Mini-lesson #23: Prometheanplanet.com
As technology grows and becomes a larger part of our educational lives, it is important that techers be familiar with SmartBoards, as they are beginning to appear in more and more classrooms. This site provides teachers with a plethora of information they would find valuable if their classroom is equipped with a Promethean brand SmartBoard. There are tools, utilities, tutorials, and it seems anything else that a tecaher might find valuable in this area.
Mini-lesson #22: Google Books
Google books like like a useful site. Allowing students to track and record their reading progress, google books would also help if teacher assessment is along the lines of the "evidence of engagement" that we are using for this class. Students could record, track and share with one another their progress in terms of their reading. They could also create a list of books that they are interested in reading in the future. Finally, there are some free books on there, which is always cool.
Mini-lesson #21: Wridea.com
Cool site for storing, evaluating, connecting and otherwise furthering any writing ideas one might have. I found it pretty interesting, and think that if students felt so inclined, they could benefit from the site. I think that I would use it more for personal work than I would in the classroom. I suppose for me, its function would be to give students a place to store ideas. I don't think a whole lot could be learned from it or through it, other than personal revelations concerning one's own work.
Mini-lesson #20: The Oral Tradition
I don't remember ever being asked to actually tell a story in a school, but looking back, it would have been both fun and beneficial. Far more beneficial than say, the Shakespeare reciting I had to do, or the formal presentation on, "How to do something." To get students comfortable with telling stories to other students would benefit them in many ways. They'd be more confident in their story telling, they'd be more open socially, and they'd get a chance to tell a story that they either wrote or know. It'd be a really great experience, and far more engaging and fun than the majority of high school level presentations.
And the thing from This American Life was awesome. I've never heard the radio broadcast or seen the show, but if I'm not mistaken, it's all done by Garrison Keillior (spelling is probably way off), the work of whom I do enjoy. I'll have to check that stuff out. The story Aaron chose to show reminded me of my mom. She does the same thing with stories all the time! Quite hilarious.
Mini-lesson #19: Adding Sound to PowerPoints
This lesson will be beneficial in the short term and the long term. In the short, I'll have to use this feature of PowerPoint for my research presentation, so I'll need it. Furthermore, it will help me in the future if I happen to use a PowerPoint when I'm teaching. I tend to steer clear of PowerPoints, but I know that they can be extremely beneficial. I think that I would use them more if I knew more about how to make them interesting, but for the most part, every PowerePoint I've made has been plain because I'm not sure of how to use all of the functions. Prezi.com and sitesix.com are two web-based slide show programs that might be beneficial.
Mini-lesson #18: Doodle
One of the most difficult things to do is schedule group work, especially at the college level. With so many people having vastly different schedules, it is often impossible to find a time when 4 college students can meet up to dedicate a few hours to working on a project. Doodle makes scheduling much easier, and I think that if I am to encounter a situation in which I'm working on a group project, I will use it to do the scheduling.
Mini-lesson #17: Survey Monkey
What a great way to look into students' interests! I know that I;m going to use this when I teach. At the beginning of the school year, and at the start and end of each unit. At the beginning of the year I will use it to find out what kind of stuff my students are into, and perhaps to do a learning style inventory. In doing so, I would gather a lot of useful information. I could use surveys before and after each unit as forms of assessment, pretest/posttest type of stuff. Of course, if these were made anonymous, I could get honest feedback from students on my own abilities as a teacher. This would offer me insight as to how I'm doing, as well as what I can change in my lessons to make them better for the students. Definitely a cool website.
Mini-lesson #16: Lesson Plans
As lesson plans are always a difficult part of teaching, I think that this mini-lesson was helpful to my classmates and me. I've had some experience in writing lesson plans, but not a ton, so talking about them and discussing their format and content was certainly helpful.
Mini-lesson #15: Writing Conference Proposals
I thought this was helpful, especially in that I'm writing a conference proposal for this class. Also, I think that proposals could be an interesting way to get student's ideas brewing for project/paper proposals in my future. If students were offered an open-ended assignment in which they were asked to create an interesting assignment of their own, be it a presentation, a paper, fiction, etc, they could use proposals for their ideas. It could be fun. This will also be important to me should I ever desire to give an actual presentation at an actual conference.
