FinalExamination

I had the pleasure of seeing Will Richardson in 2002 at the Building Learning Communities conference in Boston. That conference (Richardson's Blogging lecture included) have had a tremendous influence on my vision for a modern model of education. I think that there needs to be a more contemporary way of looking at the way we educate children as a result of a general loss of skill level that seems to be occurring. Some educators believe that it is society that is changing and that educators shouldn't be responsible to compete with the amount of attention that students are “wasting” texting and Facebooking. I would say that if we educators are not responsible for recapturing the minds of the young then who is.

Teachers need to get better. This is not to say that teachers are of low skill level or are not trying hard, but the mark that we need to hit in terms of our process and perhaps the underlying structure of education has drifted away from us and we need to make a big shift. Web 2.0 technologies could be a huge part of the solution. I already use some Web 2.0 applications in my class, but through reading Will Richardson's book “Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms” I have considered several revisions to existing Web 2.0 applications in my class and several experiments that I will probably be trying within the next few years.

Blogging
Blogging is probably the gateway Web 2.0 application to other less intuitive collaborative online applications. I think that Blogging's linearity and ease of use lends itself to being a technology that is easy for digital immigrants to grasp. I have been using Blogging for many years, typically for the purposes of maintaining a stream of communications from my class including homework and events. I lost interest for a while to focus on traditional web pages as a classroom structure but I'm looking forward to trying a few new things.

Richardson's book mentions using Blogs as an E-Portfolio and/or a digital binder. I have been using Blogs with my grade 9 Media Literacy students as binders (example), but I'm looking forward to trying to create a growth portfolio using Blogs. I am fortunate enough to have my Teacher Advisory group (similar to a home room) meet in one of the computer labs. As one of the goals of this organization is to develop a portfolio, I'm going to try to have my students maintain a reflective growth portfolio using the Blogging features within Ning. (more on Ning later)

I think that about 15% of my coworkers are familiar with Blogs and I'm going to try to integrate Blog writing with the help of our professional development committee into school professional development this next year. If everything goes according to plan, I should be able to set up a system where topics that we are going to cover on these days can be previewed by some individual research and the followed up with some reflection all contained within one of a few closed network options that I have access to.

Wikis
My main concern with Wiki use of late is how to assess them. I would like to have students freely add to a wiki that the class collaborates on, but determining in this situation what individual students have written has always been a challenge. I think my best bet would be to talk about collaboration with authentic wikis like Wikipedia. In my media literacy class, I think that there would be value as suggested by the chapter on Wikis to having students add content to wikipedia. If I incorporate some materials that will guide them in designing the content that they wish to add, they can add something to an authentic web page, and feel like they have made a serious contribution. This will save me the agony of using a large piece of instruction time to construct a class Wiki.

There are also some good suggestions for the use of Wikipedia in Richardson's book. Rather than steering students away from Wikipedia this next year, I'll use the tips in the book and teach them how to use it as part of their research. I am fond of the ideas about using a Wikipedia page's sections as an organizational structure for research as well as using the external links in the references section.

RSS
media type="custom" key="10178889"

"RSS Combined" by Kyle Wegner

RSS has made a huge difference in the way I personally read the Internet. Since the beginning of the course, I have tried several different feeds and although not all of them have stayed in my Google Reader subscriptions, I have found a handful that I will continue reading after the course. I have also added several personal RSS feeds and have enjoyed the mixture of educational as well as personal content that I find every time I open my reader.

Although there are numerous examples in the course text relating to uses of RSS to conduct research and stay on top of current events, the most likely use given the grades with which I could use RSS would be a way of organizing reading. I can see for a period of time having my Media Literacy students using RSS to subscribe to several feeds and I could use part of class as a time for reading. Each day, I could have students Blog about something of interest that they found to increase their number of Blog posts as well to improve their writing.

I am very excited about the idea of subscribing to my students' Blog and comments through the reader as a way to more easily keep up with all of their writing. This last year we tried Blogging on a closed school-based network, but without RSS, there is no way to quickly check all of the writing going on in my class. Any technology that makes my grading process a little easier to manage gets a gold star for merit.

The Social Web
I am still not terribly familiar with twitter other than what I have learned in this course, but there could be some possible applications for student responses. I was thinking that for classes in which we are watching a film, I could have students post comments relating to the film's content in relation to what we are learning. This way, I have a documented discussion that would help me assess participation as well as understanding of the content. My students tend to like to talk during films or think that they can text or do something else at the same time and this would be an opportunity to channel that restlessness into something constructive.

There is one research project that we do in my Media Literacy class that I know could benefit from social bookmarking. I'll do a little investigation into how Diigo functions, but whether I use Diigo or Delicious, it will pretty much come down to which would be more appropriate for use on my class set of iPads.

I am very interested in the idea proposed in the book for using Diigo to annotate student work with notes. I always find it so difficult to adequately give students feedback attached to their work when most of it is done online. If I can use Diigo to save examples of student Blogging and then share feedback on the surface of the Blog itself, then my Blogging course content will be improved immensely.

