Ruschn2discover

There are lots of possibilities with a podcast, however there are SO many steps to getting this done–and a rather long process time for transfer to MP3 and upload/download.  I’d love to use this as a publishing opportunity for reports on the web for parent/student perousal, but I’m feeling really intimidated.  I can foresee a lot of management issues for this one–and some lost work/time with student errors.  I think I would have to approach it from a small group setting…perhaps an assignment of different groups at different times throughout the year, rather than a whole group project assigned at the same time.

I’ve already discussed with another teacher on my team the opportunity for our team of four middle grades teachers to use Pageflakes pages as a more “user friendly” and “productive” page for our teacher communication and  homework websites.  Parents have commented about the difficult navigation/code protected locations of our current web pages.  We work hard to make our webs informative for parents and students, but are often told they never check them.  Perhaps one website with all four teachers pages would be more appealing?  We’re playing with the idea and hope to implement it this year.

Another avenue that I would LOVE to develop is the WebQuest layout.  That was an awesome layout!  I’ve created my own web quests but found the example item to be very engaging and interactive.  Research links would be all collected and placed in one site–very user-friendly!  I think the kids would especially like to interactiveness of a web quest like that.

Here’s my Pageflakes page:

http://mrusch26.edublogs.org/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=26&message=1 (more…)

I’m taking the pressure off some of my lectures with a history feed from ‘History According to Bob.’  I’ve also added a PBS feed “Frontline/World” that I may use as an enrichment activity for my early finishers.  I like the brevity of many of these podcasts, but the content is typically rich and reasonably entertaining.  I’m keeping this educational at this point, but I can see its use on a more personal level.  This would be equally beneficial to my own downtime enrichment.

The directories led to me a plethora of content.  I had no problem finding many that I would like.  One drawback was the loading time for a few of the sites I selected.  But we know how that goes…technology is often unpredictable.

Way cool site!  I loved this!  Navigating this page is SO much more productive than other book sites.  I quickly viewed new novel possibilities, but the group sites were intriguing.  One was called “happy heathens.”  I couldn’t help but check it out–yes, an atheist site–sort of.  No, I’m not atheist, but I was curious about the group and its conversation thread.  There must be a wide variety of other interesting groups on this site.

My favorite part of the site was the recommendations.  I typically like to hear someone’s thoughts prior to buying a new novel.  I just don’t want to be disappointed or waste my time.  This would be another option to use when my reader friends aren’t available.

I can definitely see a great value in ‘delicious.’  With the use of tags, I’m sure my searches will become more fruitful.  As a result, I’ll spend less time looking and more time finding and developing the use of the sites.  One thing I have found frustrating is all the sites incorporated in the class.  I’m finding myself lost in cyberspace at times.  In all fairness, this has happened more often when I’m tired or distracted.  However, when one is working within a small window, the seemingly unending directions that these sites can take you gets my mind a little boggled.  I can imagine how I might go on lengthy trips on ‘delicious’ also.

That being said, I thing one beneficial use of this at my school would be for sharing among the departmental teachers.  It would save time in the end.

http://del.icio.us/mrusch26

Check out this great article about student motivation in middle school!  I’ve had a lot of questions since my introduction last year to middle school students–mostly around student motivation (or lack thereof)

This article had applications of some of the tools that have been introduced in this class, but it also addresses some of the commonly debated issues between teachers in schools, like testing and developmental issues.  The comments that were posted were also worthy of a glance.

Seriously…I’m SUPPOSED to pick maybe a few tools, but THIS is just too awesome!  I’ve already used Glogster with my 8th grade classes to a wonderful end.  I’ve also used Quizlet to create review vocabulary for exams.  These, by the way, were introduced to me by other teachers who had taken the class already.

The first three new choices that popped for me were: Polldaddy, Timetoast, and Wordle.  I would use Polldaddy for professional improvement through student input of projects and processes.  I would also use it as a component in projects–for students to develop a poll and show a deeper understanding of a concept.

Polldaddy would be great to collect student input about the class or projects but would be equally good for student generated projects for history content: debate prompts, etc.

I would use Timetoast for student created timelines and perhaps a teacher generated timeline for the quarter–eliminating certain questions like: When are exams?  When is our next project?  When is the test? When is our next break….etc.

I think Wordle would be a productive way for students to demonstrate their understanding of a topic on a thematic level, using emotion words, important person names, and event names to create a historical collage.  This type of project would not take up a lot of class time, would be creative, and would help students demonstrate understanding on a more creative level.

The most obvious social feature that I gained is the ease of access of many of these sites.  This would increase the amount of collaborative interaction from source areas other than the classroom–very nice, very flexible.

For this task, I viewed a video and editing in the classroom session by Kevin Burden.  The focus for this podcast was to enrich gifted students’ interpretation and understanding of poetry through an assignment that included a multi-media approach: pictures, video clip, voice threads, etc. (This was an older, 2006 session)

The students were 15 and a year advanced in their curriculum.  This project seemed partly an experiment in observing student skills/understandings gained.  One objective was to see what students could do with an activity like this…an attempt to bridge deeper, more refined interpretation of a story by combining multi-media components and student to student feedback/alternative interpretations.

This task was worthwhile.  I’m often frustrated a little when students don’t always meet my expectations at the end of a project.  It was nice to hear someone else express their own observations of inadequate student performance (even from gifted students) and acknowledge the need for both scaffolding and tweeking throughout the project.  Student results don’t have to be perfect to demonstrate REALLY STRONG student learning.  I think I can be too hard on myself when I seek to create a “perfect project.”

I learned about a video editor program called JUMPCUT that I will probably investigate in the future, and like the flexibility of this mode of professional development.  I’ll be exploring some of the the more recent conference topics later.

While this project focused on poetry, it spawned ideas of how I might use blogging or multimedia options to have students respond to samples of cultural music, since I teach Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

Theme:  How Will You See the World? Modes of Transportation and Inquiry

I liked searching Flickr, and thanks to the “optional search” I was able to quickly find a large variety of the items I needed.  One of the notable characteristics of this picture resource is the colorful, inspiring, professional images that are available–not just the basic stuff.

The most obvious use that I could easily implement in my Social Studies class would be to help students learn vocabulary.  I preferred the “tag” method of this use in the poem, rather than the “picture” method.  It provided more visual variety and there were too many pictures that had been deleted or were unavailable when the link word was clicked.  It seemed like it would take more maintainance in order to use successfully, since only one picture was linked as an example–which was sometimes not available.  The use of pictures that correspond with unfamiliar and often hard to spell/pronounce words would make the learning process more affective and definitely more interesting.

I realize I could also use this tool for student generated application/presentations, but I’m not ready to incorporate all of these new things at once.  However, I think I would put it in the top 5 for tools I want to use this coming year.