Pattyjane’s Weblog

This week I became very involved with the readings for class and that’s a great start but I’m time challenged and didn’t get to experiment with some of the tools listed. In our text, Web 2.0, I read through chapter 5, largely because as I was reading I became so intrigued with the new tools discussed in chapter 3, that I wanted to go ahead to better understand how these could be applied in a school setting. I also read up to page 127 in The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman. About mid-way through chapter 3 in Web 2.0 I felt like I was Alice in Technology Land and twice as confused, amazed, and frightened! Everything I was reading about new Web tools was new, except for our discussions in class, and for me, some brief visits to Wikipedia for research. Reading Thomas Friedman helped assuage some of my fear because of the discussion on the evolution of the internet and Web 2.0. Somehow getting the background on how these cyberspace systems developed helped fill in some gaps. I was discussing this feeling of being lost with a friend of mine and she said that some of the background is good to know, but it’s like driving a car, you can drive it without needing to know how a car is made or which part in the engine does what it does.

Chapter 3 focuses on describing the new tools available to all of us with an internet connection. The open source movement allowed the Web to not only be a source for information to be transmitted and consumed to being a platform where information is created, shared, edited, revised. The beauty of it all is that it is available and free. The more I think about it the more I think how lucky we all are to have this abundance of information in our lives. Not only that but we can use it, work with it, use it to communicate and collaborate on creating and solving problems. What a great gift the originators of the World Wide Web gave us.

I like how chapter 3 outlined the tools available on the Web. I’ve discussed tags in a response to Vlad and thought it might be good to do some work on that in class. I still need to get more of a handle on RSS–I understand it–information I want will come to me, but I would like to set up at least one subscription for myself and use the RSS technique. I’m not sure what to do with the XML code and how to get it to an aggregator. Thank goodness blogging has been demystified since we set up our blog sites. One really has to do some of this stuff–I mean use these tools–to get a sense of what they are. It’s all so new and by default, confusing. Example: I’m on the board for the Theater at Monmouth. Our last board chair set up a blog site and invited board members to blog about the theater’s productions 2 summers ago. Well, I think no one on the board knew what blogging really was so no one contributed to the site. Until people of my generation develop their understandings about some of the new web tools like blogging, a whole huge group of people will be out of the loop on this kind of communication and collaboration. Again, there is so much out there to be aware of it is overwhelming. It’s so hard to get my head wrapped around this…so I’m really glad I’m taking this course so I won’t be on the ignorant side of this kind of literacy. I am fascinated by podcasting. I plan to go to teachertube.com tomorrow to checkout a teacher’s video someone mentioned in Vlad. I’d like to learn how to make a podcast in the near future and use it soon in my teaching. I’d like my students to make a podcast as a demonstration of their knowledge on a particular topic in social studies or science. I love the idea of wikis–it’s one of the easiest things for me to understand of all of these web tools. I like how on Wikipedia, for example, anyone can add information or edit what’s already there. Just the other day, I looked up an obscure 14th century English Duke, and sure enough plenty was written about him. I know that I’d never have found that information before the creation of the Web. I’d like to use a wiki with my students. Though I plan to wait until I’ve read Classroom Blogging and checked into how other teachers have used it as a learning tool successfully. I’ve read the pages on social bookmarking, but I still feel like I don’t understand what it is, so I might need a tutorial on this tool. My daughter does photosharing all the time, but I don’t know exactly how she makes it happen, so I plan to get her to show me this when I visit her this weekend. For video showcasting, I’ve visited YouTube.com to watch the videos of some music I like. As for making my own, I need to learn how to upload videos for class projeccts.

For most of the rest of chapter 3, I made notations of the sites listed for the new tools that are out there. What I’d like to do is find the time to go to them for the different educational purposes listed, like the site mentioned for 3D modeling, and for geography Google Earth. That’s what I mean about being overwhelmed. Now that I know what is out there, I need time to go in and try to use it and figure it out.