Wiki-Wiki

I have been having a tremendous amount of fun creating wikis for use in my classroom and with my students. This week, I decided to create the instructions for an upcoming project into a home page on the newest wiki that I will be creating interactively with my 8th graders. It is called BigKidRecommend; 8th graders will develop short author studies accompanied by videos that they produce of scenes from their favorite children's books. Once completed, they will add their pages to the wiki space and I will use it with my younger students when we do author studies or when they are searching for something new to read. I have produced several wikis; a couple of these are www.whome.wikispaces.com (a website with lessons regarding our environment) and this one www.bigkidsrecommend.wikispaces.com. These are a practical and easy way to connect your students to technology.

RSS Feeds

Really Simple Syndication; not so much. I had trouble just getting started in bloglines.com; doesn't seem really simple to me. I understand the concept, however, a great, short way to see what is up to the minute in news, blogs, video, and audio; a busy man or woman's way of keeping up without leaving where they are. I appreciate the fact that many major news networks such as CNN and USA Today offer this format. I don't quite get how blogs can really be that important. Maybe my tendency to hang on to a little bit of "I don't really need it now" is holding me back on this one. I think out of all the technology that I have researched and "played" with in my SLIS classes, this one seems to be the one that I probably won't use.

Been A While

As I continue on my journey towards my second master's, I am now in a class that continues to stretch me in regards to technology. Blogging this week is to be about things we are exploring. I have been using wiki spaces alot during this school year; sometimes quite successfully; other times not so much. It can be a challenging experience at times, but not nearly as challenging as developing your own web page so I choose it often. I have developed several lesson plans using it and my 7th graders and I developed a school history for our school's 35th anniversary; that was interesting and challengeing. It can really be tough when kids accidentally wipe out the work of others kids. Such is life.