BP17_2009114_Significance of Using Blogger

Blogging for educational purposes can be a very useful tool for reflection and research. When individuals are given the opportunity to express information in a conversational manner to millions of potential readers, they are given the opportunity to change perceptions and ideologies. For subjects such as education, bloggers can post research that they have gathered, web 2.0 tools that they have discovered or just talk about things that go on in their classroom that may be of assistance to others. There are thousands and thousands of blogs out on the web and they have been there for many years which leads me to believe that something must be right about the whole concept. This concept to me is essentially an online diary or journal from one person to millions in order to express a view.

I have never used a blog before in my life, but I am quickly realizing that I will be using this type of media pretty much my entire career as a Full Sail master student.

BP16_2009113_Peer Review of Joanne Yate’s Web 2.0 Tool

“Zoeybot is a free search engine and educational services recommended for kids ages 7-13. The program is SafeSurf rated which makes it an A+ option for teachers and parents alike. It provides the user with a variety of tools such as research articles, videos, and tutorials. Students can even take notes on the material they are reading by simply clicking on the “Launch Editor.” To top off its appeal to kids there is even the incentive of submitting your own work to be entered onto the site for possible pay.

While all those pluses certainly make the site appealing it also has a down side to things. For example it’s kid friendly appearance is appealing to the younger audience, but somehow I can’t imagine my 13 year old being enthusiastic about it.
The music player which offers a small selection of genre is little more than loops, again appealing to the younger audience maybe, but definitely not to the MP3 generation. On the reverse side of things as I started to explore the search engine itself I found some serious concerns. The readability of material is way above most students younger than 10 years of age and a search for “tropical fish” resulted in articles on “tropical storms.” On a final note of concern some of the tutorial videos, the coins through the hand mini magic show and others failed to play.

Overall a great concept, but truly poorly carried out in my opinion. The site design appeals to the younger end of its target audience while the resources are most definitely geared to the older end of the spectrum.”

Joanne,
With my last couple of peer reviews being about collaboration tools, your search engine tool is a great break from the mainstream. Everybody can benefit from something as simple as a search engine that suggests material for education of school age children. You did touch on some great ups and downs of the site and I would love to see a more expanded music player from it, but as a big grown up kid, I can handle the styling of the site and what age group it is attempting to reach out to. Thank you for the great information!

BP15_2009113_Peer Review of Kelly Lynn’s Web 2.0 Tool

“The Web 2.0 tool that I have chosen to explore and investigate more closely is Notely.net. Notely.net is an organization tool first and foremost, but it is also a collaborative tool as that is part of what makes a web tool a Web 2.0.

I have taken a screen shot of all of the features that Notely.net utilizes. On tab that I really like that I would use to create a classroom assignment would be the grades tab. The grades tab allows students to track their own progress in their classes. Hypothetically, I could have students get a grade printout from all of their teachers and they could actually keep track of how they are doing in their classes. This tab could easily be used in conjunction with the tasks tab. If students typed in all of their tasks as they were assigned and created a grade category at the same time, keeping track of their own progress would be a breeze. Also of note, there are applications for Notely.net for iPhone and a mobile version as well. Perfect for our tech savvy students.

Other features I like that I feel could be extremely useful are the uploads, journal, and links. The journal of course, is going to be something that you keep private, but a tool that allows uploads and links to be shared is amazing. For example, today in class a student asked me how to find out how many pages were in her novel that she returned to the library. If we were using Notely.net, I could have easily posted a link to her from amazon.com showing her how to look up how many pages were in her book. Another benefit with uploads would be targeted toward the incessantly disorganized student who inevitably loses the handouts that you give him or her. If a Notely.net network between teachers and students existed, the student would have access to the teacher’s Notely page where they could download the uploaded work.

All in all, Notely.net has an unlimited number of uses and I think teachers and students alike could benefit from its use.”

Kelly,
I am a prime candidate for organizational tools! I enjoyed looking around your tool site and seeing what features it offered the users. I was very impressed with the intuitive layout of the site and the ease of use. While I do not have an iPhone, I would definitely use this tool on my iPhone to help me keep things in order and working efficiently even on the go. Thank you for showing another wonderful web 2.0 tool that anyone could learn from.

