Here are some links discussing Social Media in Schools:

• Social Media Educators Need to Use and Know It
• Twitter and Facebook – Are they useful in Education?
• Blogs & Wiki’s at the Elementary School Level
• Delicious as a Tool for Teachers
• Blogging as Part of Your Class
• Interesting Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom

Social Media, Twitter, Facebook, Education

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I’ve been using Delicious for a while now for saving web sites that I find useful in solving technology problems. After I fix something most people say “I don’t know how you know all this information.” and I say, “I don’t know it all, I know where to find it and where to save it.” Google is your friend, it helps you find what you need and Delicious helps you save it for when you need it. I would never carry a book or expect myself to remember all the data that I need to fix the things I’m responsible for.

At the same time, teachers shouldn’t have to memorize all their curriculum or items that enhance it either. They should be able to get the information, save it to Delicious, then retrieve it at a later time when they need it for a class. Could you see a teacher being able to log into Delicious, search a tag and come up with a web site in seconds for a class on the spur of a moment. That enhances the learning experience for the students. It gives them something extra and teaches them another way to use the resources at hand to get information relevant to a subject they are studying.

Another way to use Social Media to our advantage teaching students with current technology.

Delicious, Social Media

I’m not going to speak to this issue, instead I will let the original article that inspired me to blog this do the talking.

Are iPod-banning schools cheating our kids?

The larger, more interesting question is: Why do we devote so much time and energy teaching kids to memorize facts we know they’ll forget? We should instead teach critical thinking, creative decision-making and sophisticated information retrieval.

Education, Technology, K12 Education

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This post was contributed by Heather Johnson, who is an industry critic on Devry University review. She invites your feedback at:

heatherjohnson2323@gmail.com

Teachers who are interested in blended learning are seeing many new Web 2.0 tools come and go these days. One of the most promising tools that recently launched is haiku LMS. This learning management system delivers a robust series of features so that teachers can seamlessly integrate the Web with classroom instruction. As the makers of haiku LMS say, “The message, not the medium, is what we are about.”

The user-friendly interface of haiku LMS means that teachers and students can adopt the new system with little to no training. Individual teachers can create and administer course content, assignments and assessments. Both students and teachers can easily collaborate through the system, exchanging messages and homework assignments.

haiku LMS offers enterprise-level service and support. Administrators can even implement the system throughout a school, rather than starting an account for a single class. Naturally, there are different fees attached to the various levels of support. Although there are open-source content management systems available for free, some teachers may opt for a commercial service like haiku LMS, if only for the professional support.

There has been a lot of positive feedback on this streamlined management system (self-described as “zen-like”). Various testimonials from educators are advertised on the site’s homepage, as people have been testing the system since its 1.0 launch in 2006. Things are constantly being updated and improved on with haiku LMS and I highly recommend it to teachers everywhere. A 60-day free trial, completely risk free is offered.

Note: All views are those of the guest blogger. The author of this blog does not endorse any products or services mentioned in the post unless otherwise noted. The reader is responsible for checking all offers and link authenticity before entering into any agreements or purchases.

I’ve been working a second job sine the beginning of the year which has cut down on my free time. With the cut back in time I’ve had to prioritize that time between doing my blogs or spending it with my family. Of course my family has won that battle, so I have not been posting for the last month as the second job has started taking off with more work equaling less free time.

I do get a chance to read my RSS feeds and wanted to share some of the best reading that I get to do during lunch or late at night. Here is my list of the top 5 feeds I like to read:

1. Problogger
2. Zenhabits
3. Weblogg-ed
4. Zero Day
5. Education IT

The above are my 5 must reads from the 31 feeds that I have in Google Reader, but I do have 2 other favorites that I like to follow so I would like to share them also….. Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub and the “The Official Dilbert Website.”

Enjoy

Technorati tags: Education, Technology, Blogging ]]> http://edutechation.wordpress.com/2008/03/17/when-you-dont-have-the-time/feed/ 0 Ray http://edutechation.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/blogging-as-part-of-your-class/ http://edutechation.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/blogging-as-part-of-your-class/#comments Wed, 03 Oct 2007 01:53:51 +0000 Ray Ebersole http://edutechation.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/blogging-as-part-of-your-class/ ]]>

I’ve been working on this post for a month with a teacher at my school. Together we’ve started a blog for his 5th grade class (click here). The idea is to engage the students on the computer in a way that gets them interested in their work, while teaching them how to communicate. We also want to get the parents involved with their children together outside the classroom in an environment that the kids feel comfortable. The blog has been up for two days and in that time the students have already started asking questions about assignments with over 25 comments.

The blog consists of the main entrance page that contains the Upcoming Events post, pages that contain weekly class Lesson Plans in Math & Science, a Homework page and an Online Resource page.

• The Upcoming Events post is static, sort of; Keith will change it depending on events as they change each month. We decided that instead of making new posts, then having the posts scroll down as in a typical blog, that Keith would just write the upcoming events in the text editor and save the update. He will also change the time stamp to reflect the new age of the post.
• The weekly Lesson Plans are short basic overviews on what the students are doing that week, if there is a test and what is expected. It is not a detailed lesson plan, but something that gives a parent an idea about what their child is working on.
• The Homework page gives the students a homework assignment due later in the week. The student can ask questions by using the comments section of the page. The comments are moderated by Keith so that nothing inappropriate gets on the blog.
• The Online Resources page will change, be added to as time goes on and Keith finds sites that he wants his students and Parents to visit.

