Learning, Teaching, Technology and Summer

www.fotosearch.com.

During the school year many teachers feel frustrated hearing about new technologies. In most cases, the reason is lack of time.

What can be better than summer break as time to learn about new tools, open accounts or require the site to send you a forgotten username and password to access gadgets you've started some (or long) time ago, browse the Internet to get ideas on how this tool can be used in class and practice, plan, and add it to curriculum.

Check out these resources: they may help you give way to new teaching techniques in this school year :

Amazing tutorial by Intel for Project-Based Learning is excellent for anyone for a professional development opportunity for technology and differentiation (regards to Daine Vahab).

Ten Techniques to Use in a Laptop-based Classroom this article by Laura Turner covers the how-tos of blogs, wikis, digital ink, tablet PCs, online learning, and much more. Many helpful links included.

Wiki: Create Accounts For Your Students
If using a wiki is one of the tools in your class next year, to know how to create accounts in bulk is a must. Read the instructions in the Wikispaces blog.

Find safe videos for the classroom - NCTE suggests links to streaming videos that could be used for education. Tip: streaming takes a lot of bandwidth and slows down the Internet. Download videos to desktop and show them directly from your laptop.

Scholastic provides teachers with features and lesson plans for building a classroom community during the first days of school.

Claimation - creation of mini-movies: Consider incorporating claymation into lesson plans for any subject with this how-to guide. Claymation uses artist's clay, a digital camera, a computer, and video software to engage students in active learning. Students create clay figures and make them come to life by posing them in multiple frames and creating a mini-movie.

Blogs used as students' portfolios: To Shred, or Not To Shred... By Bob Sprankle
who shares his experience of using blogs for keeping his students' works instead of losing many of them at the end of the year as well as throughout the year if they are done on paper.

NCTE recommend blogging sites that are available to start a blog. They also provide some tips of how to find blogs of other teachers. Read NTCE Inbox Blog: In Search of Teacher Bloggers

Digital Photography Contest for students: Portraits of Learning, the 7th annual digital photography contest announced by Tech & Learning. Read more...

Wikis

A wiki - a web based collaborative tool - was invented by Wart Cunningham in 1995. His idea was to create web pages that would be readily revised by multiple users. Each participant becomes an author, with equal access and tools to shape a web site , provide text, rewrite and edit content, and integrate other visual or verbal aspects into the site.

The following two movies demonstrate basic principles of how wikis work:
Wiki in Plain English from YouTube created by CommonCraft and "Understanding how wikis work" from Atomic Learning .

Wikipedia is a wellknown open-community wiki- encyclopedia that is composed by multiple authors. To learn who can become an author, what the rules are, and what educators think about using information published in Wikipedia, read:
Exploring Wikipedia, Using Wikipedia as a research tool, Wikipedia vs. Paper Encyclopedias, Its strength and weaknesses, Contributing to Wikipedia and FAQ School or watch a YouTube movie What Is Wikipedia(8:43 min).

The advantages and disadvantages of the wikis are well explained by Lori Reed in her blog PLMC Core Competenies: Wiki, Wiki, Wiki:
"The wiki's users are potentially its authors. This means that when new information is discovered about a subject, it is quickly added to the collective knowledge base. Unlike a conventional encyclopedia, where editors have to find experts for different subject areas, and nothing gets published without their say-so, anybody can write a wikipedia entry." "The disadvantage a wiki has is ironically the same as its advantage. Being written by its readers, and having little in the way of editorial control, a wiki is prone to being subjective, or strongly influenced by opinion."

Uses of Wikis :

Wikis are widely used for sharing knowledge and information.

- Community Guide: RocWiki - People's Guide to Rochester that was created for people of Rochester, NY to share what they know and like about their city.

Library Success: A best practices wiki - a wiki that is created for the community of librarians, and any librarian can contribute to the page.

I have started to gather information and experiences from people, especially AIS alimni, about what they remember about the library. You can visit the site AIS Lib: What do you remember about your library and how it improved your life? and contribute to it by creating your page and leaving your memory on it. This is an example of a wiki open to public.

- Subject Guide:
SJCPL Subject Guide is created by St. Joseph County Public Library system as a library web page Editing can be done only by librarians.

