got science?

I have a Facebook account, iGoogle page, PageFlake, regular e-mail. Now, another network? How am I going to find the time to do all this??? I joined the Middle School group in the Ning community and added the Ning badge to my Facebook page – proudly declaring my membership. I have explored the Classroom 2.0 briefly and added my name to the Atlanta list of people interested in free workshops related to web 2.0. I figure, if it is free and dedicated time to explore, why not?

I think our largest challenge, as educators, will be to decide a direction to follow and stay with it. These tools change – sometimes they are no longer free, other times they are bought by another company…we will have to change with them. Fortunately, I have the type of personality that welcomes “go with the flow”. Many kids are programmed this way, but not all. Some students will flip out if the web service is down or a page is unavailable. These are issues that will have to be addressed.

Overall, I love the idea of joining a web based social network for educators. I hope my brain can handle the inflow of ideas, suggestions, and projects.

For this visit back to my Google Reader, I looked at my favorite presenters from NSTA, but they only had one post, that Jared had returned from a conference. Not so informative….so my next scroll was through my NYT postings until I found the headline “Forensics is a Hit in School”. This caught my eye. It was a great article about a very diverse high school in New York, where the forensics course is the most popular elective in the entire school (7 different sections, 3 of them for college credit).

#mce_temp_url#

As it gets to crunch time, I’m getting a little less creative with my blogpost titles….

My first response to pageflake was “FINALLY!” The place to store all of my web 2.0 tools. I had been pondering how I was going to keep up with it all, and had decided that igoogle was going to be the center of my universe. I’m not 100% convinced that iGoogle would not meet my needs, but I love the educational framework of Shelly Paul’s flake, so as many good educators throughout history, I’m going to ‘borrow’ it. 

I had to restrain myself due to time, but will definitely come back and work out a start page for my personal tools as well as the portal to my 7th grade classes for the fall. I am convinced that both students and parents alike will benefit from knowing where to look for information regarding class and science as a content area as well. In addition, this will be an eye-opening introduction to many of them about the web 2.0 tools that are available to them (both parents and students).

Yesterday and today I have used a frog dissection video that I found on TeacherTube (and previously referenced in another blog post)….to have that video on my pageflake so that students could go home and view it, share it, and gross out their parents, babysitters, or siblings, would be invaluable. I can’t wait to see where this takes me….

Well, here is attempt #1 with the slideshow. I am not sure if it will work as it seems RockYou is blocked at school. I will try to play it when I get home. These images are from the “my pictures” collection, rather than the ones I saved from flickr…another glitch that I couldn’t figure out. But for now, this will do.

EUREKA! I have discovered the best thing since sliced bread. I often repeat my same speech 5 times daily. This is a vast improvement over the 6 grades of teaching that I used to do (K-5), but by 8th period, things get a little boring. In the past I have used YouTube to let kids find music videos during our final project, a song about one of the body systems (minus the reproductive system) set to a modern song (some kids prefer classic rock – one year the winning tune was “I am digestive man…set to the tune of “Iron Man”). The first search I completed was for frog dissection, which we are starting tomorrow – and there was the perfect introduction by muld65 – added in Nov. ’08. This will hold their attention – it is clever, concise, and clear – and it’s NOT ME TALKING. I think this will be a hit.

Another video on Teacher Tube was a quick history of the world set to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”. I could imagine a social studies teacher using this as a discussion in class or as a sample project for students who have a similar task.

When looking for my “How To” video, I searched “How to embed into a blog” and I was reminded that I needed to switch to HTML mode and then back to Visual Mode to view the video. As you can see above, I was successful.

In the fall, I may select one of my early units and have the students choose producing a YouTube video as one option during a project and see how it goes. I think many students would jump at the chance. In fact, I believe a number of my students have experience posting the videos, but I don’t think they are educationally appropriate.

I was thrilled to see that this assignment was about using Google Docs. I have already been using this web 2.0 tool for homework assignments with my 7th graders. I have also shared it with 2 administrators at school, one of whom used a form to gather student data for an upcoming field trip.