BP14_2009113_Peer Review of Jessica Cruz’s Web 2.0 Tool

“Echalk is a site that I currently use in my school as a portal for communication with parents, colleagues, students, and the community. It is a collaborative web 2.0 site with multiple functions from posting assignments to setting up blogs, gradebooks, a communication tool (email), and setting up professional groups to share information in. It serves as the school's website providing access to loads of information and work existing in the school building. It shares a very similar structure to iGoogle but is more restrictive in its functions. The benefit is that all members receive email accounts from the same database. For instance at my school; The Renaissance Leadership Academy, we are all first initial.last name@rlascholars (jcruz@rlascholars.com).

Each teacher has his or her own page where he or she will post messages, discussion boards, assignments, class calendar, links to relevant sites, highlights of student work, etc. Each member sets up his or her page with the widgets and functions he or she deems necessary for his/her class. Administrators also communicate with the staff and parents via this portal by setting up groups where information is disseminated. Pages, messages, and groups can be set private just to be viewed by the select members or public for the world at large to benefit from.

This site has been developed specifically for educators, students, and parents to ensure that communication and collaboration is continuous. Parents, educators, and students can post information pertaining to the school community and projects occurring within the school. The community at large can be informed on what is occurring within the school.

Links can also be included. Echalk is ever-changing and therefore, while currently it does not provide the function to subscribe to RSS feeds, I am confident that it will in the very near future.”

Jessica,
I looked through your web 2.0 tool and enjoyed seeing that there are so many different alternatives for online collaboration. The features of this tool are not really different from those of many others, but at least we as instructors can have some variety in terms of what we can use to help our students succeed. Even parents can get in on the collaborating. I love all of these collaboration tools!

BP13_2009113_Web 2.0 Tool_Babbel

I, like most of you, have been in a situation where a little more knowledge of a foreign language would come in handy. Babbel is an online language-learning system that teaches conversation skills for different languages. The languages that users can gain knowledge of are Spanish, French, Italian, German and English. With Babbel, users can learn words and phrases in foreign languages and connect with people from all over the world. Students and teachers can practice on their own with the intuitive online lessons or find a study partner in the international Babbel community.

Babbel contains a bunch of vocabulary (around 150 Vocabulary Packages, 3000 words), grammar exercises and explains how to put it all into practice. Whether the user wants to learn the basics or they are looking for special exercises for travel or for work, Babbel’s extensive collection of learning material offers lots of interesting and high quality content.

I am actually going to be using this site to see if I can learn a little Spanish seeing as how that is the popular language down here in Florida.

Video was taken from Babbel home website: http://www.babbel.com

BP12_2009113_Reflective Media Asset #2

As I went over my last video and asked friends about it, the main two things that came up were the lack of background music and the lack of live action. I have made those improvements to my latest video.

BP11_2009112_Web 2.0 Tool_Askforia

Askforia is a social question and answer web 2.0 tool developed by three 15-year-olds from Singapore. It is very cool to explore around the site and see what people ask as well as what they offer for answers. It was very ironic that when I looked on the front page of the site, the question was “Identify the Communication Barriers in Traditional Learning and Online Learning?” This is precisely the reason why I think this site is a great tool for students. They can ask questions from their peers as well as I can pose questions to my students for critical thinking purposes.

The idea that a collective social network is there to help you with your questions is very useful. So far I have come to the conclusion that Askforia offers the best and easiest way to explore, share and answer questions with people from around the world. With Askforia, students can ask questions from anywhere at anytime, and they can get answers from their friends (conversational) or experts (educational). I cannot count the times that I have had a question that I just could not answer. Usually I went without an answer so ling that I forgot it all together. With this tool I can post the question and then check back a little later to get an answer. Of course you will have to evaluate the answers that you get for yourself, but it is a great step towards finding the answers you need.

Sign in and try it out. You never know what you might be able to find out or what you may help someone else find out. Students will benefit from the chance to use critical thinking skills.

BP10_2009112_Web 2.0 Tool_Woopid

Woopid is a web 2.0 tool that allows you to watch free technology training videos. Students can get help and answers for their computer and gadget questions with thousands of video tutorials for PCs, Macs, and tons of different applications. This service sort of reminds me of Lynda.com, but with one big difference. It’s free.

There are multiple uses for the classroom in this web 2.0 tool. I think that students need a site like this one to help them when a teacher is not around. If a student can go online and in minutes find a free tutorial to help them finish a project, I say that is invaluable. With “bundles” the site groups up related videos for the user to easily access. If I wanted to learn about a program all I need to do is find the bundle associated with that file and presto, I have 10 or so videos thoroughly explaining aspects of the program.

