Thing 23

Web 2.0 and the 21st Century Learner.

The world changes in the blink of the eye. We have technology that some people said would never happen. Everyone thought the telephone was a crazy idea, way back when. Now we have phones that we talk on, surf the web, take pictures and video, type into blogs, and a whole host of other applications. This means that teacher must take the time and school systems must embrace the technology and teach the teachers how to use the technology that it has and what it buys. Only then can we do our jobs and teach the students.

We as school need to prepare our students so that they know how to use this technology. When I say use, I mean appropriately and effectively, so that they get the most out of the information it can provide. We must teach the dangers of its use as well as all of the positive things that it can do.

I am really glad I decided to take this class. I have used wordle with my students. I have used creative commoms in a project from bighugelabs.com. I also cannot wait to share "Things" with my students and my co-workers.

There is so much out there, I am not sure that I have even scratched the surface of what is available, but I do know where I can go to keep my students and myself growing in the applications and uses of the World Wide Web.

Some of the stuff I have done for this class I did with the mindset of what will I need for my classroom to do. Others I did for me. I think that for me to grow as a teacher I must continue my quest to find others who want technology to continue to grow and become useable in the schools, so that our students are prepared for life.


I hope to continue posting to this blog and maybe some of my classmates will to.


See ya on the back side.

Chris Pannell

Westside Middle School
Barrow County Schools
Winder, GA 30680

my blog http://panedlife.blogspot.com/

edmodo.com panedlife
twitter.com pannellcatlanta
plurk.com panedlife
schoolrack.com panedlife

google account- chris.pannell@barrow.k12.ga.us
barrow county email chris.pannell@barrow.k12.ga.us

Thing 22

The image was created at http://www.wordle.net/.







The second exploration took me into http://www.edmodo.com/home/
I created an account and started playing in the calendar feature, it is pretty neat. Can't wait to play with it some more and and some files. I want to see if I can build each individual class and have assignments posted there. Right now it is a toss up between here and schoolrack. http://www.schoolrack.com/panedlife/welcome-to-my-place/

Thing 5d

http://www.11alive.com/rss/rss_story.aspx?storyid=131545

The words DA investigates and education are never a good combination. Here is a perfect example of administrators so caught up in making AYP and having good test scores that they have now jeopardized there careers and apparently lost. As of this post the principal has resigned and the assistant has been reassigned. Will have to keep following updates on this as I know more will be coming out on this one.

Thing 21

http://www.pageflakes.com/Default.aspx

I see this as a great place to gather and hold lots of information that you may want to get to in a hurry. Without having to open up 5 or 6 different addresses.

I can see having not only personal information here, but also professional stuff and even things your are learning about or how to do activities.

I posted the template that you created and love it, but I will add my own stuff as I go. I added country music, twitter, and facebook and I can not wait to see how they work in this environment. If they work well I can see having my blogspot, plurk, podcast, and any other host of items housed in different pages so that they could be easily accessible for what ever class you happen to be teaching.

Thing 20

I think Google Documents may be my newest favorite. I have always wondered, just as I did with my favorites on my computer- how can I access these from anywhere. Now I know if we set up forms on Google documents then we as a collective groups can go in and edit and then everyone in our group can see the changes and see if others need to be made.

Being the Staffing Coordinator if the people in my department could go in and edit a form I created then there would not be constant emailing back and forth of documents that I need to have updated every couple of weeks. They could just make their changes and I would have the very newest version right at my finger tips.

Thing 19

http://www.garageband.com/mp3player?|pe1|WdjZPXLrvP2rYVW_ZW1jBA


Subscribe Free  Add to my Page

Wow I can't believe how easy this was. But it did say your grandmother could do it. I am sure with the right equipment, this would be just as easy with a video podcast. I reserve the right to try that later and maybe I even post it when I decide to do one of those.

Through the use of a podcast, you could let your students actually talk about the project they have completed for class and then let of student make productive comments about it and let each others comments lend to the final grade of that project. But, reserve the right to take points off of the person making them if the comments are not giving good criticism for the project.

Thing 18

I signed into the NPR podcast site. http://www.npr.org
There is a great podcast with the new Secretary of Education talking about all of the changes he is going to make. However he said it will take years for all of his ideas to come into reality. Hence I here the government saying we have all of this money for Education Reform but you the teachers will not wee any of it.

I was having computer issues and it was saying that it could not play the pod cast, but I jumped over to another computer and was able to hear it.


http://smartboards.typepad.com/smartboards

is another current favorite of mine right now. It teaches things that you can do with you Interactive WhiteBoard.

