Betty’s Bytes

Twittering, podcasting, blogging, posting, reading, researching, keeping up with the news and sports, finding and communicating with friends, making new friends, buying and selling, comparing, writing, mashing, googling, binging, banking, investing, learning, sharing…. While reading my tweets today, I was reminded how much is available to us through technology. Take a few minutes to view a few of these links:

• Videos for using SMART boards in the classroom
• Videoconferencing to bring the world to students
• Marco Torres engaging students through digital media
• Essential tools for collaboration with students
• Teach literacy across the curriculum, fast and free
• Visual Bloom’s with 21st Century tools
• 15 things all classrooms should have
• Top 100 tools for learning by category
• 50 best inventions of 2009 – Time
• 24 things to do when launching a  new blog
• 60 second recap – 60 seconds to learn about a book or contribute a recap of your own
• 10 Gadgets to make Google Wave more productive and fun
• Google Wave reading list
• Students speak their minds through digital media

Blogging has become so common that it is nearly impossible to keep up with the blogs that may pique your interest. I subscribe to RSS feeds of some of those that interest me, and yet I still have difficulty reading all the few subscriptions. On the whole, I try to keep up with ITRT blogs and news feeds, but that is impossible. There are just too many sources of information to begin to read them all, so I just pick and choose and few, occasionally adding a new source.

This week I am presenting blogging to the Library Media Specialists in Virginia Beach. My goal is to cover the basics in 2 hours and have each participant leave with a “work in progress.” As I reviewed the procedure for establishing a blog, I was reminded that it takes very little to actually have a blog up and running; other technical people have done most of the work. Basically, you need to sign up, sign in, make a title and post your first article. VOILA! You have a blog!

Reviewing the procedure over the course of the last two weeks, I am reminded that there are many links on a blog that seem very similar and some that you really do not need to use or even visit on a regular basis. It is, however, fun to make the blog your own – adding pictures, backgrounds, Voki’s, and widgets. With time, we’ll explore some of what makes each blog unique.

First, a reminder to all teachers – each of your students is a pearl in an oyster. Watch and listen carefully to this video.

One luxury of spring break is time, time for leisure activities and time to read – paper and paperless books, Web sites, emails, twitters, Facebook postings, the news and so much more. As a result, there follows a list of sites for teachers that provides information and sometimes complete lessons:

• Plagiarism Workshop – a WebQuest that provides a complete lesson aimed at high school students
• FunnelBrain - a collaborative online question and answer flashcard site, where student teams create flashcards – that is questions and answers along with video explanations. Two aspects of this site that make it unique are the “third” side of the flashcard that offers explanations and the ability of the site to track or “funnel” information so that users are not asked questions for which they know the answers, but instead are asked the questions they need to learn.
• 33 Ways to Use Blogs in the Classroom – a must read for those interested in using Web 2.0 tools
• Life.com – the world in pictures, a joint endeavor by LIFE and Getty Images to create a collection of millions of high quality images, organized by categories (News, Celebrity, Travel, Animals, and Sports).
• Virginia Launches K-12 ITunes U Portal – part of a larger effort to “harness the power of digital media and mobile devices to expand and supplement classroom-based education”

Students in two senior English classes have just completed a unit by writing, recording, editing, and posting podcasts of interviews. What an exciting adventure in both classes! The students were so engaged that they did not realize how hard they were working, while they recorded, added music, edited, and posted their podcasts. View their submissions by visiting the blog created for that purpose VBCA Student. The students reviewed an interest survey and selected either a famous British politician or scientist to research, or a nonfiction book to read.  Once the students made their selections, they brainstormed questions to answer via their research and then used reference books and online journals to research, write, and report orally on their choices.  These reports took the form of an interview in which students made connections between modern world issues (political, environmental, or economical) and made inferences based on their research as to how their subject would respond to such questions.  The interviews were then recorded as podcasts and posted to a blog where students were able to listen to one another’s final products.  (English Virginia Standards of Learning covered included E 12.2.1, E 12.2.2, E 12.2.3, E 12.2.4, E 12.2.5, E 12.2.6, E 12.12.1, E 12.12.2, E 12.12.3, E 12.12.4, E 12.12.5, E 12.12.6, E 12.12.7, E 12.12.8, E 12.12.9, E 12.12.10, E 12.16.3, E 12.16.4, E 12.16.5, E 12.16.6, E 12.16.7, E 12.16.8, E 12.16.9, E 12.16.10, E 12.16.11, E 12.16.12 along with a variety of Technology Proficiencies.)

As teachers, we prepared for the first podcasting experience in our small alternative high school by taking classes, collaborating with expert users, reading Will Richardson’s book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, and researching the Web. The students wrote, rewrote, and practiced their scripts. Then, we used the free downloadable program Audacity to record the interviews for podcasting.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson that we as educators learned was that the students were self-directed, involved, cooperative, and collaborative because they were truly engaged in the learning activity. It was a joy to see students revise, re-record, and edit because they wanted to do so, not because it was a requirement.

As the Internet continues to expand exponentially and the school division demands more and more from us as educators to engage our students using technology, time becomes a more cherished gift. Can you research, interact, and blog too much? Do you spend too much time on myspace, Facebook, Twitter, or some other social site? Do you find it difficult to try to read just the sites that you have tagged for their interests? Is your mailbox filled to overflowing with interesting information? Do you have to keep a list of your blogs, your logins, and your passwords just to remember what you have agreed to maintain?

All of these questions came to mind this morning, as I logged onto the computer to update my personal blog and realized that I have too many blogs to maintain.  This blog Betty’s Bytes is important as it provides a venue for me to share some of the ordinary and extraordinary things that I learn with my co-workers and friends in education. My personal blog is my journal and vital to sharing my life with my family and a few close friends. Through the years I have created several technology in education blogs, and for some reason I am reluctant to delete them even though I do not use them any longer — they seem somehow to mark an historical trail of how I got to where I am today. I have also created a blog for my son’s friends, who were traveling the world with the musician Jack Johnson as his nannies, a blog for my high school class after a mini reunion in Rockbridge County, and a variety of VBCA CRS blogs, wikis, and podcasting sites such as the VBCA Student for podcasting and Do You Believe in Me for publishing student writings. All of the sites that I use are free except for one personal domain that I use for personal links and email. Now, I am blogging on yet another free site, the one provided by the school division for us to use for instruction; my site is Technology & the alternative student, a reflection on what I am doing at work.

I have too many blog and wiki sites, so my next job is to evaluate what is really important, what I must keep and maintain, what I must keep for historical purposes, and what must be deleted. The time has come where teachers will create and maintain their own blogs, so there is no need for me to have quite so many — although, as I reflect on what this is all about, I am reminded that I must maintain a blog and a wiki for training purposes, as well — so there are two more sites that I cannot delete just yet.