Ning...Ning...Ning... Yet Another Tool?

I recently decided to increase my network presence and after reading many great blogs, I decided to create a page on ning, click on the picture to check out my page. Well I do like it's many capabilities. I uploaded some personal photo's, downloaded an image from flickr, added a video and my first podcast. It appear to be robust and connects you with other social networks quickly. But I don't think it is as great as I had previously thought. The text editor is extremely limited. You cannot change font's, colors or sizes unless your great at html and it has been a while for me. When you join a social network, you are prompted to create your own page again. How many pages does one really need on the internet? Google ads show up on the right side of your page unless you are willing to pay the $19.95 premium service fee. I leave ning with mixed feelings. Is it really the great tool I thought I had found? I'm still not sure. If your a ning user, I'd love to hear what you think... The center of learning and technology lists ning as one of the 100 top tools in education. Do you agree?

Teaching in a networked world

When teaching in a networked environment, passions for and uses of learning grow in a way that has little to do with demographics. Therefore the flexibility provided by the educators becomes especially important and the new meaning of access to education is quite individual enabling individuals in making their own decisions regarding their private and public lives. And in making these decisions comes great responsibility and it is up to us an educators to teach the extreme importance of proper conduct and internet safety in a networked environment. The students need to understand that the world can and will be there audience and they must write accordingly. A friend of mine just posted a link to a podcast where it is evident that students are abusing the use of the internet. It can be found at: http://www.storiesofus.com/previews.html.

In another article, , thanks Jeff, you see how negative endorsements can severely affect students in the academic setting.”University throws Facebook at Revelers”.

In its capacity as a tool, Internet and networks are but a ripple on the surface of our educational institutions. It is allowing us to expand our capacity as intellectual being and helps to challenge, us. Networking and the internet are without precedent in the educational history of mankind. The importance of networking in education has been finally been seen, particularly the use of wikis and blogs. A wealth of resources and techniques now exist which serve as a source both for exciting examples of new teaching practices, as well as easily accessible methods for adoption into various formats of teaching and learning. Not only is it changing the way we think, it is changing the way we teach and the way our students learn. The internet and networking technologies have allowed teachers and students keep up with their minds. It lets us try our ideas as soon as they come up with them.

Personal Learning Networks - What are they anyway?

To me it is the network I am creating with my online presence. It is the many people who have decided to follow me on twitter and those I have decided to follow. It’s the really cool teacher from Wisconsin that liked my blog and keeps in touch. It is my wiki, my network is becoming a part of my everyday living. It helps me stay informed and it helps me to learn. The constant rate at which I am receiving information that is of interest to me and it’s all great. My network allows me to expand my thinking and better yet, when I am unsure of something or need an answer, I can go to my network. These many people who comprise my network are experts in many fields and have many answers and resources that they are more than happy to share. Thank goodness for my network, because with technology evolving so quickly I just can’t always keep up.

For students and schools this network could be such a valuable resource. It will help them to find relevant information quickly, it will allow them to make connections with people and content and allow them the possibility for other points of view. As teacher’s we really can only teach so much, we only have so much time and knowledge. Does it not make sense that personal learning networks would benefit our students immensely? They are learning from other people, they are blogging and getting many different takes, thoughts and ideas to expand upon. Learning does not essential end, but continues. Students could make connections as well as know exactly where to go to get the knowledge or content that they need. PLNs can only increase our student’s knowledge, it is one of the most powerful resources we could teach/ give them.

For an interesting read on personal learning networks and communities, check out “Learning Ecology, Communities and Networks; Extending the classroom” by George Siemens. The article is dated five years ago but is still quite enlightening in comparison with the other articles, blogs and podcasts I have found on the subject. For a great podcast, check out Professional Learning Networks; Online Professional Development by Jeff Utecht.