Mini-lesson #14: Digital Storytelling
I found this lesson interesting. Creating a digital story could be an awesome project for students, especially when doing a book talk for a class. When I teach, I plan to have a portion of the year dedicated to student selected reading. I think that I could create a fun assignment in which students created a digital story of a book they chose to read and book talk it to the class. Interesting and fun, while allowing for some great opportunities in the classroom.
Mini-lesson #13: Animoto.com
Animoto seems like an interesting way to get students, especially those interested in film/video production, involved in the classroom. The site allows users to create videos using pictures, sound files, and text. These videos can then be played in a way similar to a slideshow, though far more interesting and visually stimulating. I can see myself using this site in the classroom. One could allow students to use animoto as an option for a project. Students could create a video based on books they've read, themes of a novel, etc. It seems like its fun, easy, and definitely applicable in an educational setting.
Mini-lesson #12: RSS Feeds
Well... turns out RSS Feeds are cool. I've what they are for quite a spell... since I first heard of them, and today I found out. They allow users to view updates to many sites in a single interface. You can have recent updates from blogs, websites, and other online sources, all in one user-friendly interface. It could definitely be used in the classroom for student research projects, current events, student or teacher-ran sites... a lot of things. If one were to have students create blogs (like we've done for 250), there could be a single RSS Feed that shows the updates of all the blogs, and thus, we would not have to visit each blog individual. There are a lot more ways that an RSS could be used, but for me, the aforementioned seems to be, at least now, the most useful.
I'll use this for sure, starting now, and on through my career.
Mini-lesson #11: Voicethread
VoiceThread has some good stuff to offer. Its a site that allows users to create, manage, and edit pages containing voice recordings, pictures or videos, which can then be edited by multiple parties. You can also comment on the of others via the same three mediums. It seems to be easy to use, which is an obvious plus. It could be put to good use in the classroom. A teacher could have students create their own voice threads, and then view and comment on those of their classmates. Certainly an interesting site with a lot of potential in the classroom, and I can definitely see myself using it.
Oh, it can also be accessed and edited by cellular telephone, so long as the phone has internet access.
Mini-lesson #10: Scribefire and Zotero (Me)
My mini-lesson revolved around two add-ons for Firefox: Scribefire and Zotero. Scribefire allows users to access and edit their blog without having to go through their blogs page. One can create new posts, edit old posts, add pictures and videos, et cetera, using the Scribefire interface.
Zotero is a bibliographical tool that collects information from webpages, allowing users to create, organize, and manage bibliographical sources. One is then able to compile these entries into a single works cited page.
I will definitely use these programs in my classroom one day. They're also beneficial to me now. Both are great add-ons.
Mini-lesson #9: Tagxedo
Today's first mini-lesson was about a site called Tagxedo (www.tagxedo.com). Similar to Wordle, Tagxedo allows users to create an artistic textual representation of an entered text, highlighting the words that appear most frequently. But tagxedo takes it one step further; it allows users to incorporate a picture into the textual representation. It's a pretty cool site. I could see myself using wordle, and I think that I like this even more. I can see myself putting tagxedo to use in my classroom.
Mini-lesson #s 5, 6, 7, and 8: SmileBox, Wordle, Twitter, and Meebo -- respectively
I was apparently slacking, so I have a little catching up to do for my mini-lesson posts. There are four of them, so I'll mention each briefly.
SmileBox:
This one seemed pretty interesting. With it you can use your pictures and videos to create presentations. The interface seemed relatively straight forward, and with a little time I'm sure that I could use it proficiently. The question is... will I? To be honest, I'm not sure. According to the presenters, you have to pay to get all of the site's features, which leads me down the path toward disinterest. I'm not against spending money for my classroom, I just think there are other things on which I would spend my hard-earned cash-ola. For instance, for the same price as a year of SmileBox I could get a set of books for my classroom... books that would last (ideally) quite a few years. To boot, there are other ways to create photo and video presentations that are free, or close to it.
