Little did I know the time and practice that it takes to be able to juggle.
But I know now. I just completed EDES 501.
As you can see in the video, you learn to juggle in slow motion. When I first looked over the tasks for this course, I had no clue what it was all about. Multimedia sharing? social bookmarking?? When I started exploring each tool I was moving in slow motion. It took exploration and practice before I could move at a decent speed and use each tool properly.
Looking at the bigger picture, I have had 3 main demands to juggle - this course, my work, and personal life. In the video the juggler points out that most of the time only one ball is out of your hands. If I had a grasp on 2 of the 'balls' - this course and my work, for example, then it seemed like my personal life was up in the air. It's been quite the juggling act.
As I have become more comfortable with the juggling, I am so glad that I have taken this course. Looking back, this is the best course I have ever taken. The relevance to teaching and the sheer volume of what I have learned is incredible.
When I first set up this blog I had no clue what a blog even was. I thought that it would just be a learning log of my progress with each tool. You can tell from my URL name "lorisedes501blog" that I had no idea of the creativity that blogs allow for and benefit from. I learned this from my classmates' blogs and from reading the blogs of the experts like Will Richardson, Stephen Abram, and Lee Kolbert. I am no complex blogger but I've still come a long way.I've learned how to use so many great tools.
My RSS feeds have allowed me instant access to my favourite sites including all of the blogs I learned from.
My library wiki was a site I created for my students. It is a place they can go to read books online and book reviews written by their peers. If you look back at my blog posting on wikis, you can see I struggled with embedding my voki avatar. I am happy to report that I have figured this out! My students think the avatar is great.
I was very excited about the tasty treats del.icio.us had to offer. I still am. Delicious not only tags my favourite sites but it "automatically reminds users of previously deployed tags, suggests some tags, and notes tags used by others." (Alexander 2006). If you look back at my personal learning process, this tool made a difference in my life.
I really enjoyed creating podcasts using Audacity and Podomatic. I was surprised by how easy it is to make your own podcast. The only part I didn't enjoy was trying to embed my podcast to my blog!
I was also surprised how easy it was to make a YouTube video. I think photosharing and videosharing were great tools to start with. I was somewhat familiar with these tools before but had never explored them in terms of teaching and learning. I was intrigued to learn that Flickr was being used with students in many ways including creating visual stories, presentations, illustrating work, making connections or interpretations, and documenting field trips, school-wide events and projects.
Twitter was the tool that surprised me the most. I had no clue it could be used in so many different ways or for educational purposes. I have made contacts with some brilliant people. From following people like Joyce Valenza and David Warlick I realized that it wasn't just for telling people what you are doing. Mack Male and Joanne deGroot also helped me see it's usefulness. Today in fact Steven Anderson tweeted about the Kaboose site which led me to some excellent math games. I retweeted it and tagged it with Delicious. I am excited about the resources I have been compiling. This technology thing is great!
My group members were wonderful people to be teamed up with and I learned great things from them, including how many of the web tools can be used in the classroom. I furthered my Web 2.0 knowledge with our group discussions and by reading their blogs:
Crystal's EDES 501 - Crystal has informative and interesting blog postings that have progressed to become very in-depth and organized with lots of research.
Canadanz's Learning Page - Canadanz grabs her readers from the first sentence of her postings. She has effectively discussed her personal and professional learning and outlined the pros and cons of every tool she has tried.
Mark's Musings - Mark uses a brilliant analogy or metaphor and a strong sense of voice to keep his readers coming back. He is a true lifelong learner and has been an inspiration to me. Mark's screencast, Challenge_1, outlines the challenges many of us went through in creating/embedding our podcast and reminds Web 2.0 users to be prepared for trouble-shooting. I have to admit, at the time part of me was relieved to hear that others also had trouble embedding their podcast into their blog...sorry guys! Your support helped me. I thought for sure it was just me and I was missing something obvious. Now I know that there will be glitches and I feel better prepared to deal with them in the future.
Let me reflect on some of what I learned from each group member in our discussions ...
Crystal - She outlined many ways that RSS feeds can simplify our lives. She also gave me a better idea of how to achieve complex blogging and helped me realize that nope, I'm not there yet. She taught me how to become a critical consumer of text in Web 2.0 and the ways that digital literacy differs from traditional print, leading me to many good articles including Karchmer (2001). She led a comprehensive discussion on blog voice with a plethora of sources. My favourite was Rowse (2007) who suggests two easy ways to inject voice into your blog: first by airing your opinions, hopefully sparking continued discussion; and secondly by experimenting with humor to entertain your reader and have them return to your blog...Oh, if only I was funnier.
Canadanz - She investigated information overload and how it can be reduced. She also opened up my eyes to privacy issues and led me to interesting sources including this video created by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. She gave me lots of sources for how to improve my blog including Bingoooooo. This site had some great suggestions but I did have a laugh at their tip #5: "Make sure all your spelling is correct, your grammer and capatalsation." She also led us to consider blogging authenticity and whether people are faking it. Canadanz has made me consider the 'cons' or the problems that could arise. She reminded me it is important to look at both sides of a situation.