Web 2.0 and Personal Learning Networks

I'm adding more thoughts on the article“Web 2.0 a Social Movement” by William Birdsall. In reading the article again, I found the following:

“Web 2.0 has increased the participatory role given to users of the Web in its development and use. Tim O’Reilly, who is often given credit for coining the term Web 2.0, talks about development principles that include: “an architecture of participation;” “harnessing collective intelligence;” “rich user experience;” “trusting users as co-developers;” development in a state of “perpetual beta”; “the wisdom of crowds” (O’Reilly, 2005).

These crowds have become our own personal learning networks, our communities. We use blogs and wiki’s and subscribe to feeds. Feeds in themselves change how we interact with the internet; we are having pertinent information given to us. We are no longer searching endlessly for that information. Imagine the potential for students. Have you ever seen an 8^th grade student in a computer lab or library try to perform nettrekker and google searches and come back frustrated as can be. I have. We are removing a piece of frustration and giving back to our students the time they need to digest information instead of having them spend all of their time searching for information. None of this would be possible without web 2.0. And where does that leave us in education, where do we focus when it comes to web 2.0 and professional development, lacking indeed.

Personally having become a web 2.0 user of late, I am amazed at the amount of tools that are out there and the amount of information I have already learned and accumulated via these tools. In eight weeks I have played with at least 10 different tools, and I haven’t even begun to touch the surface. Web 2.0 has allowed me to connect to people all over the world, via my blog, my wiki, my twitter account, and various other bookmarking and networking tools that I have found. I am thrilled to be a part of such a large and growing community.

Web 2.0 - A Social Movement

I just found this article on "Web 2.0 as a Social Movement" and I had to share it. In thinking about web 2.0 and learning networks, I found this link from a previous grad course I took. Did you know that:

The emerging presence of Web users has become so vivid that Time magazine choose for its 2006 person of the year “You,” the millions of individuals who are loading content daily on such sites as YouTube, MySpace, and so forth. Time characterizes this dramatic change in the information age with the rhetoric articulated by Web 2.0 pundits: “community and collaboration,” “power to the people,” “seizing the reins of global media,” “citizen to citizen, person to person,” “massive social experiment” (Time, 2007).

This just reinforces what I was already thinking about. Web 2.0 is an increasing community and with this community comes increased personal networks and increased knowledge.

Reflection on Classroom 2.0 or You Live Where?

I really enjoyed the presentation by Clarence Fisher, who's presentation I found on the K12 online conference 2007 website. The foresight it takes to see the changes needed in our attitudes towards education is very inspiring to see. I think that we do need to change our attitudes about how we teach our curriculum. He states that it is our thoughts about how we educate our students that must change and I could not agree with him more. It is no longer a text book world but a vast and growing world with an abundance of resources. We need to think more about our student's best interests and we need to prepare them for the future. In today's growing technological societies, we need to learn to embrace collaboration and all of the tools that allow and complement that collaboration. We need to think about how the free tools available to us will positively affect our students. They will be sharing and creating ideas and posting them for discussion from all around the world. They are thinking about what they are writing and reflecting on information that is relevant to them. This is a true enhancement to any subject of interest for the student. They are making connections that will contribute and possibly reshape their thoughts. This is what we need in order to prepare our students for the future and this is what we must strive to accomplish in our classrooms, students who are creative, sharing thinkers.

OBSTACLES TO OPPORTUNITIES - K12 Online Conference

Well, If you have never had the chance, every educator interested in technology integration and concerned with the obstacles found in school administration, restriction on access, how to complete a task that is more meaningful to your students, then I highly recommend the presentation by Brian Cosby on Turning Obstacles into Opportunities. This presentation shows how students who are weak in certain areas such as English, writing, pronouncing, mathematics can all be helped with the use of technology integration.

He shows us exactly how powerful blogs and wikis can be to a students educational experience. Students spend more time thinking about what they are going to write, they are not just regurgitating information, but actually processing it and forming an opinion. The have an audience and get feedback about their thinking”.

