A New Beginning

Although this course was challenging at times, learning to use the technology was an added bonus. Many new tools were learned which can be incorporated into the teaching and learning process. The best I can think of is to learn well one at a time and share it with my students so that they can benefit.

We must also be encouraged to continuously keep on the path to professional development so that both we and our students will benefit from the knowledge gained.

To the lecturers, thank you for the learning experiences of this course.

Wikis in the classroom

Wikis are the most useful tool in the reading classroom as they can encourage collaboration. I found a really great site that shared 50 ways to use wikis in the classroom and thought that I should share it with the group.

http://www.smartteaching.org/blog/2008/08/50-ways-to-use-wikis-for-a-more-collaborative-and-interactive-classroom/

Resource Creation
Using these ideas, your students can collaboratively create classroom valuables.
Virtual field trips: Have your students research far away places they would like to go on a field trip, and get them to share images and information about the location.
Create presentations: Instead of using traditional presentation software, put presentations on a wiki.
Write a Wikibook: Make it a class project to collaboratively write a reference book that others can use.
Study guides: Ask students to create study guides for a specific part of the unit you’re studying.
Readers’ guides: Have your students create readers’ guides to share their favorite and most important parts of works you’ve read in class.
Solving wiki: Post difficult math problems, such as calculus, so that the class can collaboratively solve them.
Glossary: Get your class to create a glossary of terms they use and learn about in new units, adding definitions and images.
Class encyclopedia: Ask your class to create an "encyclopedia" on a topic, adding useful information that can be built upon through the years.
Create exploratory projects: If you’re teaching a new subject, ask your students to collect and share information in the wiki so that you can learn together.
Student Participation
These projects are sure to get your students involved.
Exam review: Encourage students to share review notes and other helpful pieces of information on your classroom’s wiki.
Peer review: Allow students to draft their papers in a wiki, then ask other students to comment it.
Student portfolios: Assign portfolio pages to each of your students, and allow them to display and discuss their work.
Correction competition: You can post a document riddled with mistakes, then have students compete to see who can fix the most errors fastest.
Peer editing: Ask students to edit each others’ work for spelling, grammar, and facts based on a style guide or rules you’ve defined.
Vocabulary lists: Encourage students to submit words that they had trouble with, along with a dictionary entry.
Get feedback: Ask students to post comments on wiki pages.
Share notes: Let your students share their collective information so that everyone gets a better understanding of the subject.

Group Projects
Allow wikis to facilitate group work by using these ideas.
Group authoring: By asking groups to use central documents in a wiki, you can ensure that everyone’s documentation will be uniform.
Grandma timeline: Have your students create a history timeline using Grandmas as units of time.
Organize ideas: Allow group members to post their ideas in a wiki, and you’ll cut down on duplicate ideas, while at the same time allowing them to build upon the ideas.
Fan clubs: Start fan clubs for your students’ favorite figures from history and ask them to contribute their favorite quotes, photos, and other tidbits together.
Track projects: With wikis, it’s easy for students to see which tasks have been completed and which ones still need to be fulfilled.
Track participation: Assign a wiki page to a group project, and then individual pages for each student to show their participation.
Student Interaction
Get your students to work together on these projects.
Collect data: Use central documents to make sure that data collection is uniform and easy to manage.
Mock-debate: Pit two class candidates against each other and perform a debate on your wiki.
Study buddy matching: Let students match themselves up into study buddy pairs.
Multi-author story: Start a creative writing unit, and get your students to write a short story together, each writing a small amount of the story.
Choose your own adventure story: A twist on the multi-author story could be a choose your own adventure story, where each student branches out into a different path.
Share reviews: Post articles for different movies, books, and TV shows, encouraging students to share what they though about them.
Literature circles: Host a book club on your wiki where students are required to read the same book, then discuss it on the wiki.

For the Classroom
Use your wiki to create spaces that are special to your class.
Classroom FAQ: Make it a class project to create an FAQ for your classroom that will help new students and those that will come in years later.
Classroom scrapbook: Share news, photos, and current achievements in your classroom on a wiki page.
Calendar: Create a calendar on the wiki and encourage students to add their own personally important dates.
Classroom newspaper: Create your own news outlet on a wiki.
Hall of fame: Highlight students’ exceptional achievements on the wiki.
Classroom policies: Encourage students to draft rules and policies for the classroom.
Community
Reach out to the community with these resources that everyone can appreciate.
School tour: Get your class to take photos of your school and write about their favorite spots on the wiki, then share it with the rest of your school and your local community.
Recipe book: Ask students to bring in their favorite recipes from home, then share them with parents and the rest of the community.
International sharing: Collaborate with a class from another country and share information about your culture, or even a day in the life of a typical student.
Local history: Document historical buildings, events, and more from our community. You can ask students to perform interviews, and encourage parents and other adults to contribute their knowledge in the wiki.
Community FAQ: Ask students to create an FAQ for their community, then pass it on to your next group of students.
Community nature guide: Have your students collect highlights of plants and animals in your community.
Share achievements: Let parents log in to the wiki to see what their children have accomplished.