Wordle:
Well, I liked wordle quite a bit. It creates an artistic type of word list of the most common words in a given text. Just copy and paste and it compiles the list for you. Rather than list the words numerically by frequency, it lists them by size, so the most common words appear the largest. What about words like "A" and "and" and "to?" It filters them out so you don't have to worry about it. This could be interesting in a classroom in a multitude of ways. The most interesting that I can think of would be to see what words an author uses frequently. Doing so would tell the reader quite a bit about the authors style through word choice. It would also be likely to highlight main themes and points of a text. This one, I think I'll use at some point in my career.
Twitter:
I'm sorry, but I'm probably not ever going to use Twitter in my classroom or otherwise. The presentation was interesting, and its definitely a cool site, but I guess I have no interest in it... here's why: Every time I hear about Twitter all I think of are celebrities. They constantly plug their Twitter accounts, telling people to check them out, or follow them, or what have you. Being that I'm not interested in celebrities, I'm not interested in Twitter. I understand that you can connect with friends, too, but most of the people I'm interested in 'connecting' with are but a phone call away. I guess using Twitter to do so would seem extraneous. "Why," you ask, "wouldn't you use it in the classroom?" It seems like it'd be really easy for students to get sidetracked. If you ask your students to log in and go to a certain area, I would bet that about 1/2 would make it there. The others would probably be perusing the site, which would be counterproductive. The only way I could see myself using it is if I had students go through peoples sites and find grammatical errors or something, but even that is a long shot.
Meebo:
Well, I can think of good applications, but see traps into which students would probably fall. As for the good... as Dr. Cole mentioned, it would be so very interesting and exciting to hold a discussion between your classroom and another one that is across the country or around the world or even down the hall. The site would open doors for inter-classroom communication that wouldn't be possible otherwise, and that would be sweet. It'd be really cool to set up a video chat of one entire classroom with another where everyone could be involved in an open discussion. I can definitely see myself doing that. As for the downside... Well I'm looking around the room and a whole load of people are on Meebo right now... perhaps they're doing something productive, but in all likelihood they're talking to friends or relatives or what have you. That's all well and good, but if it distracts students and they end up off task, it probably wouldn't be overly beneficial.
Mini-lesson #4: SmileBox!
Today's mini-lesson, presented by Ellie, was an introduction to smilebox, a downloadable program that allows one to create slideshow and powerpoint type presentations. The interface seems very user-friendly, and the program seems to be one that would benefit any teacher looking for a quick and easy way to create such presentations. The downside is the $15/mo. charge for those who want to put the program to full use. Currently, this doesn't seem like something I'd invest in, but when I teach, it is a distinct possibility.
Mini-lesson #3 (ish): So I don't forget what to do for the "tools" presentation
(1) Tell what the tool is (Firefox add-ons that will help students - specifically Zotero and ScribeFire)
(2) Show, tell, and coach how to use it
(3) Explain how it could be used in an ELA classroom
WORD!
Mini-lesson #2: nicenet.org
Today's mini-lesson was dedicated to a website: nicenet.org. I haven't had the opportunity to look around a great deal, but it seems that it will be quite helpful in our discussion of the Troy Hick's text. Also, I imagine that the "I hate Technology" discussion will be both entertaining and fruitful. Of course, the usefulness of nicenet.org is not limited to ENED 250...
It seems as though it would be a convenient place to hold forums for other courses, were teachers and/or student inclined to start a forum for their classes. Perhaps more importantly, it could be used in the future, when we all have graduated from SUNY Fredonia and have classrooms of our own. It seems straight forward and well governed. Nothing too fancy or complicated, which is perfect when you're trying to direct 30-some students on how to post, sign up, et cetera. Having a centralized place where students can post and discuss whatever topics are necessary would be quite beneficial. I can see myself using nicenet, or at least something similar, when it comes time for me to teach.
Mini-lesson #1: Writing Territories
Today for our mini-lesson we discussed writing territories. We made lists: genres and forms in which we've written, haven't written, what we're interested in, what we're not, et cetera. Pretty self-exploratory exercise. It really got me thinking about my writing and what I've yet to do.
Would be great to use in a classroom to get students to think about their own writing and where they'd like to go with it, genres they'd like to explore, personal reading and writing interests, et cetera.
Territories can also be used to explore general interests... the possibilities are extensive. This exercise can really be applied to anything.
A gnarly little exercise indeed.