Free online software is available to help practice skill sets and hopefully your school budget has allowed for a video camera or web cam as he also shows us how ESL students excel with pronouncing words when they are being recorded. What a motivating factor. In another example we are shown how web cams in the classroom helped to include a student with cancer that could not attend class. By using the web cam, she was able to be an active part of the classroom experience. I think the think I found the most amazing was the students ability to publish, broadcast and make production decisions when producing their own digital videos. Their publications on bullying and being an individual were and are truly inspiring.

I think this is the way of the future, or at least I hope so. Innovative teachers who realize that we can teach students more, or help them reach their true potential with technology integration. It is our duty as educators to find mediums that help our students to think, to actively engage in thinking. If they can post their thoughts or put them on video, how much more exciting. Let's put our text books down for a minute and see what other tools we have to help our students process information. Use your web 2.0 tools if you can. They provide powerful mediums for learning and collaboration.

Is Computer Technology a Priority Anymore?

With one semester left towards my masters in computer technology education, I am starting to wonder if I made the right choice. I know I did for me. I love technology and I love to teach. I used to be an Unix engineer so it all made sense. Other passions include science, but just didn't make sense as I am so comfortable and interested in technology. Well, as I research technology in school districts, I start to wonder if they make it a priority? Is technology the first thing to go when funds drop or things need to be shakin up? It appears it just might be that way. I am conversing with a friend in Virginia who just had 3 computer technology teachers layed off due to budget cuts. As for the state I live in, New Hampshire, It appears there dedication to technology is deep, that is if you read the NH Office of Education Technology's website. Yet, as I search for a position as a Computer Technology Educator, there are exactly two jobs within an hour of me. If you do a search for science or english, you get 15 to 20 jobs easily. While I realize that these content area's are extremely important, in this day and age, is technology not equally important? When is computer technology going to become and integral part of our school systems and curriculum? How much longer do we have to wait for school districts to realize that technology is our children's future, and they are doing them a great injustice by not integrating it into their curriculum in a much larger way?
I wonder...

digital identities

It is my hope to contribute to a new thought rather than be redundant. I started thinking about this after reading a blog from BudtheTeacher a week or so ago. So who are we when we are online, what prompts us to make the choices we make about what information we do and do not post online? Am I making the completely wrong choice in having my name, state, and school in my profiles? I wonder.

I have decided for now to give out a lot of information about myself. I hope it does serve my purposes. I am looking to market myself for a computer technology position and really want my network presence to help my cause. I think that even after I do land my dream job. I will continue to update my profiles. I like hearing from and collaborating with people who have similar interests as I do, people I can connect with and use as resources. I think this is a lot easier to do if you know where I am located and what I am about, my likes, dislikes, the point in my career, etc…

I think that in this day of internet connectivity or should I say heaven, we redefine ourselves my being a part of a web 2.0 community such as a wikis or blogs. I think that people posts make us think and that their reactions give us a sense of what they see in us or even what we see in them.

I found a great article “Thinking about Digital Identities” that states the following:

“There exists today a very useful tool for monitoring online identity, which helps to clarify some of the complexities that participants in the digital world face, where, “It's an uncanny situation; the creative act becomes a dispersion of self.” (Miller 29) That tool is an RSS newsreader, also known as a feed aggregator. In short, it is a piece of software that continuously pulls information you have requested towards you, delivering it to your desktop. Mine is called FeedDemon. It is a tool for wrangling identity:

• It delivers what I write about in my own self-controlled space (my blog, for example). It confronts me with my professional, performed self.
• It delivers me as performing on other people's spaces, mainly via comments I have written. These are representatives of my identity where I have actually gone myself and actively participated elsewhere, generally in my professional persona, but not always.
• It delivers me as performing on other people's spaces, but as they perceive me, such as through quotes they have pulled from my own writings, but also from information drawn from private emails, phone calls, in-person conversations and chat.
• It delivers other people's reactions to me, their agreement and disagreement, their misunderstandings and even deliberate mis-quotes. If I then respond to these issues, FeedDemon delivers those responses as well.
• It notifies me when someone has simply mentioned my name, my blog or my business.
• It notifies me when someone has bookmarked something I have written, or that someone has written about me, without the person who actually bookmarked the article commenting at all.
• Today all this information is primarily text, but increasingly, audio, photographic and video information can be wrangled as well.”

