Goodreads

Thanks for the push back onto Goodreads! I'm looking forward to receiving updates from Marcia, of course, but also from a couple other folks at school and at least one other friend from The Other Side of the Bridge. (Do they even have libraries there?) I'm not sure how I might use Goodreads in the classroom, except to show students the ways in which adults track and share our reading lives. If others have suggestions for how to use Goodreads with students, I'd be interested in hearing!

getting back in

As part of DLC #6 (I think) we were asked to reflect on the DLC so far, as well as to comment on someone else's blog (see previous post). I am enjoying coming back to the DLC after being away for a while. I've discovered that it's a relaxing thing to work on occasionally in the window between when I finish dinner and when I'm ready to actually do school work. Working on a DLC allows me to feel mildly useful, genuinely curious, and sometimes even surprisingly successful. I've enjoyed the challenges that offer opportunities for my personal life as well as potential professional uses. (My sister and I found a "Waylon Jennings/Willie Nelson" station to play for our mom during our Mother's Day gathering!)

DLC 6: What went wrong?

Well this might require a tech time to sort out. I think I missed something obvious. Did I need to sign out or enter through some other door? I clicked the links to my colleagues' blogs but was unsuccessful at figuring out how to leave a comment. It is so common to fail on one's first attempts at technology (okay, at other things too!).

What I find most challenging about my digital literacy is how I learn something by doing it once with support, and then I am not able to do it independently the next time I try (which could be the next day, the next week, the next month, etc.) and then it's completely gone. And I don't need it enough to make myself backtrack and re-figure out how to do it. I just don't do it. So my Shelfari shelf hasn't changed since I started it and I have to ask Miles how to do a screen capture and I almost got on Diigo long ago but then I forgot to follow through on some final confirmation step…

Success with technology is like splashing my face with water in the morning: lots goes through my fingers but the job is accomplished. The rest feels more like trying to remember a dream.

Tangled in the Web: Conferences pt.2

Tangled in the Web: Conferences pt.2: "The TEP (Technology Education Partnership) conference on April 7 provided opportunities to see what was new with Smart , learn about Maine'..."

I visited this way cool blog by this wildly positive, popular, and web-savvy library teacher! Anyone know her? But I couldn't figure out how to leave a comment! Which was what I was supposed to do. Also I didn't see how to become a follower. Is that passe? Yikes!

Listen Up!

Pandora was delightful. I hadn't listened to Joan Armatrading in so long! What a flashback! I had her music playing as I visited iTunes. Right away I subscribed to two NPR podcasts, which I'd been meaning to get back to for a while. (Now if I can only find my iPod…)

Then on to iTunesU. That didn't go quite as smoothly. I did subscribe to RadioLab and also downloaded a couple free videos--one from the Exploratorium After School program. I think I can use their "jitterbug" in our electric circuits unit next year! (At about this point my Pandora station disappeared and I started seeing the spinning ball of death fairly frequently…)

I was surprised by the layout of the K-12 portion of iTunesU. For those of us who don't belong to any of those "bodies" it was not as user friendly as the other portion of iTunes podcasts (organized more by topic). I ended up poking around the NAIS site and the one from Maine, but I had the feeling I should know what I was looking for rather than just browse. It wasn't so easy to tell what grade level podcasts were targeted at either (until you opened one and found out that it was way, way above my/our level).

I like the idea of using more music in my classroom. (I imagine my students get a little sick of my one CD!) But I may have to tap into other people's successes with the iTunesU podcasts. And I may need a new computer here at home!

Watch Know

I chose several short videos to share with all or part of my class. We watched a fun video on the states, capitals, and regions, another one about the geography of the U.S., and a cool short one on how to find the volume of a rectangular prism. (We compared the volume "formula" that the man shared with our own methods.)

Pets/Nicknames

I saw April's third graders using Wordle to generate words of different parts of speech. What a great idea! And now that I know how to do a screen capture, I am more likely to use Wordle with my SmartBoard to launch or summarize a lesson.