I personally don’t like everyone knowing all of my business.  I value my privacy and don’t have a need for everyone to know everything about me and my family.  Two friends of mine have a facebook and they love it.  We recently went to the beach.  I had my laptop there and they were on my laptop checking their email and working on their facebook A LOT.  I don’t think I got on the laptop hardly at all.  They said it was great to keep up with friends that they never see.  My 24 year old daughter has one and I asked her advice when I got home-Do I need one?  She said no.  She said you don’t even like checking your home email account.  I recently read an article in the paper that said some young people (20s) are finding social networking is too time consuming. 

However, I am all for whatever motivates students.  And, if social networking will encourage students to write or participate in a project or promote their learning, then let’s do it with them.

In the Classroom 2.0 Forum, I found an article How to Use Twitter in the Classroom by Sage Lewis The article found three main improvements.  “Class Chatter” was the conversations between students on Twitter.  The students were discussing things that were going on in and outside of the classroom.  “Class Communty” discussed the increased awareness of each other as students inside and outside of the classroom.  The students were more respectful of each other and learned more about each other than they may have if they hadn’t talked outside of class.  DUH! The author of this article referred to the Sixth Sense by Clive Owen which was a very interesting link, as well.  Sage Lewis, the author, also refers to Twitter giving students more of a Sense of the World, what various things people are doing throughout the world.  This blog also had a link to Academhack, which gave more Twitter tips.

 After exploring Ning and Classroom 2.0, I didn’t like the organization of the site.  It was hard to navigate, in my opinion.  I’m pretty sure I won’t be using either of these in my professional or personal learning.  My concern with Social Networking and students is, will they be able to determine between fact and opinion with the various sources they are communicating with on the social network.  I like the colloboration aspect, but not the gathering of factual information.  I would be concerned about the validity.  However, if they are going to use it, we need to help them how to determine this.

I went by to my old standby Infinite Thinking Machine.  I found an article that caught my attention because it was about cellphones in education.  Cellphones in Education  One of the links I focused on was Liz Korb’s.  She thought the cell phone could be the “Swiss army knife of 21st century digital learning tools”.  This is because they can be used in and out of the classroom.  So, many students already have them, low cost, can be used anywhere, anytime, and anyplace.   They can be used for collecting interviews, data, pictures and send this information to a Flickr account.  She can text message homework assignments.  They can be listened to podcasts and can be used to create their own podcast.  They can also be used for students with visual impairments.  Their is a website called Jott.com that students can call in their blog post and then it appears on the class blog.  They also can listen to any website that has an RSS feed.  Students with hearing impairments can use the text feature to receive and send communication.  There are lots of free web-based resources that use cell phone to create polls, calendars, digital books, podcasts, and more.  She believes that the goal of cell phones is not to fully integrate them in technology, but be an option for teaching and learning.  I’m sure there are many students that will love their teachers for adopting this option.

My first impression of Pageflakes was TOO BUSY and the page takes a long time to load.  However, after studying all of the information coming to me, rather than me going out to find the information, I liked Page Flakes better and better.  It was very easy to move, edit, and add the various flakes.  I think students would really like using a webpage like this.  I think I would advise my teachers to create a different Pageflake page for each Unit OR Subject they are currently studying and want their students to use for accessing information and also colloborating with groups for projects.  Or if they had a self-contained class, they could create a different page for each group to work and colloborate on.  I think I would focus on Social Studies and Science themes to start with, but it could really be utilized for any subject.

I LOVE Google Docs!  I can’t imagine why everyone doesn’t use it.  Bill Gates has probably blocked the site for many.  Just kidding!  Google Docs is a great solution to our teacher’s overloaded email accounts with too many attachments, also helpful to keep from having duplicates of the same documents.  My husband doesn’t have Office on his home laptop-this is going to be great when we need some office product on his laptop.   I, also, love the email feature and the ability for everyone to collaborate and make changes at the same time to the same document.  The Revision history is another good feature.  This is also a great storage location, so we save space on our servers.  I noticed there is a limit, however, which is good.  I can see where we can use this within our own department when creating training documents for our teacher.  We can post it on Google Docs and then everyone can contribute.  It’s a great resource for students to use at home if they don’t own office.  I did notice that you couldn’t upload Office 2007 documents, however.  I thought it was very easy to upload documents though.  I uploaded a table, a powerpoint, and an excel document.  The powerpoint ran as a slideshow right from Google Docs. 

I spent much more time exploring these two sites than I thought I would. I’m glad I went to YouTube first, because if I had gone to TeacherTube first, I probably would never have gotten to YouTube. I felt like TeacherTube was a education filtered version of YouTube (which it is). I was overwhelmed by the vast amount of junk in YouTube.  TeacherTube is a great resource for teachers and students because of the focus on curriculum.

I found several videos in YouTube, however. I found two very good videos on Integrating Technology in the Classroom that would be good to use with my teachers. “A Vision of K-12 Students Today” and “Technology in Schools”. I found a how-to video created by Lowe’s “Make a Shade Garden”. This was a very helpful video to me since I’m trying to re-landscape my backyard. Some of the how-tos looked like they had been filmed in my backyard. The video for fun that I watched was the video about the 12 year old British idol competitor, Hollie Steel. She is amazing for 12.

Video sharing and producing in the classroom can be an incredible tool for the teacher and student. I liked the comments I read that talked about the feedback students and teachers can receive from others after the video has been posted on YouTube or TeacherTube. This is another great way to colloborate with others. 

The video I’ve decided to embed is a video from TeacherTube “Code of Best Practices in Media Literacy”. This topic is coming up a lot in my trainings with my teachers. I thought I could use it with them.