Potts’s Summer Blog

I truly enjoyed myself throughout the entire Web 2.0 course. I learned many new ideas that I have already started to utilize in my classroom, including my new 6th grade class blog and a wiki page that is in the works as we speak. I was thoroughly overjoyed about all of the items I compiled and assimilated in my summer wiki page because this wiki page gave me many new ideas to incorporate into my Math wiki page. In order for me to honestly retain the information I learned this summer, I need to continually look for new and innovative methods to communicate with my students and parents as well as to underscore the need for a transparent, 21st century classroom that can transcend and extend beyond the physical boundaries of “four walls.”

I  enjoyed navigating through the Classroom 2.0 page. There were many aspects about Classroom 2.0 that I found very interesting, including the elaborate and creative videos that covered all different subject areas. I found a math video that assimilated an explanation of the Pythagorean Theorem. This interactive video was very inspiring because it contained movable characters and triangle sides throughout the entire video and it underscored the validity of the Pythagorean Theorem by using the theories of other mathematicians.

I also enjoyed looking at the discussions, especially the questions that were being asked by educators. It was amazing how an educator’s question would fuel ten or eleven comments that were extremely pertinent and helpful to finding a solution to a problem. I believe utilizing Classroom 2.o would definitely enhance my professional learning foundation because of the availability to join discussion groups to find answers to classroom or curriculum questions. In a group discussion format, an educator could find an answer to a question like “What has been the most effective tool when teaching your students about the Stock Market?” Opinions given by many like-minded educators would allow one to assimilate all of the feedback and find the most important responses to aid in the understanding of the Stock Market.

WOW! I can really see how editing and incorporating new material, new feeds, new bookmarks, and new websites into Pageflakes can be very addicting as well as time-consuming. I had an absolute blast organizing and assimilating all of my new items into my pageflakes page. This is definitely a continuous work in progress and I’m very excited to be able to construct such an elaborate and informational educational website.

I believe that an educator, through the usage of one’s own personal Pageflakes page, could definitely enhance a student’s learning environment by allowing students to access the important aspects of the Pageflakes page, such as the important educational bookmarks and the teacher tube videos. Students would have many research tools and educational links at their direct disposal and would not need to initiate difficult searches as often, especially if the pertinent links were present on the teacher’s Pageflakes page.

I have thoroughly enjoyed navigating through and utilizing Google Docs. This definitely is a very helpful tool because it allows educators to upload documents, presentations, and spreadsheets in such a way so that other competent individuals have the availability to change, edit, or improve such documents. I really enjoy the fact that this allows for immediate change and feedback where e-mailing documents back and forth really slowed the editing process.

I believe that Google Docs could be used in such a way where colleagues who are teaching the same subject and are organizing a similar project could collaborate with each other as each person changes and edits existing documents and/or presentations to assimilate all of the important ideas into one cohesive project rubric. I also believe that students could utilize Google Docs by sending written essays, stories, or presentations to their respective teacher and the teacher could more quickly and effectively change and edit the document in a much faster time period. Immediate feedback would work much better between a student and teacher. It would definitely allow the monotony of “e-mail attachments” to be bypassed.

As an educator, I believe utilizing Google Docs on a consistent basis would deepen my scope of what ideas are out there from a curriculum perspective and would enhance my core of ideas as I browsed documents and presentations from all subject areas.

I really enjoyed searching YouTube. I have been navigating YouTube for several years and you can definitely locate very interesting and intriguing videos. I found a song about dividing fractions on YouTube that provides a fun way to remember the steps when dividing two fractions.

I also found TeacherTube very intriguing and inspiring because of the availability to share videos with other like-minded educators and to find pertinent videos that enhance a student’s learning environment. When navigating through TeacherTube, I found a very creative video that summarized and described many different ancient civilizations through singing and pertinent Powerpoint pictures. This video was created by a sixth grade class.

I would enjoy doing a similar activity with my sixth grade Social Studies class because we could incorporate factual knowledge of the characters and places in the civilizations with writing the lyrics to our song. I would also enjoy observing the pictures that sixth grade students could find and assimilate in a Powerpoint presentation. The Powerpoint and song could be used in unison to convey understanding of many different civilizations.