I am still contemplating what all I could find as resources for my classroom, and as I start expanding my searches I will get into more class based podcast.

Thing 17 part 4

Well until this class I had never even heard about a Ning or even microbloging for that matter.

I did join Classroom 2.0, and posted the badge in an earlier post. I did not get very much out of the site until I was a member. I could spend hours and hours scrolling through the site and blogging in it, if I had that much time on my hands, but since I don't, I tried to stay with things that I could actually start using and maybe keep up with. My blog Thing 17 part 2 is the ning I thought I could utilize first and then maybe expand as I go along.

I decided that starting a classroom web site through schoolrack was a good free way to start with something that I could use and my students and parents could look at for additional information. http://www.schoolrack.com/panedlife

I think there is a lot of information out there we as teachers just have to be able to find it. I recall in one of your videos, that you said you did not get much out of something, until you spent the time to create what you needed out of the site. I think this is so often the case, we don't want (or have) the time to find out everything that we can about what we teach. It is always a race to the finish line to make sure material is covered before test time.

As for my own microblogging site I am not sure about that. I think I would be more comfortable joining someone else's for a while to see what I really could or would use it for.

I have a plurk http://plurk.com /user/panedlife and I have a twitter www.twitter.com/pannellcatlanta So I think I need to play with these a while and get more comfortable with them. Then who knows I will see where it takes me.

Thing 17 part 2

http://www.schoolrack.com/panedlife


Well this something I have wanted to try to see if it can keep me more focused and on top of what I want my classes to do. I found http://www.schoolrack.com through the nings search. I started my own very basic web page and I hope I can keep building it.

Thing 17

Visit Classroom 2.0

Thing 16

Prior to this course I was just getting started with social networking. I got on Facebook to keep in touch with some out of town relatives that I don't get to see very often. Then it was a good way to keep up with church stuff and our friends there.

I had never thought about using a networking for professional purposes, but hey why not. We all want to try new things in our classrooms to get and keep our students engaged. With all of the teaching professionals that there are this could be a great asset. I once had a professor that always said "Don't recreate the wheel."

This made sense then, but now through the internet you may be able to find what someone else has done and tweek it to what your classroom needs are.

I signed up for Plurk http://plurk.com/user/panedlife and and I know it takes time, but you should be able to search for friends without going through your email accounts, so for right now I am not sure about this PLN. Maybe this could be set up for Barrow County teachers and then let us pull our teacher friends, that could be a large base of teachers and resources, in its own right.

I always am willing to try something that has already been done by someone else and I just make adjustments as I need to. So I would say that there is a strong reason to join a PLN or create your own. Since I teach so many subjects and three different grade levels, I would benefit from others more than my own. But, one I might create would center around technology.

Thing 5c

http://langwitches.org/blog/2009/06/15/links-for-2009-06-15/

"Curriculum Mapping is sweeping the country as a dynamic tool for communication. By collecting data about what is actually taught during the course of a school year and sharing those data, teachers are able to work together to reach an efficient and powerful level of decision-making."

Wow I think people in education have been saying this for years. Maybe if the higher up Education people would listen to some things teachers say, we might could accomplish some things and better our test scores also.

Thing 14

Well this is something I am always dealing with at home. My computer is so old and so slow. I don't really want to upgrade right now, but if it gets much slower I will have too. So I am always trying to find out things to make it faster. This video does a good job telling three different ways to try.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-za7hy_Rdq4

Thing 13

Well, well, well. I had never heard about voice threads nor had I ever seen one until this course. I can see by listening to the other ones that you can really use voice threads to enhance a presentation or provide other ideas that may not have been thought of yet. When multiple minds collaborate on a single topic, many ideas can come form it. It we were doing something like the math problem that you gave as an example, you could have different students telling how they would solve that problem. We a student can explain how they did something to a teacher or another student they then have more securely locked that information into their usable memory.

If a student had done their own slide show other students could make comments on it and even tell what they learned from them.

Thing 12

Well first off, some of these I have heard about and seen some of them used. http://blabberize.com for one . One of our teachers used this with her language arts class, so they used my computers. I did not really pay much attention to them, but you know as well as anybody else, when something is going on near you, you can't help but notice. I still haven't tried it but I plan to. I think it is a neat way for students to really take ownership of something they have created. My daughter and I are going to try one, and I will see if I can post it.


The next one I am interested in is http://www.glogster.com/edu/ I only played with it for a few minutes and it seemed really neat. I always create and invitation each year and I think I am going to see what I can do with this. As for the classroom I think you could use this in social studies or science and let the students make a poster about some system or some person. Will have to investigate this one some more when school is back in session.