I used the form option of Google Docs as an introductory activity to begin discussion on a unit. I also used the form as an end of week assessment to tie together 3 separate, but related terms. The students seem to love this form of homework. I have had some glitches where students don’t get the email (I think most of them end up in the spam box) or their service providers block the email due to the form being in the body of the email. I am still working on this, to figure out the most successful amount of first attempts with these assignments.

Another aspect of the Docs I haven’t yet tried, is using the “collaboration” option. I am going to teach this to the students soon and try to use it in our final project of the year.

A third and final suggestion I have is to share my inclass PowerPoint documents with absent students or students who need further review of the content. 

I love the “green” aspect of this web tool also!

Now, this is an area I feel particularly intimidated by…I have never loved hearing my own voice on recordings and would be hesitant to try to record my own lectures. The presenters I saw at the Nat’l Science Teachers Assoc. conference record lectures and have them available for students to review prior to tests and for access when a student misses school. I am not sure I am ready for this yet…

I went to the “Apple Learning Interchange” site to view a vocabulary lesson and was impressed at the simplicity of using the podcast as a tool for the classroom. Anyone who wants to view it can follow the link below. While trying to be resource conscious, I see this as a wonderful and portable way for students to make their own flip cards for vocab review. They can share their podcasts with one another…certainly a valuable way to encourage networking among the student body. The kids could even help evaluate each other’s work. I think that group work that is usually centered around using PowerPoint could easily be extended to the world of podcasting too.

http://edcommunity.apple.com/ali/story.php?itemID=15710&version=4062&pageID=10007

I am definitely going to prepare a little “show and tell” for my next book club meeting. I am in a club that has met for the past 12 years. We have just recently titled ourselves The Random Bookclub, after 11 years of existence. It is informal – a way to gather for some social “girl time” while sharing our insights of a random assortment of books. There is no theme – we have read fiction, non-fiction, science fiction, historical fiction, children’s book (1), and hold an annual book exchange near Christmas. I love it. This site will take my Random Book club into web 2.0. 

I don’t include much outside reading in 7th grade life science, but could see how a language arts teacher would use this site in the classroom. I also think students could use this as a research site to see how people connect topics, authors, themes, etc.

Well, I completed this “thing” out of order…I had already been introduced to Delicious and imported my bookmarks from my hard drive at school. I had not, however, tagged any of them and I’m certain that many are old links or irrelevant to what I’m teaching now. I will get around to searching through my links and deleting ones that need clearing out. As usual, I began to understand the “social” aspect of this by watching the jing video. Each time I watch one of those I’m amazed at the simplicity of making these short “films” and would love my students to learn to use this web 2.0 tool.

I have been looking for sites to share with my students regarding my upcoming frog dissection lab, so I conducted a search in the delicious network. I came across several sites I usually use (NetFrog 2.0 especially) but also came across some new ones. I just love that all of my students can access my “mrslondon” links and am figuring out how to work this into my fall science curriculum.

Anyone who wants to sort through my 150 added bookmarks, here is the link:

http://delicious.com/mrslondon

A quite interesting article on my reader was the speech that the Sec. of Education delivered to the Nat’l Science Teacher Association National Conference. I attended this conference in March in New Orleans, but didn’t hear Secretary Duncan’s address.

This the summarizing statement towards the end of his speech:

In his education address last week, the president called for a lot of things:

• Eliminating charter caps;
• Expanding performance pay;
• Extending the school day, the school week, and the school year;
• Increasing parental responsibility;
• And ultimately, dramatically expanding access and opportunity to college.

I am curious how educator’s salaries will reflect an extended school day, week, and year. I often say that my salary reflects the 8 week vacation I take each summer – if students are in school for more hours, will teachers be expected to be there as well, without compensation??? Time will tell…

http://www.nsta.org/publications/news/story.aspx?id=55955