CSEs (better late than never)

Now that I've stopped construction on the Ark, prevented my basement from flooding AND had COX Communications finally restore our cable/internet/phone to working order, I can finally jot down some thoughts and revelations about Google's Custom Search Engines and what a great tool they have already been to both myself and my colleagues. All of the 7th and 8th grade teachers at my school now have gmail account sand have a least been using google docs for a few weeks now, so I decided to give them a brief rundown about Google's CSE's at our team meeting on tuesday of last week. They were all so excited that all but the math teacher decided to use a CSE engine with the 7th and 8th graders as a whole class the next time they went to the computer lab. I asked both the science and social studies teacher why they were so excited about building CSEs, and both responses had to do with having "control of the content that students will be directed to on the web."

I also believe that the "control" aspect of CSEs is what makes them such a great educational tool. Not just for the teacher, but for the student as well. Using a CSE for the webquest that we're building is going to streamline the project for the student by directing them to the most appropriate information that will help them complete the tasks involved. The same could be said for the science teacher at my school that designed  CSE loaded with all the best middle school-based science fair projects: ideas, suggestions, science curriculum tie-ins and standards. He was able to keep the students from clicking off on tangents and staying in the "realm" that he wanted them in. I liked the way he used the word 'realm' and so did the social studies teacher, so much that he also built a CSE for students to use when they went to choose countries from Latin America that they would research. 

CSEs would also be great for students to use in making up their own webquests for classmates. Once they've been taught how to properly evaluate websites for educational purposes, having the students build their own CSE could be a powerful tool in helping them construct their own realms of knowledge based on what they found most interesting in social studies, science, or language arts class. 

Flick & Digital Photography

If anything, my new flickr.com account will give me a place to keep all of the photos I use in my class, and plan to use with my class in the future. I have a ton of photos on my iMac and a ton as well on my laptop. After my wedding a couple years ago I took a month of that summer archiving all of my photos and videos collected throughout the years, and backing up all that info was very time consuming. But it also gave me a chance to reconnect with many images I hadn't seen in years, and now that I can easily locate all of my old photos and video clips, I have a place to upload the ones that I'd like to share.
I've also recommended flickr.com to the 8th graders at my school working on a yearbook. They had been taking photos on their digital cameras and emailing their shots back and forth to each other. But as you could imagine, with 8 or 9 people taking pictures, that was alot of emails, alot of images on already slow-running computers. Making sure that the site wasn't blocked on the school computers, I told them if they each got an account at flickr.com they'd be able to share their photos with each other the instant they're uploaded to the site. I also explained that if they were nerdy like me and labeled the photos well when they saved the file that would be uploaded to flickr it would make the pics much easier to label once they were done being uploaded.
I was pleasantly surprised when I uploaded my first photos how the file name I saved them as was automatically in the description box for that photo. I also liked the ease of flickr to organize and label all of the photos individually and in sets as well. There are so many possibilities for the use of the Creative Commons photos in the classroom, and the countless ways students can tag and label their own photos, or find photos that are interesting to them as well from all over the world is pretty powerful. My students would have a great time taking the information they collect in science or social studies class to annotate a picture for other classmates to learn from.
I've only had time to upload some photos from my home computer of my family to give the students and example of my home life and what's important to me. I will be asking them to do the same with pictures they really love of their family. The kodak photo program I used exported the pictures in a form the program called, "best for the web." I think they look a bit dull, and blurry even, so I'd have to say the next batch I upload will be saved at a higher resolution. Check out my first album at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/herman75/sets/72157623638963422/

Social Bookmarking

After using delicious.com for almost a week now, I'd say that its capabilities and powers far surpass my uses. I am always on one of either 2 computers, both with the same bookmarks. When I combine that with the fact that I', able to spend less and less time on the internet with a growing family and added responsibilities at home, delicious was something that kept me online longer than I should have been a few too many times this week.
The most productive time I spent surfing the links of other delicious.com folks was after I bookmarked Discovery's United Streaming.com and teachertube at delicious because I wanted to see what others who bookmarked unitedstreaming.com tagged as 'educational' or 'language arts' and so forth. It was much easier to flip through another teachers bookmarked pages, and what they thought was was good content out there online, much more helpful then just a list of sites (no matter how well organized google, bing, yahoo, and the likes can make those lists) which is all those search engines really are, lists. What I was most intrigued about during the reading last week was the new folksonomy tags that help categorize related information. It makes the bookmarking of a page much more involved, giving you the ability to choose key words that you think are most important in describing the content of the website and/or the purpose that its serves. These tags act as a lingual-web that connects you to others who tagged the same site, use the same tag words. The idea of a folksonomy made me think of my students and how many of them struggle to see deeper relationships between information rather than what's apparent of the surface. This tool would be able to help the see connections between their personal interests as well as educational connections if used for researching certain topics in each discipline. The science fair starts next week at my school and I've already told the science teacher for 7th and 8th grade how well delicious.com would work to locate related pages to the specific science fair project that they choose. Telling a student to find 3 or 4 pertinent websites about increased heart rate dependent on music genre (a popular topic the last couple years) it may take them up to a half-hour. If you tell them to find the best site they can about the topic, and the delicious.com can point them in the direction of 3/4 other related sites it would make the task less daunting to the student as well as giving them the chance to mentally sift through more related information.
Having all my bookmarks in one place to reference wherever, whenever is good, but the power of this application in education and research will play a much more important role as I teach my students how to use this and the many different ways it can be useful to them.

Week 5: RSS and Google Reader

What a great TOOL!!! I can't believe how much easier RSS has made my life online. Having all the webites that I frequent in one place like 'bookmarks' is one thing, but being able to organize the feeds that you get into your Google Reader saves so much surfing time that I have more real life time with my family.  What I like best about the Google Reader is the ability to build and organize folders for all of the feeds you subscribe to becuase what I found after a week of finding RSS feeds, was that they all fell into 4 or 5 categories. Even if the page didn't have an RSS option, just by cutting and pasting the URL into the 'Add a Subscription' button in the upper left hand corner of the screen had Google make a feed for that page to notify you of any changes to the pages.
Musical artists, online streaming concert sites and concert touring sites went into one of my Reader folders, so if any updates were made to pages of my favorite artists were made, I was pushed the info right away. The same went for all the other sports, language arts, even united discovery streaming sites that I frequent at home and at school were all there in my Reader. If I didn't want to keep the feed, It's easy enough to delete. I really like the way that Goggle makes up nice blocks of information for you in the Reader, complete with headlines, graphics and links right at your fingertips. Even for the pages without true RSS feeds, Goggle does an amazing job at creating great, reader-friendly previews of the updates made to your favorite sites.
Having students organize there own interest through RSS feeds and Reader pages could really help me bring their literature circles to cyber-space. ALl it would really take would be for the students to create a gmail account, then create a Blog on Blogger about the book their group chooses. Then, each of the group members could subscribe to their other group members to answer questions about the novel, share ideas, and offer insight at their own speed. Even if it was something that only a few students could do at first to try out, it seems like a medium that would appeal to all of them.