I truly enjoyed navigating through my Google Reader. I found many amazing websites but there was one link that definitely “stood out” in my opinion. I found a National Geographic virtual museum that contained lesson plans, interactive activities, and different atlases for all of the continents on earth. What an amazing assimilation of information! After navigating through the site for about thirty minutes, I found a long list of detailed interactive activities that could be used to complement an area of discussion in Social Studies. I found an activity about Ancient Greece that allows a student to ponder what it would be like to be building a new subway system in the city of Athens and discover ancient artifacts and other precious items. This activity also spurns a “young student’s mind” about becoming an archaeologist and the excitement entailed in such an occupation. This website is a wonderful tool that allows students the chance to travel all over the world and learn about specific cultures and practices.

What a fun and exciting time one can have when creating a podcast for the first time. I really enjoyed writing out the script and explaining how a student can divide two fractions using three key words to remember the steps. The three key words are “Bring,” “Change,” and “Flip” and the sentence I utilize to help remind students of the process is “Bring your Change with you everywhere you go so you don’t Flip out when dividing fractions.”

I believe that students in my 6th grade Social Studies class would enjoy utilizing a podcast as an interactive activity when discussing major characters (pharaohs and queens) of Ancient Egypt or when discussing the major gods and goddesses of Ancient Greece. Each student could organize and complete an individual podcast (1-2 minutes in length) that specifically described a major character of an ancient civilization. The entire class could follow along in the book as they listened to each individual podcast and then discussion of the important aspects of the podcast would follow.

I thoroughly enjoyed previewing two of the podcasts from the Education Podcast Network. I chose this directory of podcasts because of how the themed podcasts were organized by subject area. Within the aforementioned directory,  I navigated through the elementary grades podcasts under the mathematics subject area and located a creative file of math podcasts by Chris Frederick Under the heading of mathgrad podcasts, Chris compiled twenty-six wonderful explanations in podcast form of how to explore the mathematics world behind everyday situations. Several of the mathgrad podcasts included such issues as how to solve the Rubik’s cube and how to explain mysterious number problems. I would definitely enjoy interjecting these interactive podcasts into my math classroom as extra credit problems or as helpful aids to build stronger critical thinkers.

I also enjoyed searching the Education Podcast Network for interesting Social Studies podcasts. I was able to find a very interesting file of fifteen podcasts by Eric Langhorst that explained how he incorporates the trilogy of education, technology, and history into his everyday life and teaching. A very interesting podcast by Eric Langhorst is how he uses twitter as a teacher and an educator. After listening to his explanation about Twitter and its classroom applications, I was amazed at how Twitter could be used as an interactive tool in any classroom.

After navigating throughout LibraryThing, I was truly amazed about all of the different genres of books one could locate based on one word in the title of a book, the author’s last name, or even a subject matter (math). I thoroughly enjoyed exploring the LibraryThing Zeitgeist because I wanted to observe the top ten books and the top ten authors based on the number of members in each area (I knew J.K. Rowling and all of the Harry Potter books would be at the top). I also enjoyed browsing through various groups within LibraryThing to look at what discussions were taking place based on my topic of interest. I found one group and eleven very interesting topics when I typed in the group theme “math.” I will definitely be able to utilize this in my professional life (I’m thinking about joining one of the “math discussion topics” because it interests me) and LibraryThing would be a wonderful asset in my classroom because of how my students could join reading focus groups and have discussions when recommending/not recommending certain books to other students in the group.

What an amazing social bookmarking site! I could not stop bookmarking various sites on Delicious (even though I only bookmarked 17 websites) because of the ability to create all types of inspirational and pertinent tags when saving the bookmarks. I was overwhelmed at all of the possibilities that “fell in my lap” after I tagged a bookmark with many words. When thinking about “tagging” on Delicious, “more is definitely better.” I will definitely utilize all seventeen of my bookmarks as I instruct my students through Pre-Algebra, Algebra, the Stock Market Game, and important ancient civilizations. I believe my students could benefit from using Delicious because students could share important websites and other valuable information with one another when working on major projects, especially when researching ancient civilizations or finding ways to practice such concepts as solving two-step equations.