Patricia\’s Blog

I teach a basic grammar class and while I was exploring podcasts, I discovered Grammar Girl. This is a radio show that deals with various grammar questions. It is hosted by a young woman who has a lively and interesting presentation style. I found a segment on less and fewer which is one of the grammar points that we will be working on later this semester. I downloaded Grammar Girl Less and Fewer from iTunes. These podcasts also have transcripts that go with them. The original presentation might be little challenging for my students, so I put the podcast on Audacity and edited out some of the language and then edited the transcript. I will link this to Blackboard so that my students can listen to it during the week we work on count and noncount nouns.

As you know, my students are second language learners. The two most difficult grammar points of using English are articles (a/an/the) and prepositions. Even some very advanced learners of  English have trouble with these two things. In both my writing a grammar classes, my students work on prepositions of location. The illustrations in the books work, but they are line drawings in black and white. Also, there are not very many and they are rather boring. It would be so much more interesting and authentic to make an exercise with photos. I could put them in Soft Chalk which would allow me to use the photos in a “quiz” format. Students could get instant feedback on whether or not they used the correct preposition. One example could be:

I can see the wall ______ the wine glass.

©ainus. (2006, May 30). Wall through Wine Glass. ©ainus’s Photostream. Retrieved October 22, 2007 from
http://www.flickr.com/photos/caius/156796056/.

Last week Deb added some links on Educational Reform to our wiki project and one of them got me thinking about teachers and leadership. The link to a blog by Neil Rochelle referred to some questions about teacher leaders, specifically the questions asked by Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach in February of 2007.  

Below I have paraphrased Nussbaum-Beach’s four questions and targeted them more specifically to you – my classmates, setting them within the context of our work on the Read/Write Web.

• Do you feel your responsibility to act as a leader has increased as your understanding of the Read/Write Web has developed?
• Do the new skills that we are acquiring make us “teacher leaders by default?”
• What role does Web 2.0 play in the role of a teacher leader?
• How do you see yourself contributing to teacher education?

This week we worked on learning about and developing wikis. Because I would like to do away with my writing textbook and thought wikis might help me with that goal, I went to Wikibooks Main Page. There I found two sites that demonstrated some of what can be done with a wiki. One has many ESL lesson plans, Lesson Plans, and the other is very similar to a grammar text book, Grammar. Both of these sites gave me some ideas, while at the same time made me want to jump right in and start “collaborating.” That will come later, but right now Deb and I are working on our wiki project, Deb and Patricia on Using Blogs in the Classroom.

The project has been a good learning tool. Since Deb is a great partner, the main challenge has been on the technology side. Learning how to use the tool (editing, format, adding a page, linking the page) seems to take me a long time. (My nephew laughs when he hears that “bonk” sound which means that something strange happened!) The second challenge involves the massive amount of information, sifting through it, and choosing what to include. Once my del.icio.us page develops and becomes more organized, this will improve.

My view of wikis has changed. Most importantly, I now know what they are, but I also have a beginner’s understanding of what they can be and that is pretty amazing. I don’t have any resistance to using wikis. The college where I work is very supportive of using technology, so the only resistance I can anticipate is on the user side. In order to use the Web 2.0 instead of my writing textbook I am now wondering what type of support my students will need. Is it reasonable to expect them to access the Internet instead of a paper textbook? I don’t want to make the class online, but in order to use the Web instead of a paper textbook, will the class need to be labeled a blended class? These are questions I will need to ask my dean and the technology people at school.

Blogical Discussion:

http://friendlyarachnids.edublogs.org/2007/10/15/5-a-2-blogical-discussion-forum/#comment-17

Hi. Here are the comments I made as of Friday morning. I will be going away for the weekend to a place where my cell phone doesn’t work and there is no Internet connection. I will stop in the public library once to access our class, but here are my posts so far.

On BJ’s Blog (Blogical Discussion):

http://techinclassroom.blogspot.com/2005/07/tech-in-classroom.html#comments

On Deb’s Blog:

http://friendlyarachnids.edublogs.org/2007/10/11/4-b-2-learning-via-rss/

Social bookmarking can be a useful tool for my professional development. I have found it to be an efficient way to tag the sites that I find useful. During this class many websites and blogs have been mentioned and I have been able to go back and collect many of these on http://del.icio.us/triciaj. Previously (I’m a little embarrassed to say) many of those sites ended up on little post its. My tag is triciaj.

Networking is something that has unlimited potential. Right how I have two people in my network, Lee Anne  and Will Richardson.  My next step will be to add my classmates and in the future, I will be able to add others to my network. I would like to both broaden and narrow the expertise of the people I put in my network.

My Pageflakes pagecast is now available at http://www.pageflakes.com/pgalien/15415335.

I just listened to Will Richardson’s Keynote Presentation for UPEI’s New Media Institute given on September 29, 2007 (http://edtechtalk.com/http://edtechtalk.com/). He said that there are two people in his physical space who are not bored when he talks about technology in education, but there are thousands on his blog who are very interested. As he said, Web 2.0 “allows people to connect in ways they cannot do in physical space.” As time goes on, I hope to discover more feeds from people who teach what I teach and in a similar environment. RSS can help me connect quickly and efficiently with a wide range of people who have the same professional interests that I do. Perhaps I can get some ideas on how to realize my dream of getting rid of my writing textbook.

In the future, I will also be able to use RSS to link my students’ blogs to Google Reader or Pageflakes (like Lee Anne does with our blogs). This will make managing their projects easier.