RSS - A Good Time

RSS aggregates are very handy. This week we have been exploring using aggregator for RSS feeds. It's so wonderful to have all the updates go to one place then you aren't wasting your time going from Blog to Blog in search of great resources and inspiration. It has been nice spending the time to search for blogs and then search the people that follow them or even ones they follow. There are some great ideas out there and blogs are one way to make the discussion grow from outside your department to outside of your district and on to the entire world! (What a idyllic fact.)
The video we watched for a group was interesting to watch as well. The guests discussed some of the problems with the current education we have in place. We seek to individualize everything for our students to meet their needs the best we can. One guest even said that the way we currently teach will look different in the year 2050 because we will just be coordinators for students from a distance. I don't think you can take teachers out completely because that is not the way the world functions. It reminds me of the movie, WALL-E. If we had less than 120 students in a day this would be great to do. Individualize every lesson and subject for our students, but a teacher's day isn't magically longer because they have more work to do. I feel that this would be very difficult to incorporate and be successful at in our current structure and under the current governmental rules.

Wiki Wiki Wiki

For me Wikis are an interesting option for my classroom because of the formulas needed to be expressed in mathematics. After searching and viewing so many other blogs and wikis people have created, I can use these for sources of inspiration. I can link these sites and use what I already have created on my webpage to make them useful for myself and my students. Sometimes it's as simple as reading a post a teacher wrote to spark an idea or help you learn a new way to reach your students. I'm excited to keep exploring for more useful resources.

Blogs, Wikis, and Read/Write Web... Oh My

Today in class, and out of class, we discussed the advances of the read/write web has made on education. We currently use blogs in grade class to document our weekly growth as educators and reflect on what we have learned. This is a common use for blogs, people sharing information in a format which solicits feedback and conversations about the content. I think it will be a helpful reflection piece when we are doing our final comps. I enjoyed the time we had this week to look for professional blogs which might help advance our teaching. I would be interested to get those on an RSS feed so I can regularly check them. I would also be interested in putting a comment Q&A section on my class website for students and parents to use, not sure if that can be done with our restrictive site, but we can always try.

As for wikis, I struggle with this. It is difficult to assign Internet work to students who do not have access at home and do not have a study hall. Yes they can come in at lunch and after school, but I don't think the equity is there. Maybe for those students we could use a call-in podcast for them. Another aspect that I wrote about in one of my book responses was the fact that many programs do not have equation editors to use, such as blogger. This makes it very difficult and time consuming for students to write mathematical responses and I know they will spend more time focusing on how to use the technology as opposed to focusing on the content. We shall see... I'm still not convinced of it's use for my class the way it is currently. I can see it as a good place to share ideas and have students reflect upon their learning, maybe I will explore this route. We shall see.