Other
Here are even more fun and useful ways to improve your classroom with a wiki.
Let your students leave their books at school: With a strong classroom wiki, you should have a wealth of information available, so much so that students can leave their books at school and access information online.
Use wikis as a hub: Any time a student creates anything online, ask them to link to it or upload it to the wiki so that everyone can use it.
Make website creation easier for students: Using a wiki platform, students don’t have to worry about web design, so they can focus on content instead.
Organization: Save links, documents, and quotes related to units or your classroom as a whole.
Track assignments: If you ask students to put their research on wikis, you can check in on their progress to make sure they’re on the right path.
Teacher collaboration: Work with other teachers to create lesson plans and track students’ success.
Create and pass a legislative bill: Let students see the back and forth that exists in legislation by creating their own and attempting to pass it.

Try these!

As a reading facilitator, one must apply the three c's of 21st century learning in the classroom. They are: create, communicate and collaborate, Ferriter(2009). In addition, you must be able to teach students how to manage and evaluate information on the internet. For creativity, we must test the boundaries of what is possible so that we can learn and our students can learn as well. For communication, we must use our voice in positive ways and in the finding of new means to express our opinions and to help our students gain their own voice. In terms of collaboration, we must work together with other facilitators and fellow teachers to improve what is already done and what can still be done for the development of reading in this country.

Try these collaborative writing tools:

http://www.zoho.com

http://www.writeboard.com

http://www.gliffy.com

Be on the alert!

With the implementation of technology in the classroom, come added responsibilities. Teachers who use technology must be aware of and be able to protect their students from the negative media that exists especially on the internet. There are many inappropriate videos and websites available for free access.

Some sites such as YouTube should only be used by the teacher as a source of resource material. Additionally, students should not be allowed to freely explore the internet without proper supervision. Guidelines for the use of the internet must be carefully shared with the student. For example, the student should not without the consent of the parent post personal information or pictures which can be used as a source of information for predators. Mullen and Wedwick (2008) suggest allowing the student to choose a pseudonym when posting blogs etc.

I recently found out that the Ministry of Education does not include social networking sites as a part of what can be used in schools. This must be the result of the negatives surrounding them. How can we as reading facilitators overcome this hurdle?

Digital Storytelling

During this course I was introduced to digital storytelling using both Microsoft Power Point and Microsoft Photo Story 3. It was quite easy to get excited about the enormous possibilities available for teaching the student reading skills and for allowing the practice and development of the skill. Ohler (2006) suggests that digital storytelling can improve “students’ skills in critical thinking, expository writing, and media literacy” and other 21st century skills.

Photo Story 3, especially has numerous features that can improve any story. These features can cause the student to become sidetracked. The student must prepare their story carefully and decide what is needed to make its message clear. Overuse of the technology can lessen the impact of the story. As the saying goes, “less is more”.

Technocentric or Curriculum-centred?

Over the period of this course, ICT in Reading, I have read a few articles that discuss the need to focus more on the content being taught than on the technological tool used to enhance the content and improve the learning of the student. The vast difference between technology and traditional methods can often overwhelm both the teacher and the student. I also felt overwhelmed at the numerous things that could be learned and needed to be learned.

Harris and Hofer (2009) argued in their article discussing the goals of TPACK; that technology must not overpower the content but must be used as a tool to implement it. The content such as the reading skill that must be taught has to be the central focus of the lesson. The web 2.0 technologies can act as support to the actual teaching of the lesson and also for the activities which the students will use to express their understanding of the content. Of course, initially the teacher has to spend time introducing the student to the new technology.

Ebooks??

Buying new and crisp books, turning the pages, is for many traditionalists a singular joy. Traditionalists here refer to those persons who love to walk around with books in their bags that they know will not be stolen and who love to bend pages or buy pretty bookmarks. I am one; at least I was until I was introduced in this course to ebooks. Ebooks are available for reading in different formats. Some ebooks might mean audio books or having a story read online by a famous person or someone else available with illustrations.

