Category Archive
The following is a list of all entries from the Professional Development category.
Web 2.0 Overload
Wow, it’s been quite a while since I last posted…
I have spent the better part of the morning creating a workshop on Web 2.0 tools (or so I thought). Just as I was finishing I decided to check out Robin Good’s blog for a couple of new web 2.0 goodies. After 20 minutes, my Flock taskbar was inundated with open tabs, all ready for my perusal. I DON’T HAVE THE TIME OR ENERGY TO CHECK OUT ALL OF THESE TOOLS! Just as I think I’ve found the next cool thing, I stumble upon something else that is entirely new and just as great! When will it stop? Though its exciting, I worry about where this is all headed. How can we expect our faculty and staff to keep up with the tools when the integration specialist can barely keep up? Will people eventually get over it and quit looking for new tools? How many more social networking sites can possibly be created this week? What’s next?
Projects at WCS
Lately, my afternoons have been consumed by workshops, inservice classes, and one-on-one sessions. With all of the technology integration happening at Williamson, I decided it was finally time to start posting about it. I have created a new page at the top of my blog aptly named, WCS Projects. Feel free to check out what’s happening at Williamson and post a comment letting us know what you think!
Google vs. Flickr
Educational Application Analysis
Source: Harry Tuttle
What would you use in your classroom?
Workshop with Will Richardson
I hope most of you have had a little time to rest from Will’s 3-hour training session. I know a lot of material was covered and that it probably seems quite daunting to think about integrating everything into your busy teaching schedules.
To help you internalize the material, I’d like to recap a few things… First, I think the point of yesterday’s session wasn’t neccesarily a ploy to make all of you classroom bloggers, but, rather to open up the world of blogging to you. Once you understand what blogging is, how HUGE it has become, and what type of material is available for you to read, then, you might begin thinking about incorporating such a practice into your instruction. Palloff and Pratt (1999, p.16) believe that active learning occurs when
“learners actively create knowledge and meaning through
experimentation.” As educators, we must experiment with blogging. We
need to understand how it works, why it works, and how it can work for
us.
Yesterday’s workshop was by no means a way for Will to convice WCS that every teacher should use blogs in the classroom. He was merely opening your eyes to a new community. For years, researchers have been writing about the effects of communities on learners. Just as important in traditional face-to-face classrooms, learning communities are vital on the internet. Blogs are learning communities. Yes, some material out there is inappropriate for our students, but we can’t neglect the seemingly immediate communities that develop within the blogosphere.
I’d like all of you to explore blogs. Don’t worry about wikis, RSS, del.icio.us, and the myriad of other techie terms Will threw out. Blogs have been around for a while, and as you saw, are growing everyday. Go out and read. Find a blog about your hobby, your educational practices, your favorite food. Once you understand the blogging world, and its communities, you might want to look into RSS to “easily” gather the posts from all of “your” blogs. More on that later…
Palloff, Rena M. & Kieth Pratt. Building Learning Communities in Cyberspace: Effective Strategies for the Online Classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999.
technorati tags:Blogs, RSS, Will, Richardson