- Conference Wiki :
Computers in Library 2009
AALL 2009 Conference

- Other:
You can use it for planning, collaborative editing, note-taking, presentations, and projects.
Read more in Wikis: A Beginner's Look

We use them at schools and in the library. Wikis allow all students in the class work on the same document. Even if the content is changed or replaced, the teacher can see every change made and track the author.

You can build your own wiki with Wikispaces or

practice different functions by doing activities listed in
Wbaisparents Wiki.

Web 2.0 tools in foreign language classes

Foreign Language Faculty in the Age of Web 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Quarterly, July-September 2008) highlights the importance of using Web 2.0 tools and advantages they provide to promote communication and sharing - the two essential aspects in teaching foreign languages in class.

The Internet provides access to authentic language in print and spoken forms. Teachers can make a collection of theme-based articles, news articles, and books.
By using blogs, wikis, podcasts, VoiceThread, and social networks they can bring the target culture to the classroom without traveling to the country.

VoiceThread
is a great tool for Foreing Language and ELL classes. It is an online media album that allows a group of people to make comments on images, videos, and documents, really simply. You can participate 5 different ways - using your voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam). It's easy to control who can access and comment on a VoiceThread, which makes it a secure place to talk about almost anything: business and academic presentations, travelogues, family history, art critiques, language study, tutorials, book clubs and digital storytelling. A VoiceThread allows an entire group conversation to be collected from anywhere in the world and then shared in one simple place. Try it, you'll like it!

Wikispaces: Now in French: Wikispaces is working on translations Wikispaces into many different languages. Their first language, French, is now available! So if "vous parlez français," you can change your language preference by visiting "My Account" and choosing French in the settings section. Learn more about this new option on their blog.

See a collection of links for French, Spanish, and Hebrew classes on Schoogle

Free Online Resources for Foreign Languages:
Livemocha - Language Learning: learn, practice, and share a variety of languages.
Mango Languages - free resource of learning languages online.
Wikibooks.com - the open content textbooks collection. You can save a book on the computer or print it.
FSI Language Course
Foreign Language House (Spanish, French, & ESL) - context-based, communicative language learning materials for all ages: *Situations, Stories, Non-Fiction Readings, Culture, or Content in Each Unit;
*Reproducibles Always Included; *Everyday Conversational Activities
Free Language Pods

Supplementary Links:
Blogs
Wikis
VoiceThread
How to type French accent marks
Le Notepad
Free Language Pods: French, Spanish, and other languages.

Articles:
Social Networks in Education: French Language
The Use of Web 2.0 tools to promote learners autonomy

Examples:Syllabus as a wiki
Blogs used in Foreign Language Classes - Spanish (Diane Vahab through Blackboard),
Podcast in Hebrew class - Nicole Chernick's class of Hebrew Beginners (requires AIS login)

Wikis as an educational tool

Wikis is a collaborative tool. Anyone can contribute to the article, add information, edit it. The famous Wikipedia is a wiki. Wiki can be opened to everyone or protected by a password. Wiki can be one of the tools on your Blackboard course.

Wikis conflict with tradition assumption of authorship (copyright and intellectual property). This issue should be addressed when a wiki activity is introduces.
Encourage ownership and autonomy.
Wiki Etiquette and Formats:
1. Show proper respect to other readers
2. Don't plagiarize
3. Stay on topic
4. At the end of your entry identify yourself as the author.
5. Size of the Wiki page: usually the size of the wiki page is that allows it to be printed on a single sheep of paper.
6. Naming links should not be generic. Pages become reference tools. Name them the way they will be easily used by other users.


Wiki in class:
to create an online text, one specific to your particular class, that you and your students can contribute to;
create a class Wikipedia;
create a Wikibook (see examples);
a collection of links, graphics, annotations, and reflections for the class;
create know-how;
take notes.

Examples of using wikis in education:
Classes:
Journalism Class by Paul Allison;
Encyclopedia:
PlanetMath.com
Creating textbooks - Wikibooks Takes on Textbook Industry (CNET News)
California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP);
High School curriculum - South Africa Curriculum;



Sources:
Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham. For Teachers New to Wikis.
Will Richardson. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, 2006.
UMBC. Eukaryotic Genetics and Molecular Biology course