Blogs, Wikis and Twitter Oh My

I know that I am a week behind with this blog but I will try to make up for it. It's funny to me how much harder the writing part is than the reading. The same thing is true for my reading challenge blog. I have read close to 50 books since I began the challenge, but I have only managed to blog about 27 of them. Why is that? It really makes me stop and think about some of the work we ask our students to do - and why they sometimes have difficulty getting it done.

I have to say that this class (and the last) became even more relevant to me this week while at the TIES conference in Minneapolis. Bernajean Porter (of DigiTales fame) was one of the featured presenters, most of the sessions had to do with blogging, on-line discussions, wikis, etc. and you couldn't go anywhere without seeing a tweet!!!

I had been following a few people on Twitter before, but I found that I was getting a lot of overlap from the information on my RSS feeds. It seemed that people were tweeting about things they were reading on these blogs and I found that I got more information from reading the blog than the tweet so... I guess I will give it another try. Maybe I need to find different people to follow. I think I will start with some of the fabulous presenters at the TIES conference. (Can you tell that I loved this conference? The only bad part is coming back down to reality when you return to work. I would love to see all of these innovative ideas implemented TODAY but I will be patient and try to keep taking the little steps that will get us there in the future.)

The readings this week have motivated me to make some changes to my Reading Challenge Blog (and to work on updating my postings) and to make some other changes to my wikispace. I am considering switching to Weebly, we'll see. All of my reading over the past 2 weeks has really convinced me that we are on the right track with My Big Campus and some of the other wiki's and blogs that are being used in my school. I will continue to push for some of the more reluctant teachers to at least try blogging themselves in order to see how effective it can be and to follow some other educators on their blogs. Rss feeds are a perfect way to build you personal learning network and continue your education every day. What a great way to connect with fellow educators/experts from around the country and around the world. I have said it before to my staff, but I think it's worth another push.

Pecha Kucha Take 2

Okay, I was wrong. In my previous discussions about the Pecha Kuchas, I had indicated that I thought they would be too long. Actually, it wasn't long enough. I really tried to limit what I said about each book and I tried to talk as fast as I could while still being understood - and I still ended up about 10 seconds too long on each slide. I am continuing to tweak it but I'm not sure I'll be able to get it down to 20 seconds per image. I know that's hard for a lot of you to believe, since I am always at a loss for words!!! Overall it was a lot more fun than I thought it would be. This would definitely be a interesting project for students to force them to be as succinct as possible. I think they would enjoy it.

PREZI!!!

I love Prezi. I have used it for a number of presentations and I think it is fantastic. It can have a tendency to have too much movement, and make the audience sick, until the creator gets used to using it more effectively. I feel that I use more of the principles of Presentation Zen when I use Prezi. I am less likely to resort to bullet points or writing out my whole presentation. It forces you to really focus on the important points and highlight them by literally zooming in on them. You need to be more organized and have a more well thought out "story" to use Prezi effectively. I think my audiences, mostly students, think it's pretty cool too.

Pecha Kucha

When I started writing my post for this week - I realized that I had missed mine for last week. So....I have to say that thus far, this is my favorite class. I think that the ideas and sites are the most applicable to what I do everyday and I can easily see how they could be used with my students. I love Animoto. I have used it a number of times before, and I have had my students use it on a number of occasions. I like that it is easy to use and still gives you a very professional looking product. The one thing that I'm a little hesitant about is the Pecha Kucha. A first you think that 20 seconds isn't that long for a slide, but you don't really look at one image for that long in most presentations. I tend to do a lot of mini-lessons in my job and don't usually talk for close to 7 minutes straight. I'll have to see how this works as I get started on my storyboard.

Digital Stories in the Library

I actually use digital stories often in the library. I love to use book trailers when I do book talks for classes. The visual images, in combination with music and words, can "sell" a student on a book much better than my description alone. When I talk about books, I usually have a combination of trailers and those without. The books with trailers always get checked out first.

Book talks is only a portion of what I do. I can see that digital stories could really add to the actual lessons that I teach as well. It's reminding of when I used to teach high school social studies. I used to try hard to make the "stories" come alive to my students by painting a word picture, and talking in a conversational way that pulled them in. Why then have I started doing all of my library lessons as power points with bullets? Wouldn't these lessons be impacted just as much by "stories"? I have tried some things, but there is really so much more out there that will really allow me to impact my students more.

Digital Storytelling

I am really looking forward to this class. I think that I'm in for a lot of work, but the content seems interesting. These are skills that everyone needs to improve on, and if I can make my presentations more effective and entertaining, I will be able to make a larger impact on my school community.

I am also a little worried about this class. Typically, creativity is not one of my strong suits. I have never enjoyed creative writing and I am artistically challenged. (My stick figure don't even look like stick figures) Hopefully I can learn some skills and tools that will help my struggling right brain. I have used some tools, like photostory and microsoft movie maker to make "book trailers" and as an assessment tool for a health class project. (The students create a photo story as their final presentation for a unit on diseases - some of these were very personal and powerful)

I am actually currently seeking an alternative to Photostory. Our district upgraded to Windows 7 over the summer, and chose not to purchase the compatible upgrade to photostory. Therefore we need to come up with something else for the health classes to use before these projects begin again in January.

Course Reflection

Whew! This has been the toughest of the classes so far. Apparently my life has a very delicate balance and I can function when all of the pieces fit where they are supposed to. But when one of those pieces slips out of place....watch out.

Actually, I can keep everything together when I stay on top of them, but I managed to get behind in this class and it made it very hard to keep going. That being said, I really enjoyed the class. These are important concepts to effective teaching that sometimes get forgotten in the push for "content". It is necessary to reflect on the different ways that we can impact our students, and to develop an arsenal of strategies to have at our disposal. Isn't it funny how sometimes the simplest concepts (such as feedback) are the ones that we tend to forget, yet they are also the ones that can provide the biggest "aha" moments?!