Patricia\’s Blog

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.

Good morning. I submitted this post yesterday. Then I tried to edit it and when I looked for it this morning it was gone. I think I edited and then didn’t save. Here it is again. Losing it was frustrating, but doing it again was satisfying because in the meantime I learned how to make the format of links look better!

I was inspired by a blog written by a student named Lauren. She attends an international school in
Korea. I found  her blog through Support Bloggers. I clicked on the right of the page under blogs. The format of Lauren’s (a Student) Blog is beautiful. She also has a counter on the right that shows how many people have read her blog along with a world map showing where the readers are from. She also has included photos and video. Her topics are deep (orphans, death, literature) and she has included thoughtful posts. I also liked the way she referred to her fellow classmate’s blogs and made positive comments on each of them. Her teacher is Mr. Burell and you can find the project at Mr. Burell’s Class Project. The project was set up by three teachers from around the world, Clay Burrell in Korea, Christopher Watson in Hawaii, and Michele Davis in
Colorado. Beautiful, international, deep, clever, and high tech are the adjectives for this project. My comment to Lauren can be found at Patricia’s Comment to Lauren’s Blog.

Welcome to Patricia’s blog. I am still in the early stages of imagining what it will be like here. I hope that my students will find this a warm and welcoming place. It will be a place where they can develop their English language skills, express themselves, and learn interesting things from each other about the big, wide world!