Another very interesting feature is custom tutorials. You can have tutorials created for you by Woopid. When you click on the "Request Tutorial" button, you can describe what you're looking to have explained to you. The tutorials are in the same video format as every other tutorial on the Woopid site. Once requested, a Woopid representative will communicate with the user to iron out all of the details.

I have been looking for a site like this one for a while now and I am glad to have found this one. I recommend this site for anyone looking for a free alternative to high priced tutorial sites.

BP9_2009112_Web 2.0 Tool_Gcast

Gcast is a site that enables students and teachers to create, post and embed podcasts. This service as well as podsafe music and hosting is free to anyone who wants to podcast to the world. It is so versatile that you can even record a podcast by phone.

For the “podsafe” music, Gcast gives users the ability to record by phone with no need for a computer, upload mp3 music from your computer or upload music from GarageBand. Another useful aspect of the music section is the ability to mix and edit your tunes right there on the website.

Hosting on Gcast works well also because whether the podcast is 30 seconds or 30 minutes, the user can publish it with Gcast for free. Gcast stores your media and automatically generate the "RSS feed" that enables listeners to "tune in" to your podcast channel for very easy hosting options.

Besides the hosting portion of the service, you can embed the podcast in your own website. You can also have other people embed your podcast into their websites. All they need to do is copy and paste the HTML code and place it in their own websites. The player can be configured to play automatically or wait for users to press play before they listen to your podcast.

As I registered for the service and tested out some of it’s features, I found it to be very easy to use considering it is a free service. I have found that in many services like this the program is put together in a makeshift manner and the interface is not what it needs to be for success purposes. I am very pleased to see that this is one of the web 2.0 programs that a user can rely on.

BP8_2009112_Peer Review of Sheryl Floyd's Web 2.0 Tool

"The free version of Screenflow! How fun will this be for my students to record their own tutorials and understanding of specific computer applications or classroom assessments.

The site is easy use and gives a lot easy, intuitive options. First of all, the tutorial provides an overview of how the site works and the tools that can be used to create screencasts created on your computer. The website is free but one needs to create an account. However, the site can be used on both Macs and Windows.

Other than the obvious purpose of creating tutorials for students,
Some ideas:
students can in turn, create tutorials for almost any situation.
create tutorials for next year’s students on how to create a document in Adobe InDesign for newspaper, editing photos, using photoshop or editing on an application
as an assessment on how to use a computer program like iMovie

The site allows just specific parts of the screen to be recorded and to provide voice recording as well. And it allows for sharing videos on sites like twitter, facebook and delicious. The other great feature is that videos can be uploaded directly to the screentoaster website, youtube or you can download the movie file as a .mov.

Recording can also involve voice recording. I think the beauty of this site is that a student can use it at home and it doesn’t even involve downloading a program."

I use screenflow on an almost weekly basis for my class and in order to do this I bought the program. It would have been so nice to get the same functionality out of a free program such as screen toaster! I went on and registered for the site as soon as I learned about it and I am impressed that the free version (screentoaster) records just as good as the version I paid for (screenflow). The only draw back is the fact that I like the editing tools built into the screenflow program. Other than that difference, I am happy to recommmend this tool to anyone who wants to record videos for demos, walkthrough, or podcasts. Finally, the fact that it is strictly online and is does not take up space on your hard drive coupled with the idea that it works for any operating system just makes it all the more efficient. Great look into the web 2.0 tools Sheryl. I will look forward to telling others about this online program.

BP7_2009112_Reflective Media Asset #1

BP6_2009112_Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is described as a social bookmarking site that allows a user (or a group of users on one account) to add meaningful labels that describe the content of Web sites (Buffington, 2008). To break this down even further I would like to offer my take on this web 2.0 tool. After reading through the Education World and Web 2.0 Wiki sites, I gathered that this tool takes bookmarks of potentially useful websites and allows users to access them from any computer around the world. These website bookmarks can be accompanied by descriptions and comments to enhance the experience. This can be useful in research environments where multiple people are looking for a specific topic. If one of those people find a good website, they can share it with the rest of the group with nothing more than a tag. A “tag” is essentially a keyword or words that tells users what the website is about at a glance.

