Task 5

So my first thought is Information Overload! But I did find some blogs that I think will be pretty useful. So You Want to Teach is a blog that may be useful when you get to the middle of the year and you're frustrated. It seemed to be a pretty positive blog and that it had things that I think we teachers sometimes forget (such as why we are teaching). Another blog I thought was pretty informative was Smart Classroom Management. I know I'm always looking for ways to make my classroom management better, so this is one I will probably keep up with. I also subscribed to Education Week just so I can stay up on all the politics of education.

I had a hard time finding any "just for fun" type blogs to follow. If those were the only type of blogs I followed, I probably wouldn't ever check my feed, because it's just not important enough.

Task 4

So this RSS thing is kind of cool. That fact that you can get everything that interests you all in one place is pretty helpful. I've used RSS feeds before, but it got to the point where I would just forget to check it, and then I stopped using it altogether. I guess I'm just not a news junkie. Usually if it's not on Yahoo's front page, I just don't know about it, and that's been working pretty well for me. But we'll see how this goes. Maybe I will find it more useful this time around. Well, if I'm actually using it for work stuff, then I could see how it would be more useful.

One of the blogs I found that I liked was called Motherlode, which is about parenting. There were some pretty interesting posts on there. One that caught my attention was called 'A New Term for Lousy Parenting.' There were some pretty strong opinions in it, and I could see both sides, but I'd have to agree with the people that say that the blogger's term "ghetto parenting" is going to be perceived in a racial context.

Task 3

Blog writing is, I think, a pretty unique form of writing. It's really kind of an 'anything goes' type of writing. But what I like about it is how I feel like I really get to know something about the writer from it, whereas with other forms, you don't get such personal knowledge. When someone blogs, he/she is really putting himself out there. The difference between blogging and other writing, though, is that when that person puts himself out there, he gets immediate feedback from readers. The blogger will know if people love or hate his ideas, and people are not always nice when they respond to ideas they don't agree with.

I really liked reading the blog from the teacher who doesn't give homework. I thought the initial blog and all of the comments were very thoughtful, and I feel like blogs like that could be very useful to me as a teacher. I think that having a place where professionals can share thoughts and opinions with people they would never get to meet otherwise is an awesome thing.

For students, I think blogging can help to reinforce their ideas, but also get perspectives that they may not get otherwise, such as thoughts from other teachers and students. Not to mentions teachers and students who may live in different places.

Task 1 - Thoughts about Web 2.0

I have to be honest. Before starting this course, I really thought I would be brushing up on things I already knew pretty well. After reading 'A Day in the Life of Web 2.0' I quickly realized I was WRONG. As I was reading the article, I was more and more amazed at how the web could be used.

I think it's exciting, but also a little overwhelming because there's so much I don't know, and will I really be able to integrate Web 2.0 into my classroom?

In the schools where I have taught in the past, most of my students didn't have a computer at home. So any technology that I wanted to use was pretty much limited to what I could do in the classroom, which was not much and was rarely very interactive. It was mostly me using the technology as a teaching tool...In other words, it was more of a Web 1.0 situation. In the future it seems that I will be communicating with students and parents in a whole new way. Homework assignments will be given differently, hopefully in ways that will encourage a deeper level of thinking from the students and will give me a better insight as to what the students really know. Parents will really be able to have an intimate knowledge of what is going on in the classroom, which hopefully will help them to support their children's learning even better.

I think that with cell phones and video games and computers being the norm for so many kids, education really has had to change to be able to engage kids in the classroom. It doesn't really work for a teacher to stand at the front of the class and lecture kids all day. I think that by bringing Web 2.0 into the classroom, students will want to get involved because they will be doing things similar to what they already like to do.