When reading stories to students some teachers are able to read in a way that holds interest in the story; others may not. One advantage of ebooks is that they are often read by a professional who will understand the story and present it dramatically. Students can also read or listen at their own pace if they are at a personal computer. One ebook site, the link for which is available on myelearning, which I found very interesting and useful as it came with activities and the stories were read by famous actors, is : http://www.storylineonline.net/

Concept Maps for Meaningful Learning

As a Language Arts teacher, I have always found concept maps to be very reliable tools for getting students involved in the writing process, especially brainstorming and organizing their thoughts before, during and after reading. I especially encourage students to use them when writing summaries and preparing to write essays. With the summaries, students can pick out the main idea and the sub points and create their own maps to show their understanding of what they have read. They can then use the map as a guide for writing their summaries. This is helpful as many students like to pick sentences directly out of the passage rather than write it in their own words. The concept map encourages them to search for the relevant information and put it in the right order. I also use concept maps as a personal tool.

The article by Cañas and Novak(2008) showed a wide range of uses for the concept map. For example, I learned about using connecting lines for linking words and phrases to show relationships and even the development of a focus question. I will definitely share this new understanding with my students in the coming academic year. Other content area teachers can also use concept maps for concept and vocabulary development with their students.

Digital Abyss

I read a very useful article entitled, “Avoiding the Digital Abyss: Getting started in the Classroom with YouTube, Digital Stories, and Blogs” by Rebecca Mullen and Linda Wedwick. It shared how teachers need to try to lessen the gap between the traditional definition of literacy and the new one. It also shared how teachers at a rural middle school in the U.S. were using various technologies in the classroom. Additionally, the article provided a lot of insight into the many ways the technology can be applied to the classroom situation.

For me, I was especially impressed with the use of YouTube. I am fairly new to YouTube, although it’s very popular, and I am excited about the possibilities for videos that can be found there, not only music. I once used song video with lyrics as a set induction for professional development in my department. YouTube is a great resource tool for the teacher. The article also suggested various sites such as SchoolTube and TeacherTube. I visited TeacherTube and found useful pictures, documents and videos which will be great resources. I also found an interesting video on how not to use Power Point.

Are schools hostile to learning?

I discovered an article in Educational Leadership Feb. 2009 titled “Learning with blogs and wikis”. The author, Bill Ferriter, began by discussing how schools are hostile to learning and how blogs and wikis can be used to get educators to find learning opportunities where they normally would not. This article reminded me about a story a friend told me about her son. She was having some trouble with him because in Standard One, he had begun to hate school and did not want to go because there was too much work and it was too difficult. And it was not that he did not understand the work for he is a good reader who loves to read. Both of these led me to wonder if at times we as teachers encourage students to be hostile to learning because we have become hostile. I have often heard fellow teachers complain about the amount of papers to correct, the lessons to plan and teach and all the added paperwork. And added to that there is the rush to prepare students for the national tests and the exams. And then there are the workshops that have to be attended and assimilated.

Ferriter suggested that blogs and wikis can encourage educators and their students to “create, communicate, and collaborate”, all necessary skills for our times. Teachers can begin by reflecting and sharing the many educational blogs available on any topic possible. Later they can graduate to writing blogs. And they can also work in teams to create wikis.
Before we help our students find their voice we must find our own.

What do you look forward to about teaching or on a school day?

Suggested sites from the article

Wiki - www.wetpaint.com sample http://anatowiki.wetpaint.com
Blog on education: www.edublogs.com
Really Simple Syndication: www.pageflakes.com for teachers http://teacher.pageflakes.com

Are we giving Students a Voice?

Over the course of this M ed. Program, I have seen many ways that teachers can give students a voice. This is especially so for this course in web 2.0 technologies. Students can use blogs, wikis, podcasts and digital storytelling etc. to express their opinions and develop reading and writing skills.

This is the reason that many of the social networking sites like facebook, hifive and the others are so popular. It is not just about that desire for two seconds in the spotlight and ‘the everyone wants to be famous’ game. I know of students who do not even have a computer at home and have facebook accounts which they access regularly. People, especially young people, are looking for places where their opinions are of value. In spite of how misguided the methods they use sometimes.

There is a golden opportunity here for teachers to help their students access these avenues and also use them for productive purposes. Even as there is so much negativity that students, especially adolescents have to relate to daily. This will help students learn gain the benefits that can be achieved from expressing their opinions in positive ways.