Mark - his discussion posts were always interesting because he often looked at the topics from a viewpoint that I hadn't considered much before. He made me think about the problem of internet addiction and led me to Wesley Fryer's blog and podcasts as he pondered the usefulness of widgets. I was also able to get some great ideas about how to encourage withdrawn students to blog: assign random numbers to students so they wouldn't have to use their names, provide a wide variety of questions to respond to and allow students to choose which questions they were most interested in and post online forum standards to reinforce anonymity and appropriate online interactions (Redekopp & Bourbonniere 2009). He scrutinized our discussion topic of reading for learning vs. reading for understanding, suggesting that the two go hand in hand. The articles he found such as “Reading for Learning: Literacy Supports for 21st-Century Work” by Gomez & Gomez (2007) suggested no distinction between learning and understanding. Mark has helped me realize that I should be questioning more rather than just believing and absorbing information.
Challenges
- Time: I learned so much in such a short time, it was like a whirlwind of information. I sometimes struggled to find adequate time to explore each tool, research, discuss, follow blogs, update my social networks, etc. There is nothing that I would have taken out of the course, however. I appreciate the efforts of our instructor, Joanne, who crammed it all in to the designated timeframe and had so much to mark so that we could learn so much.
- Information Overload: This relates to the time factor. There is just so much information on the web. I have never read more than I have in the last few months. I had to become a critical consumer of text and just scan, scan, scan.
- Accessibility: There are so many great tools that I have been eager to try out. However, my school has had issues with the computers being very slow, freezing up or sites being blocked. We are working to resolve these issues.
Future Plans
I am currently running a contest at my school for kids to write up book reviews. I will be putting them all on the wiki over the holidays, organized by grade level and book title. The website for my wiki is in our school's December newsletter so that parents can have access to it as well.
At our last Teacher-Librarian meeting, I brought up the idea of having a wiki to hold all of our book shares. At the moment the list of books are written down, then typed up and sent to everyone's emails each month. Having one place to access the book lists will be very handy.
This week I informed my staff that I would like to start presenting some of the web tools I have been learning. My plans are to show them Voicethread and Animoto at our next staff meeting. I chose these tools because I think they will get my colleagues interested. Also they are easy to learn how to use. I will first show them my animoto videos - Fiji 2009 and Whistler 2009 and then go through the steps of how easy it is to create videos like these. I will then show them parts of the What's a Voicethread Anyway and then my Fiji/Oz voicethread. I would also have them take a look at Alex's halloween book to give them an idea of how to use voicethreads with children.
I would like to introduce blogging to my staff. I would first show them the video Why Let Our Students Blog? to make them aware of the benefits of blogging with students. I will then show them how easy it is to set up a blog using Blogger and use Ann Davis' Write Weblog as a good example.
In terms of professional development, one of the best sources I came across was the K-12 Online Conference. I was so excited about it that I shared the site with my staff, other librarians, the TeacherLibrarian Ning, put a badge on my blog and tweeted about it on Twitter. I plan to continue accessing these presentations.
As educators we must become fully immersed in Web 2.0 tools before we can successfully introduce them to our students. As Will Richardson discusses in this Professional Development post, "while we need an understanding of tools to make the connections, the personal shift around those tools drives the pedagogical shift. It’s difficult to understand the impact that online learning networks and communities can bring (and their potential downsides) without being a part of them." The focus should be on "helping educators understand the potentials of these spaces for their own learning first and their teaching second." (Richardson 2009)
This video made me think about what it means to be a 21st century learner and what is best for the students of today:
As I have travelled down this Web 2.0 path of learning, I have seen so many sights. I plan to continue on my journey – wherever it leads - and bring my colleagues and students down each part of the path as I become more familiar with my surroundings.
“I see my path, but I don't know where it leads. Not knowing where I'm going is what inspires me to travel it.”
~Rosalia de Castro
This course has enriched my life both personally and professionally. Thank you to my classmates for going on this journey with me.
Thank you to my instructor Joanne for showing me the path.
Articles
Alexander B.(2006) “Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and
Learning?” EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 41, no. 2 (March/April 2006): 32-44.
Gomez, L., & Gomez, K.. (2007). Reading for Learning: Literacy Supports for 21st-Century Work. Phi Delta Kappan, 89(3), 224-228. Retrieved November 8, 2009, from ProQuest Education Journals.
Karchmer, R.(2001) The journey ahead: Thirteen teachers report how the Internet influences literacy and literacy instruction in their K-12 classrooms. Reading Research Quarterly, 36(4), 442-466. Retrieved October 28, 2009, from ProQuest Education Journals.
Redekopp, R., & Bourbonniere, E. (2009). Giving Reluctant Students a Voice. Learning & Leading with Technology, 36(7), 34-35. Retrieved from Education Research Complete database.