Well now this brings me to a whole new thought, Feeds controlling digital identities. I find this to be a particularly interesting thought. I happen to agree with, we are all participating in all of this discussions and conversations and we decide what and who that content is coming from, is no wonder that without even realizing it, we are redefining our digital identities almost every day.

On a final note, I did come across an interesting profile on Mr. Educator new to the blogging community that stated:

“I am intentionally anonymous on this blog because I believe who I am is not as important as what I do and believe. This blog, however, is not solely intended to be my space to rant...rather, I hope that discussions about education and other topics of interest can take place”.

Well, I do not know if I agree, but it does leave me to think…

My podcast on digital identities

Podcasts

So what are they, and what do they do? What is there purpose? Podcasts allow us to communicate via a whole new medium over the internet, our voice. Not just our written words but our actually voice with its inflections, monotones and levels of intensity or excitement. According to Wikipedia, the definition of a podcast is:

" A podcast is audio or visual content that is automatically delivered over a network via free subscription.”

I really am a visual person, so I have to admit that before researching, reading and creating my own podcast, I really didn’t see the point. I now see the point.

Podcasts open endless possibilities. Think about a student in a computer lab who speaks into a microphone to go over the steps used to create a digital video. Or a teacher who can broadcast a lecture or important audio clip found online. There are many possibilities of podcasts that I am just beginning to see. I am sure it can be a very powerful tool in education. Students can use multimedia to share learning experiences. It provides them with a world-wide audience that makes learning meaningful.

Many news stations such as NBC and CNN use podcasts for news, weather and sports, the same thing you could once see, you can now hear. I personally love having my hands free to type; it gives me more time to blog and wiki J

As can be seen by this quote from Educational Podcasting:

“Podcasting can be used for:

1. Self-Guided Walking Tours - Informational content.
2. Music - Band promotional clips and interviews.
3. Talk Shows - Industry or organizational news, investor news, sportscasts, news coverage and commentaries.

4. Training - Instructional informational materials.

5. Story - Story telling for children or the visually-impaired.

This is a very short list of the many uses of podcasts. I believe that as time moves on, as usual with all technologies, the value of podcasts will be seen and explored in new directions.

Some of articles and podcasts you may find of interest:

What is Podcasting - A quick and easy definition of podcasts with examples.

Uncommon Uses: Podcasting – A great blog about podcasting.

More use podcasts, but very few do so every day – A very interesting article.

Podcasts in Education: - various podcasts regarding educational topics

The Teacher’s Podcast – pretty much the same as above

Instructional Technology Podcasts – A large directory of technology podcasts

My first Podcast – On digital Identities

Enjoy J

Grazr

In reading about the Horizon Project by Victoria Davis (AKA "CoolCatTeacher"). I noticed that while doing this incredible project with her 5th grade students, the project scope included a web 2.0 tool called Grazr, hmm, ok, I thought, I'll take a look, three days later and WOW! What a powerful tool Grazr and widgets can be. I am happy and amazed. I created everything I look at including podcasts, pictures and feeds to one site, made it a widget and placed it on my reader, my blog site and my wiki. I even put all of my social bookmark sites on my Grazr list.
To quote Grazr directly " Grazr is a great tool for anyone who needs to monitor online sources and share the results:

• Combine online sources into a convenient package.
• Gather items from these sources as they appear over time.
• Collect feeds, blog posts, news stories, Wikipedia articles, pictures, podcasts, video clips.
• Any form of online data can be put into Grazr.
• Share your results in a form that is automatically updated.
• Perfect for teachers, students, librarians, financial analysts, marketers, ..."

What a wonderful tool for teachers and students. Once again the information is coming to us and we are not killing ourselves doing endless searches. Did Imention you can save searches as feeds within Grazr as well? A wonderful tool. Feel free to take a look at my whole grazr site: http://grazr.com/blog/shegstrom