Flikr
When it comes to all of the possibilities with Web 2.0 technologies, I am beginning to think, “How many accounts on different sites will my students have to make?” This is one of the contributing reasons to why I probably won't use any of the member-specific aspects of Flikr. I do teach image editing and found Richardson's idea of using creative commons content, mashing it with other (cc) content and then reposting it with correct citation, I'll probably keep all of my image editing locally within the class.

I will probably try to make more use of Creative Commons content in my students' projects and use Flikr as the source now that I know how to find it easily. I'm probably a bit more serious than some teachers about crediting sources correctly and this will add not only another piece of content that students can use to enhance their Blog posts, but also a way for me to have my students learn more about crediting different forms of media.

Digital Broadcasting
I have been interested in Podcasting for some time, but had my dreams quashed when my school district denied me free space which I wished to use for Podcasting as well as some other applications for my class and personal professional development. Now that I have discovered Podbean (I know that there are other sites in the book that also host Podcasts) I am free to pursue my Podcasting dreams.

The Podcast that I created for class is a good example of something that I will probably create more of to introduce films for my film studies class. I rarely use lecture as a delivery method for content, but I like to give an introduction to films that we are about to watch in class to enhance their viewing. Frequently it is quite a nuisance when a student is away for the introduction and they jump in partway through the film the next class without a clue of what they are to be looking for. If I recorded an introduction to each film, students could not only use this to catch missed material, but review content and on years that I choose not to teach certain films, they can listen to the additional introductions and watch those films on their own. This is the most probable situation in which I could use the flip model of education described by Salman Khan (in the following video) in which students view (in this case listen to) knowledge-based content and then apply it in class along with a teacher to guide them. (Although it's not really homework in this case)

media type="youtube" key="HkMS6Glswig" height="349" width="560" Source: @http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkMS6Glswig
 * Flip This Classroom: Khan Academy Brings Lectures Home **

In terms of student Podcasting, I know that I have some colleagues who have done some recordings as a genre of “writing” in their higher level English classes. I would probably want to use this in some way with our iPads so I'll have to investigate recording onto iPads, which I assume is similar to iPod recording but hopefully there are some Apps that will deal with editing.

Screencasting is a technology that I've become very familiar with this last year. Fed up with demonstrations and textbooks to teach software use, I bought a copy of Camtasia Studio and have recorded an entire course's content last year. This year, unfortunately we just purchased a new version of Flash which should probably invalidate most of what I've already recorded, but it was an excellent learning process and I look forward to continuing it this next year. I have posted some of my Screencasts to youTube for use with some of my older students who I don't mind giving access to youTube. Hopefully over the next few years when I can improve the quality of my audio recording and have worked out the bugs in my development, I'll be able to post an entire course onto the Internet that other schools could use for free.

media type="youtube" key="9YqX3DBmRNk" height="349" width="425"
 * Example of my youTube screencasting**

In terms of live streaming through systems like uStream, I've seen the site before but don't have much use for it. My school does have a broadcasting program with which I am not affiliated so I don't have much cause to push one technology or another. When I have completed this degree and have more free time on my hands, I can get more heavily involved in professional development (which is one of my passions) and possibly use this type of streaming to add value to our yearly province-wide teacher conference. We frequently have difficulty with teachers in our northern schools being able to participate in the day, but with live streaming, there could be some opportunities.

Social Networks
My school administration as well as most other professional organizations of which I am part have come out pretty strongly against Facebook and the classroom. I tried to get a project of the ground last year with my Teacher Advisory class but it just seemed like too little value for all the hoops that I would have to jump through in order to get Facebook up and running in my classroom.

This next year for several purposes, I will be investigating Ning as a classroom social network. In my teacher advisory class, I wish to create a network on which my students will be able to collaborate, connect, and Blog about learning. The fact that I can create a network completely separate from the public is of high interest to me. I'm excited about sharing pictures and video of our classroom activities and really think that I can have an impact on my students on an affective level toward each other (which is one of the goals of teacher advisory), to the school as well as toward life-long learning. I hope that Ning will be as effective as I imagine it to be, and if not, it will be an excellent experiment.

Provided that Ning works for my students, there is no reason that it shouldn't work well for my staff. As I've mentioned earlier, I wish to integrate Blogging into staff development and a closed professional learning community through Ning might be the ideal storehouse for that kind of dialogue. We have a rather large staff at my school and even being able to share a small amount of information on each person's profile page would help connect everyone.

Conclusion
I strongly value the process of reading Will Richardson's text and have noticed that there is an additional media kit available for purchase which I am strongly considering making a funding request to purchase for the benefit of my staff. I still have so much more content to explore, not having checked all of the tinyurl links but have found the content that I've already accessed to be very valuable. As I'm about to start a new school year in September, I'm excited by all the possibilities that Web 2.0 applications offer for my students and coworkers. I just hope that everyone else will be as excited as I am.


 * Sources:**

Khan, Salman. "Flip this Classroom: Khan Academy Brings Lectures Home". 18 May, 2011. Video. @http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkMS6Glswig

Richardson, Will. //Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms//. Third Edition. United States of America: Corwin Press, 2010. Print.