Reflections 2

I have to start by saying that I have really enjoyed learning about some of the features of web 2.0. If you are even slightly technically inclined, it is well worth the time to explore video sharing sites, wikis, and social bookmarking. I feel that the last two would both be very useful to me professionally. 

As I said in my previous post about wikis, I think that they offer so many options in the classroom and school as a whole. As a school psychologist my role is currently changing very rapidly from what it may have been even 5 years ago. With the addition of Response to Intervention into educational policy I will no longer be spending my days giving students intelligence tests. Instead I will be working with my school's instructional support team to create and implement interventions for students that are having both academic and behavior difficulties. A large part of implementing RTI effectively is to build a "library" of interventions for various problems. This is where the wiki could come in.  As we say so often, why reinvent the wheel. Instead of having to create or research interventions for each IST referral, I would love to create a RTI wiki for my school. Where we could add intervention information we have already researched or interventions that have been created by staff in our school. It is so difficult to find times when groups of people can get together to work on building this type of library. But with a wiki everyone could be on the look out for great interventions and add them as they were found.

Very much related to this is how I would, and have already started, to use a social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us. As I am searching for interventions, I could easily add them to my bookmarks list and not have to try and remember them later. Then through the networking feature, I could send them to other member of my school's IST or to teachers that might find them useful. I am also constantly looking for resources for parent and teachers about various disabilities. By using a site like del.icio.us I could create lists of such sites that I could access from anywhere and find easily. So many times I have run across a great resource online, wrote in on a post-it note and kept looking for more sites. I then loose the post-it, can remember the name or address of the site, and have to spend half an hour trying to find it again. Hopefully social bookmarking will save me a lot of time, and a lot of post-it notes!

Thoughts on Wikis

I really enjoyed learning about Wikis and think there is a lot of potential for using them in schools. I think the collaborative aspects of wikis is what makes them such a great tool. Wikis really widen the possibilities for whole class or group projects where each member can contribute to a final product. While I really liked blogs as a way to publish student work, I think wikis offer even more possibilities in the classroom. Creating a wiki for a specific topic and then having students edit it and add their own information is a great way to share knowledge. I really like that any member can edit or add to the wiki, versus a blog where only one or a few people post and then everyone else comments. 

I think collaborative work is a great way for students to learn. But not all students find it enjoyable or easy to work together. I remember as a child being dropped off at some classmates house that I didn't really know and having a few hours to get a project done before I was picked up again. I think wikis could really change the way students work together. Not only do they create more flexibility in the time and place that work needs to be completed, but I think the product that is created is much more meaningful and enduring. At the end of a school year students aren't left with a desk or basement full of reports and trifold presentations and dioramas. Instead there is a lasting product that does not need to be stored and can be shared with the world. I feel that making work meaningful for students is one of the best ways to build interest and further learning, and wikis could really be that hook for some students.

I also think that wikis could be a great collaborative tool for adults as well. I feel like we talk a lot about ways to share new information (without having to have extra staff meetings). For example as a member of my school IST, we are always looking for information about research based interventions for our RTI process. I think that using a wiki that we could all edit and add too would be a great way to build our shared knowledge base and eliminate extra meetings!

Video Resource Review

I want to start by saying that I think I may be one of last people out there that doesn't watch videos on You Tube.  But now that I have had a formal introduction to it and some other free online video resources, I can say that I find it no less overwhelming than before. There are a lot of free videos out there, and finding the best ones to use in schools can be difficult and time consuming. However, after review 4 different video sites, I now know there is some good material out there. 

The site that I found most useful for educational videos was Next Vista for Learning. This site is was created entirely for educational purposes. As I learned from listening to the podcast, all material on the site is prescreened to answer four questions related to both relevance and appropriateness. Therefore, there is no question about the content being viewed before it is watched. In terms of the content, it is divided into three easy to use sections. The light bulbs area contains introductions to various content area lessons. There is a good number of math videos with how-to's on different operations. So far there are only a few videos related to ELA, Science and Social Studies, but hopefully more will continue to be added. All the videos in this section are well organized by topic and the content is easily discernible from the title. I personally thought the Global Views section could be very relevant in the classroom. In this section introductions to various parts of the world are given by students that live there. I can't think of a better way to make somewhere come alive for students that are learning about it (I guess other than actually bringing them there). I thought that the organization of the site made it very easy to use. Also you don't need an account to use it, so you can just click and watch. The videos are all only a few minutes in length so students crunched for time can still make use of them. I think there are already many uses for this site in the classroom or school as a whole and as it continues to grow it will be even more useful. I would love to make use of the Seeing Service and Global Views sections. As I have said before, creating a sense of community is very important in our schools. By introducing students to different parts of the world, and allowing them to see others doing good deeds, we could expand our community throughout the globe.

Next Vista was not the only site I visited. I also looked at Teacher Tube, You Tube and Clip Blast. These sites have varying degrees of educational relevance. Of the three, Teacher Tube was the most useful. It had a great number of videos on "educational" topics. However, unlike Next Vista, these videos are not prescreened for content. Therefore they may or may not be appropriate or useful in a classroom. Some of the videos on Teacher Tube were rather lengthy. From the sample I looked at these videos may be more engaging that some of the Next Vista videos. For example there were raps and cheers about math operations. I think that these videos would make a good introduction to a topic and would build student interest. Overall, I found the site less easy to use than Next Vista and think it would take more prescreening by teachers to  use the videos in the classroom. But students might like to watch them as a way to remember information while studying. I found You Tube and Clip Blast to be the least useful for educational purposes, but then again, that is not what they were designed for. Both are set up for general video sharing, and therefore the majority of the content is both irrelevant and inappropriate for schools. That's not to say that there isn't any use for them in an educational setting, but it would take a lot of time for teachers to sort through and screen the material to find something to use in their classroom.  

A Reflection on Classroom Blogging

When I started this class I didn't even know what a blog was, let alone all the benefits it could have in a classroom. Now I am definitely a fan. While I am not a classroom teacher, I think there are so many ways that blogs could be used in a classroom. As we have seen in the examples that we have looked it at, it is a great way to share student work with people outside of the classroom or even school. I think the suggestion of having parent volunteers enter the work onto the blog is will save the teacher time and make the parents feel even more useful.

We talk a lot in Hilton, and especially at Northwood about creating a sense of community in each classroom and throughout the school, and I think that blogging is a great tool for doing this. It could also be a great hook for students. Many of our students are more computer literate than our staff. The more technology we are able to integrate into our schools, the more interest we will create in our students. We have a lot of posters and various projects hanging on the walls to promote community and our character traits. I think that by integrating blogging into these projects we could extend the sense of community beyond the school walls, and allow students to feel connected even when they are not in school. Being that I am not a classroom teacher, I think that this a one way that I could use blogging as part of my job.

As a school psychologist, confidentiality dictates a lot of what I do. I couldn't necessarily create a Northwood special education blog, and make all the students with IEPs post to it. But I think that as our students with disabilities get older and more aware of their strengths and weaknesses, that blogging would be a great way for them to make connections with other students like them. It could be a great way for students with disabilities to share their strategies for success, and find support when they are having difficulty.