The process is very simple and can save quite a bit of time and hassle because you can retrieve and organize your bookmarks from any computer in the world. Instead of individually saving the site in a variety of folders on your computer browser, you just type a few keywords called tags (Langston Hughes, alliteration, Black History, metaphor, rubric, and so on.), and your sites are organized automatically with sites saved by other users, using those same keywords. It really acts like the world largest bookmark-sharing database.

When students are let loose to work on projects they will eventually find websites of interest to many other students. Instead of these sites going unused by others, students would be working together to create a shared knowledge base with an online component (Buffington, 2008). When a collective knowledge can be created by something as simple as tagging a useful website, education can begin to move and grow in different directions that could potentially enhance the way students learn today.

References

Buffington, M. (2008). Creating and consuming web 2.0 in art education. Computers in the Schools, 25(3/4), 303-313. http://search.ebscohost.com

Jackson, L. (2009). Sites to see: Social bookmarking. Education World. Retrieved November 1, 2009 from http://www.education-world/com/a_tech/sites/sites080.shtm

Social Bookmarking: Link to classroom 2.0 social network discussions. (n.d.). Retrieved November 3, 2009, from CR2.0: http://wiki.classroom20.com/social+bookmarking

BP5_2009112_FLickr

For this post we have to find or think of a lesson involving Flickr. I looked through pages and pages of lessons and came to the conclusion that Flickr is a very versatile and useful tool in terms of education. I started to think about what I could use Flickr for and came up with a great way to communicate in an online classroom through pictures.

I started to think of this idea when I was uploading a couple of pictures for this very assignment. I started to think that students could use Flickr to tell stories that would otherwise be done in say Garageband or iMovie. The main direction could be to tell a story of an event through pictures and journalism style captions. There would be a minimum number of pictures posted (let's say 15) in order to tell the story with enough accuracy. For example, I want to tell a story about going to the zoo and finding my favorite animal, the tiger. I could take a picture of the zoo front entrance, then some shots of animals while I am wondering through the area. Finally, I would post the picture of my subject and all the while captions would help paint a clearer picture of the experience.

I am aware this has probably been done a million times before, but this is the idea that popped into my mind when I was exploring Flickr. I hope you enjoyed my ideas as much as I enjoyed creating them.

BP4 2009112 Web 2.0 Tool #1

For the purpose of this assignment we were all responsible for finding, using and evaluating a web 2.0 tool of our choosing. I looked through the seemingly endless list of tools and finally found something that I as well as my students could use on a daily basis. Since my class is strictly online, my students need to be able to collaborate in a way that promotes cohesion and productivity so I think that by using Ubidesk, my students can come together and work as a collaborative group.

Ubidesk is free to use and it closely resembles the popular Googledocs format. It includes a discussion board for communication, a place to upload documents that can be edited and commented on by the members and a way to organize group projects through visual graphs and charts. I was able to upload a word document, then go through and edit it, highlight sections and add side notes that would be useful for other members in my group.

The ease of use that comes with this free tool is well beyond anything that I would have expected. I was able to do everything I needed to do without freezes, crashes, errors or hang ups during my time in the site. The best thing about this tool is the fact that anyone can create an account in about 2 minutes and be ready to go in about 5. It is easy to invite group members to the site and even easier to work with them.

The only downside to this tool is the fact that most of us have google id's that enable us to use the Googledocs site. Knowing that Ubidesk does the same thing as Googledocs, I don't see it being used as much as it could have been before Googledocs. Too bad for the Ubidesk team who obviously spent a lot of time making this a great web 2.0 tool.

BP3 2009111 RSS Reader Choices

The feed that I chose to follow are listed below with an explanation of each:

Gaming and Education Overview:
I am interested in the benefits of combining the gaming world and the education world into a winning combination. I feel that through simulations and games, students can see the information in a diferent way and therefore enhance the learning experience.

PC World Latest Technology News:
I teach computers and PC World is one of the best sources for information at a glance. I recommend my students look over some of the information given within the feed.

Engadget:
Gadgets are cool and most of the time useful. I always try to keep up with the latest and greatest in terms of technological toys.

Wired Top Stories:
This feed is simply for current event information. Where else would you find out that a 140-million year old spider web was discovered in amber on a beach in England?

HowStuffWorks Daily Feed:
I use HowStuffWorks all of the time to show my students how computers work. It offers great information on almost anything really.

BP2 2009111 iGoogle Pages

Here are my iGoogle screen captures.