Wiki

http://ged578.pbworks.com/w/page/25547858/Educational%20uses%20of%20wikis

 

Here is a video discribing what a wiki is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY

Two helpful tutorial videos:

http://www.slideshare.net/cliotech/wikispaces-tutorial-306220

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dnL00TdmLY
I started this journey to enhance my teaching and to help students see what new digital programs are out there.  Personally, I love the idea of Google docs, Google reader and Google calendar. Google docs is a great way to share information easily and a group of people can work on it simultaneously but I wanted to show other possibilities.   Wiki, meaning quick, is a tool that can have many authors and many participants.  This allows students to work on a projects together each having the ability to edit the work.  The project can be broken into parts allowing individual student to have a theme or topic and they can create their own page within the group wiki.  There are many great reason for using wikis, such as it fosters collaboration, creates common goals, and teaches new technology. These is also a great way to mark students on their individual effort within a group project.  As educators we can set up free private space for our classes. It takes less than a minute to sign up- http://www.wikispaces.com

Catching up to My Student Teacher!

The good old days of stand and deliver are over and the question is today, how do you make a presentation that people are going to sit on the edge of their sits and be engaged?  One of my goals as a teacher is to give my students some experience with presentation and use the variety of tools that are available.  For the most part my students are using power point but not all students have power point on their home computer, which creates some difficulty.  I had never heard of Prezi until I had a student teacher and she mentioned that she was going to make a Prezi and present her information in that form; she showed the students and I was lost. Prezi allows you to add links, graphics, texts, audio and video, which creates a much more stimulating presentation than power point. I found Prezi to be tricky to use in the beginning. The control is a "wheel" and it takes a bit of getting use to manuver but once you get going the information is constructed ont eh never ending white board. One of the "cool" features of the prezi is that it allows you to zoom in on objects and back out again. I think that Prezi will engage students because it is a new "toy" to stimulate the senses. If lost, there are numerous tutorials on line.

 I like Prezi because it is on line and students do not have to remember to bring their USB drive.

http://trendingeducation.com/?p=326

It is a Small World!

I love living on the rainy West Coast of Canada but this is not where I started out!  I was born in southern Ontario, which consists of cold, cold white stuff.  What is that stuff… it is beautiful to see in pictures or when you are skiing but not on a daily bases.  The west coast is amazing and my mom and mother-in-law lives here but my sister and her family remain in Ontario on the family farm and all my extended family are there as well. I use to have lots of spare time to print pictures and send them but now my own growing family tends to keeping me extremely busy.  I need a digital tool that will let me organize my photos and share them easily with family and friends.  I had heard of Flickr before but have never attempted to use it.  
Flickr is owned by yahoo and you go to www.flickr.com and create a yahoo id and get started. You can upload video and or photos to share privately or publicly or you can search for photos or video via a place name and or subject matter.You can create titles for your photos and descriptions and sets that you photos go into.  It is not hard and even a beginner like myself can learn. It makes the world a smaller lace because you can keep in contact with people around the world witht he click of a button! There are a number of tutorials out there on line.  I have linked one such tutorial below!  

Good Luck- keep in contact with your friends and family!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re05530ulS4&feature=related

What Google can do for you!

RSS, Docs, Calander


Well I am here to tell you that I had no idea all the things that google could do and I have not even explored all the options. I watched the following video to give me a sneak peek at what is available from an educators perspective http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvviWtyhms0.   I have been using google reader and have slowly expanded the number of blogs that I am following. I am expanding my interests to including not only school/work related topics but a few personal interest topics.  After viewing a classmate’s blog I added 1000 Awesome Things and I am continuously searching for new ones to add but I do not want to add too many at one time.  I am not sure that I can handle the overload all at once.  Google Reader can help keep busy teachers up todate with current articels, the latest technology and what is happening in the world around them.  Google also has an amazing calendar that sends me emails and tells me to do the things that are in the schedule, unfortunately I do not have a phone that my emails could go to, otherwise this would be a fantastic addition.  The one very exciting feature that I am using is google docs.  This is amazing for collaboration as a teacher and as a student.  Just yesterday a classmate and myself got together (other course) and worked side by side simultaneously on a project.  It was amazing.  Now we can add or edit the project as we work on it.  After my maternity leave I will introduce this concepts to my students (if they do not already use it) because it is much easy to work on a group assignment if everyone has ready access, rather then trying to email it back and forth to one another. If you have not tried it, I highly recommend it!

PS. I just read about iGoogle- something that I will have to look into!