How can I use the internet in the classroom?

My experiences so far...

Too often I have witnessed teachers assigning online research projects, telling students which websites not to use, and sending them on their way to start researching. From this point, I watch the students waste a lot of valuable classroom time because their instruction lacked any real direction. Incorporating a variety of instructional models that use the internet add value to classroom lessons but should be taught with explicit instruction. Sometimes, we have too much confidence that our students will be the technological experts. Sure, they can use websites like Facebook and Twitter, but when it comes down to it, do they have the knowledge to use the internet for educational purposes?

Incorporating technology into my lesson plans….

What do I do?

Where do I start?  

When I write lesson plans I am constantly looking online for new ideas and activities I can bring into the classroom. As Leu, Leu, & Coiro (2004) discuss, having the internet as a tool for lesson planning is extremely valuable. I have folders bookmarked with different websites and I am going to spend some time on Delicious to see if my favorite teaching websites can lead me to other resources. I really liked the idea about internet workshop because every student can bring something new to the table and it also allows for student collaboration. I would like to try collaboration between different schools in different parts of the country or even different parts of the world. In addition to internet workshop, I like the student created web folios. The e-mail from Sara Silverman, the Rewards of Project Based Learning, really touched on all of the things I want to do! (Good thing for this blog because now I can go back and look at all the things I saw- and they’re organized in one location rather than piles of paper in multiple notebooks!

What is difficult for me is I do not know what I am going to be teaching. Will I be teaching English Language learners? Or will I be a Social Studies teacher? I think I have mentioned this before, but it really stresses me out. Luckily, literacy development is important across all subjects! Incorporating webquests into the ESL classroom can be challenging because many websites have sophisticated language that English language learners will not be able to comprehend as well as complex navigation which may provide difficulty to students learning English. (Sox & Avila 2009) The same is true with students with disabilities. (Skylar, Higgins & Boone 2007) When designing classroom web quests they need to be planned with English language learners and students with disabilities in mind. If I was designing the web quest and I needed to make student accommodations I would create two or three different web quests for different student needs.

More to come soon...

Digital Storytelling

Incorporating digital storytelling into your classroom provides students with the opportunity to work on a number of literacy skills. Students are required to write to create a script. Since their digital stories will be published, more time is spent creating quality writing. Students go through the whole writing process to create a script. Moreover, digital storytelling requires students to do creative and independent thinking and it is teaching them 21^st century literacy skills. If done as a group project, digital storytelling teaches students to work together and collaborate. Before I thought digital storytelling had to be a video, but after I watched Digital Storytelling in Plain English it turns out it can be podcasts too! The same process that is used to make digital story videos can also be used to create book trailers. I am working with one of my students now to create a book trailer. We’re in the learning process together. We started by watching a number of examples of digital book trailers. Her favorite was for the book Fat Vampire

In addition to an English classroom, digital storytelling can be used across the content areas. I found a digital story teaching a math lesson which I thought would be great to include in the classroom. I would find or create digital stories and make them available to my students to teach math lessons which they may have missed, or they might need extra help with when they go home to do their homework at night. Students could even create the math digital stories and share them with their peers. Here is one example of a math digital story:

Raw Ramen what??

Last week Elizabeth told us we should post a video or podcast to our blogs for tomorrow. I’ve spent the week debating what to post. Should it be educational? philosophical? funny? school related? I simply could not decide! I started to think about what types of videos I had watched on youtube since blogger conveniently has a link for youtube videos. Typically I watch funny videos on youtube- mostly because my family is constantly sharing links we find. My sister created her own account to upload some random and funny videos she filmed…which led me to the Raw Ramen Remix. I know them so my opinion should not count but I thought it was pretty funny… as well as absolutely ridiculous. They had a great time making it so I thought I would give them an audience! It also gives us an idea of what our older high school students may be doing in their free time! In high school making and sharing their videos on youtube was part of their everyday lives. This is technology many of our students are already familiar with. Another reason why using videos and podcasts in the classroom would be great!

Here is the background to the video from Kaitlyn:

"Okay so, me, Chad, TJ and Tommy were hanging out. Every night Chad came over and ate raw ramen...so they all tried it, we were just filming hang out time and all of a sudden tommy started jammin on the keyboard. then TJ was like "duuuude Kaitlyn, lets make a sweet vid!""  

and here it is, the Raw Ramin Remix, for your viewing pleasure:

Something I just found...

Hey guys! I just stumbled across these podcasts when I was looking stuff up on the Facing History website... maybe you can use them in the classroom. 

http://www.facinghistory.org/podcasts

and the podcasts led me to this...

http://www.facinghistory.org/hhb/bear-wasnt

We used this book in Houston as part of our week long Holocaust training. There is also a lesson plan with it. It's an interesting story to read even if you don't use it for anything...

