback to Prezi is the fact that students can't collaborate on separate devices while working on a Prezi.  I have my students work in groups a lot and if they chose to use Prezi instead of Google Slides, only one student would be able to edit the presentation while the others have no con...

After checking out Flickr, I find it to be a useful site.  What I like most is that students don't have to worry about copyright infringement when it comes to using pictures.  After searching for a picture, just click on the "Any License" down-drop and you can search pictures that have "no known copyright restrictions".  This is very beneficial because then students don't necessarily have to cite every picture on their works cited page, they can just cite flickr.  This touches on ISTE Standards: 2A,B, & 3B.  I think I could use photo-sharing in my classroom by having the students create a picture collage about themselves and can be used as an ice-breaker during the first week of a new semester. I did find one drawback, when I tried to do the drag-and-drop feature to post a picture to my blog, it just posted a link as seen below:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevetaylors/6248281175/ On my second try, I tried to add a picture with a URL on Blogger...

I really think social bookmarking is a great thing.  In the past, computer users would often get frustrated because their bookmarks could only be stored locally on a computer.  With the addition of social bookmarking sits like Delicious, Diigo, and Wirefan, users can create cloud based bookmarks where they can access them anywhere.  One of the best features of social bookmarks is how easily they can be shared.  I feel I can use social bookmarks with my business department because we are always sharing useful links to sites we find but if we just use Delicious as I have on my blog, we can always be updating and have a great database! I've added a link near the top of my blog for users to be able to check out my Delicious websites.  I will continue to add to it but only have a couple of sites that may be of interest. I caution teachers when using social bookmarking in their classes; students were on Delicious the other day in my classroom and many adult websit...

RSS Feeds are slick!  I enjoy using RSS feeds because they allow you to grab a little information from a lot of websites.  RSS feeds are great because they are so easy to incorporate into a blog and they keep the blog up-to-date even in if the user hasn't posted a new entry recently.  I personally like using them to keep me current with stock prices and news articles.  I teach at the high school level and feel feed readers have a valuable place in my classes.  We discuss many things from GDP to stock prices so could be very valuable for students to have information being brought to them instead of them always having to search for it.  The only drawback I see at the moment is the appropriateness of some of the articles that could end up in students' feeds.  I feel high- schoolers are mature enough to be able to handle it but it might cause a problem at lower levels. Pennsylvania does not follow the common core at the high school level but using an R...

I must admit, I use wikis all the time but rarely post to them.  On a daily basis I am using wikipedia or wikihow to gather information.  I don't feel I'm enough of a subject matter expert on any of the topics I'm researching to post to the wiki nor have I ever created one just to create one.  It was interesting exploring all the wikis out there, I never knew so many existed! For the past six years I have been using wikispaces in my classroom to upload files and have students post their thoughts in discussions.  I always loved using wikispaces but found it was a little non-user friendly.  If I ever encountered a problem, I would always search and find an answer in, yep, you guessed it, a wiki!  This year, my school district asked that everyone use the same learning management system - Schoology.  Although Schoology is a LMS, it is very open to creating online discussions and students can post comments when they have questions and other students can a...

I used blogs a lot when I was getting my Master's Degree; we had to post about various subjects and then comment on our classmates'.  I found the use of blogs was sometimes a time-waster and almost "forced".  A lot of my classmates posted the bare minimum and didn't give great feedback.  Also, I feel that depending on the subject, blogs can be a great tool or not very helpful.  I find myself using blogs/forums all the time when it comes to troubleshooting a problem with my car or phone but don't spend the time to search for blogs about a random subject that I don't need assistance with. I do not feel I will use blogs with my students.  When I create a lesson for my students, I always ask myself "how would I like this lesson if I was a student?"  Seeing I haven't had good experiences with using blogs in the past, I feel the students might feel they are "forced" to have a discussion about something that they aren't particularly ...