The Blogroll has basic links to our school page, the county school page and eharcourtschools, which is one of our main math sites. As I mentioned above, the Pages have comments allowed so that the parents and students can communicate with Keith after hours when Keith is online at home. It is also a help to the parents that cannot contact Keith during the school day. They leave a comment and Keith can email them a personal reply or leave a comment of his own if appropriate.

I personally believe a blog is an easy method of communicating your class goals than maintaining a web site. The quickness of editing a post or page is much faster than using FrontPage, DreamWeaver or another HTML program. The manipulation of the pages is easier and you can add video, pictures and other multimedia much easier. Lastly, you can communicate in faster and better with your students and their parents.

Check out Keith’s blog: Mr. Thompson’s 5th Grade Class

Technorati tags: Educational Technology, k12 Education, Blogging, Elementary Education

Check out the new Free Software page above. They are a small collection of programs and web sites that I’ve found useful and have added to our teachers laptops.

I’ve been looking at two different Wiki sites lately for use at our school and thought I would review them here for you.

I’ve been using Wikispaces.com for just about a year now for tech support of our staff. They have a special upgrade for teachers in the K-12 field which is very enticing. The pricing before the educational special is as follows:

The upgrade for teachers is to the Plus account which adds some good features in being ad-free, full privacy, SSL security and custom themes. The increase in storage space for uploaded files to 20 MB is a nice upgrade also. The actual “Total File Storage” stays at 2 GB for the Plus plan, but that is quite a lot of space.

The second wiki site I’ve been looking at is PBwiki.com. I’ve just started using PBwiki, having setup a school wiki for our AP to use as a site for parents to come to for lesson plans and ideas from their child’s teacher on how to study for those lessons. The PBwiki site does not offer a special free upgrade for educators to a normally paid plan unfortunately. Their plan structure is as follows:

As you can see, the PBwiki site is more expensive $9.95/month versus $5.00 per month for Wikispaces. Everything on the PBwiki site is more expensive than on Wikispaces for that matter.

They also have different approaches to creating your wiki. The first difference you will notice is that PBwiki makes it easier to create and edit your wiki. They are using a new “point and click” interface that is very easy to use and includes some great plugins. Some of those include a Calendar, Google gadgets, Chats, Math Equations and YouTube videos.

On the other side, Wikispaces is more like a real wiki in which you do have a visual editor, but you have to know some wiki language to get some of the same effects that you can get in PBwiki. In Wikispaces, I do like that you can use the text editor to code things like anchors to places on the same page in the wiki without using a Table of Contents.

I haven’t tried coding an anchor in PBwiki yet, but if I didn’t know how to do it I would have to look around to find help on the subject. The “classic mode” on PBwiki is the basic text editor which from the little I looked at it, didn’t impress me. It doesn’t use line breaks to separate your text or code into readable form, whereas the Wikispaces text editor looks like your actual wiki page in spacing things out so that you can read them and find what you are looking for.

Speaking of help, I believe the help files (wiki pages) on Wikispaces is richer than the FAQ that is used with PBwiki. I did a search for “Anchor” on PBwiki and it could not find anything for me (see picture). On the other hand I found a complete tutorial on the Wikispaces wiki about anchors. This to me means that the authors of PBwiki would rather you do all your work in their new “Point and Click” mode. While that is all well and good, it does limit you when you want to do something like anchors and can’t find it.

Conclusion:

In my opinion, both of these wiki platforms are well worth a try. I believe they both have advantages and disadvantages. If you are a more seasoned user, you will probably like Wikispaces better. If you want the ease of use with the point and click environment then you will like PBwiki better. My overall choice is Wikispaces for it’s free upgrade for educators, its better integration of help files and its easier to use text editor for more advanced editing.

Rankings

The rankings are based on 1 being the best and 5 being the worst.

	PBwiki	Wikispaces
Price/Upgrade Policy	3	1
WYSIWYG Editor	1	2
Text Editor	5	2
Help/Search	4	2
Overall	3	2

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Technorati tags: Wiki, Wikispaces, PBwiki, Education, K12 Education

I wanted to take the time to point to some others who blog about education. I’ve either had these folks in my blogroll or have added them recently. They have either commented here did a trackback to my blog or I have found them in my wanderings of the blogosphere about education.

1. Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub (History, accuracy and education) by Ed Darrell
2. JD2718 (Education, Math, Teaching, New York, Bronx, Union, Language, Travel) by JD2718
3. Happy Chyck Wonders by happychyck
4. Lets Play Math by Denise
5. 2 Cents Worth by David Warlick ~ David is a great source of information on Web 2.0 and blogging in the classroom
6. Weblogg-ed by Will Richardson ~ The best educational blogger I’ve read

Thanks for the commentary and words about something worthwhile……

Technorati tags: Education, k12 Education, Web 2.0

 We’ve had some interesting commentary on my last blog about teachers coming into the 21st century with their teaching methods. I thought long and hard about some of the reply’s, emails and even a trackback about the post. So, as I was reading Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed blog today, this quote from his post on Tuesday, October 10th struck me with interest.

“We need to keep teaching writing with pen and paper if for no other reason that the kids need to have the physical strength to handwrite the 90 minute Regents exam.” (Comment heard during a recent workshop.)

That might be the most depressing thing I’ve heard in a long time, but it epitomizes, I think, the depth of the resistance that many teachers are feeling about the shifts that are occurring. It’s a legitimate concern, I know, in an environment where passing the test is at the end of the day what it’s all about. (Even though you know that in a few years, the Regents and the SAT are going to have to start providing kids with digital ways to take tests.) Our resistance, our inability to see new ways of learning is going to get us into very desperate times.

Please take the time to read Will’s blog. He is one of the most respected educators in our country today, you will not be disappointed.

That’s what I think….What about you?