This week we take a look at Social Bookmarking, Twitter, Screencasting/podcasting, Google Sites and dabbled a little with Google+.
I've said my piece on Twitter in forums, last week's blog, and a paper that was due this week but here it is again: Twitter is good for getting LOTS of links to ideas from people and companies you normally wouldn't have exposure to but it is too invasive and has too many annoying components for me to use it religiously. I'm choosing to go the route of the RSS Reader instead. I think one thing that I have really embraced by being immersed in the stream of information coming from the RSS Reader and Twitter these last 2 weeks is my transformation from strictly a consumer of the information to a collaborative sharer of the information. In my role as tech coordinator (or whatever title they give me next year) I think I've always been a good source of info for my staff but it has normally been up to them to come to me with questions. As I have been receiving all of these great sources of info about various topics I have made it a point to pass it on. That is key.
That leads me to the Social Bookmarking. I had started my Diigo account when learning about it in an earlier class and I have used it off and on as I ran across good sites. I took it a step further at the end of last year and gave each teacher an account, created a Group, and then shared it with them. I then installed the Diigolet or Toolbar on their classroom computers, gave them a training session and away we went. It was fairly slow going at first and some teachers were complaining that they were getting too many email updates when people would save sites to the Group. Yep, complaining about people sharing resources with them without them having to do any of the work!! Anyways, I showed them how to adjust the settings and we kept going. Eventually summer came and the Diigo use died and has been dead ever since. Chapter 6 opened my eyes to the additional uses of Social Bookmarking and how it can intertwine with an RSS Reader. Time to get out the defibrillator and bring social bookmarking back to life.
I already use a Google Site for my classroom website and it has been awesome. Here is the LINK. All of the teachers at my school use Google Sites. I created a template for them to use and we made the switch at the beginning of this school year. It is really easy to use once you become familiar with the menus.
I haven't done any screencasting related to to my classes thus far but I have used Jing Project before. I do use a student management software in my classroom called SynchronEyes by SMART Technologies (now called SMART Sync). It allows me to broadcast my computer screen onto theirs and that is how I teach a LOT of my lessons. It is essentially a walk-through for them in the same sense as a screencast. The big drawback is that it is only available to them while they are sitting there in class. Another negative is that they only get to see it once. If they miss something the first time they risk the possibility of irking the teacher by asking to see it again. (haha - JK) Posting a video screencast on a teacher website could solve both of those problems. They'd have access to it anywhere they have Internet access and they can play it over and over again at their own leisure. I wouldn't want to make screencasts of everything for fear that they would become too reliant on them but it makes sense to have some screencasts for the tougher concepts.
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