Social Bookmarking

Have you ever found yourself away from your home computer or laptop, and wanting the links to your favorites? Or perhaps you just bought a new computer and are dreading having to recreate your list of favorites. Well if you have, social bookmarking is probably a great idea for you. This week we had a presentation on social bookmarking, which before I had never even heard of. Like most of the terms on the web you can figure out what it means from its name. Instead of bookmarking in your favorites on your web browser at home, you would bookmark the sites or tag the sites on a social bookmarking website. You can create your own site with all of the links to your favorite sites in one place that is accessible wherever internet access is. 

For use in the classroom  you can create a page just for your students with links to relevant sites that they might find helpful for class. Then there comes April Fool's Day, and because you can rename the links you can leave them all as they are and change them to rick roll your kids and have them watch Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up music video. You might run into some problems if your students actually needed to link those sites that you post that night so just be careful as with everything in the lovely field of teaching!

Smartboards

In the beginning of this course I started out with the old school classroom tools of a chalkboard an eraser and chalk in the front of my classroom. Since then, a smartboard has been installed, and I have noticed a significant change in my students engagement level, and have also been surprised by how much they have taught me about the smartboard. At first I was hesitant to get it up and running, because it meant changing how I taught. It meant, learning how to use the notebook software for the smartboard so that I could put together notes in the notebook software, and finding the multimedia contained within the notebook software. I've never had a hard time learning software, and usually am able to pick it up right away, but being a new teacher overwhelmed with all the other aspects that are going on in the classroom the smartboard was another obstacle to overcome.

Then I had it up and running. I connected it to my laptop, and then of course encountered some problems transforming my smartboard from a large computer screen into a smartboard on which I could actually write, from where it has been smooth sailing. I have discovered websites that have smartboard tools and games to teach students about finding the area of a trapezoid and actually manipulating the trapezoid until it turns into a parallelogram so the students can understand where the formulas come from. And watched as their confused expressions turned to ones of understanding as a voice from the speakers told them the exact same thing I had told them two minutes earlier.

In analyzing the different technology tools available this semester, and overcoming my own obstacle with the smartboard, I have discovered that while there are definitely some large learning curves to overcome at first the rewards and possibilities are endless from there. 

Using Multimedia

Picture yourself giving your students a math textbook in the beginning of the school year that only has text and problems to solve. Difficult right? The textbooks we give to our students, have notes, a glossary in english and spanish, introductory letters, interesting facts in the margin, colored pictures and diagrams, among many other elements. These are the pieces that help you to actually open these books and read them or look at them for more than a moment.

Well a curriculum web works the same way. The more multimedia elements that you include in it, the more engaging and effective it will be. What exactly am I referring to when I say multimedia? Well, multiple forms of media, text, pictures, movies, animations, and sound. In the past it was audio and visual messages that reinforced text based messages, now the reverse is true. In that case, it seems illogical not to include the audio aids in your website that will more clearly communicate and engage your students in a learning experience. 

Here are a few tips. If your images and graphics have large file sizes they will take longer to load, which can be very inconvenient and annoying when viewing. In that case you want to make sure your files are as compressed as possible without losing any of the quality. The format in which you save your images and graphics makes a difference in the size so pay close attention. Use JPEG files for full-color photographs, because it can maintain the elements better than other formats when compressed. GIF files are best for logos, cartoons and illustrations with areas of solid color. Keep on the lookout for PNG (portable network graphics) files which are better than GIF at compressing files and result in the quality being affected very little.

Wikis

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word wiki is wikipedia. Obvious association I know, but that is all I could think of. After doing a bit more research and the listening to the class presentation on wikis the other week I am beginning to understand the elements that make a wiki, and why wikipedia is a wiki. Did you know that wikis have been around since the mid 1990s, and it wasn't until two years ago that the word wiki found a place in the Oxford English Dictionary? Just some food for thought. Anyway, back to wikis.

So what makes a wiki? It is a collaboration of websites which can be edited and modified by multiple users with access to it. I like to think of it as a website version of Google Docs. Every time I have a group presentation to do or a group paper to put together I find myself setting up a Google Document where we can all collaborate simultaneously on the same document. You can see edit history, and who made what changes at all times if you have access to the document. After the presentation I discovered that wikis work the same exact way. There is also a way for the creators to see who made what changes and when those changes were made. 

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia doing exactly that. It has multiple users pooling information to create and modify websites in order to provide viewers with information. The applications for wikis are endless, and there are many different ways that we can utilize them as teachers. I am considering creating a wiki for my class next year where I will have different pages for each of the ten chapters in our textbook. In the beginning of the year I will have students go on to provide information that they already know about the topics, and then as the topics continue they can add new information that is learned. Don't worry the editing won't stop there, they can then go back and as new topics are learned, show how there are different links between the topics and explain how different topics connect to one another. This would be a great resource for gauging how well students are really grasping all of the topics in class, and engage them outside of the classroom to continue to think about the topics.