Podcasts

My first experience with a podcast was a free one on Itunes about my favorite TV show at the time, the OC. This was also the last podcast experience. I did not really care for it and I did not realize there were a number of other podcasts out there on more meaningful topics. Now, I think using podcasts in the classroom would be a great idea. Student creation of podcasts could allow for whole school collaboration. I loved the idea about the “online radio shows for kids by kids” (Richardson 115) In high school, our morning announcements were done by the kids in the video and media class. It was one of the most popular classes among the students at my school. Podcasts would also be a great way to do classroom presentations, especially for those students who are too shy to stand up in front of the entire class! And, as I keep saying, we need to offer our students a purpose for their learning and creating a podcast that can be shared with others provides just that. Moreover, podcasts provide students with the opportunity to listen to someone speak beside the teacher. I found it interesting that the students with vocabulary instruction with the podcasts performed significantly greater than those who just received classroom instruction (Putnum & Kingsley 2009). With students creating their own vocabulary podcasts, they’re learning the new words in the process.

I have never tried using podcasts in the classroom but it is something I would be interested in trying in the future. I think I would incorporate podcasting as a classroom station. In the past, I have used the classroom set of laptops quiet frequently, but as Labbo, Eakle, & Montero (2002) mention, like other teachers I really was not sure what to do with them. So, I did a lot of web quests. I cannot wait to be back in the classroom again to try all of these things out! I also would like to try to use Skype as a classroom tool. I think it would be interesting to have students collaborate with students from other schools via video chat. What’s really great about using podcasting and Skype is they are FREE! Skype is also a great way to bring guest speakers into the classroom. Everyone in my family uses Skype- including my Grandma and Great Aunt! Facebook and Skype have helped my entire family (2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th cousins and so on) stay in touch when we are spread out all over the world. Imagine what students could achieve by having tools like this in the classroom!

Digital storytelling response will be posted soon…

I found Wikipedia to be a great way to track current events...

The controversy with using Wikipedia in schools is the fact that everyone has the ability to be an editor. Anyone can publish, modify, and delete information. (Richardson 2010) It is simply online collaboration on a certain topic. In the past, I have used Wikipedia to find quick answers to questions that I have, mostly because it is one of the first websites that pop up in my Google search. Furthermore, I have used Wikipedia as a source for other sources. Using the links at the bottom I am often able to find additional sources which will often lead to even more sources! Oh the joys of the internet! I tell my students that they cannot use Wikipedia as a source, but I do allow them to use Wikipedia to find other sources since many have links to primary source documents.  In Hunt and Hunt (2006) I thought it was a great idea to go in and add or modify the Wikipedia pages as part of a classroom project. It provided the students with a purpose for their learning and gave them part ownership of the Wikipedia page. I think this would be really interesting to do in a Social Studies classroom as part of a research project. I was thinking that maybe the students could pick a topic in the curriculum and look for additional information to add to the Wikipedia page...I’d have to do more research on that idea first though because I can already think of some potential problems… 

My first experience publishing on a Wiki was for Tests and Measurements with Dr. Hardt. Knowing the rest of our classmates would be able to see the questions we created was a somewhat frightening thought at first, especially because Dr. Hardt wanted us to read our peers questions and offer constructive comments.  As the semester progressed I became used to the idea and because more willing to offer suggesting to my peers on questions. I found some of the comments from Wheeler, Yeomans & Wheeler (2008) were very similar to the discussions some of us has last semester.

So to learn more I started following a Wiki…

I have been following the 2011 Egyptian Protests on Wikipedia for the last week. My interest sparked initially because I was interested in learning about the cause of the protests in Egypt and I wanted to follow something that would be changing throughout the week. I think looking at the timeline of events is fascinating, and demonstrates just how quickly information can be posted and spread throughout the world. I found that this allows for a really great way to stay updated on the current happenings in Egypt and could be transferred to the classroom as a tool to track other current events. In regards to the timeline, it tracks the protests as well as the number of deaths that have occurred due to the protests. I was also able to learn about the bombing and burning of buildings throughout Egypt’s major cities. Moreover, I learned that the protestors and journalists are being arrested because the government is trying to silence them. The Wikipedia site also provided a number of links to outside sources including news articles and videos. So far there have been 305 308 331 353 355 citations for this wiki page. I used the slash through to demonstrate how my Wikipedia page has changed since Thursday February 3.

The significant number of online sources has caught worldwide attention to the Egyptian Protests even though the Egyptian government is working towards silencing the people. According to one Wikipedia source, Egypt has even been working to limit internet activity as an attempt to silence the people. I cannot imagine living with such an oppressive government. I wish I was teaching in a Social Studies classroom right now because this would be a great source for students to use to track the protests in Egypt. Students could find additional sources and add to the Wikipedia page. Moreover, I would love to use it to do a compare and contrast to other uprisings that have occurred throughout history.

In addition to news links, I found a number of sources to be linked to Twitter.   

“The White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs posted a statement on Twitter expressing concern "about violence in Egypt" and adding, "government must respect the rights of the Egyptian people & turn on social networking and the internet".^[43]”

Doesn’t this truly demonstrate the power the internet has?

Here is a link to the wiki incase you guys want to check it out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Egyptian_protests

Facebook Distracted me from Posting this Earlier

Social Bookmarking and Social Networking

Before this assignment I honestly had no idea what social bookmarking was. I had never heard of the majority of the websites mentioned in the articles either until this class. Now, I have become fascinated by the online world and have been spending a great deal of time thinking about how I am going to apply it into my current teaching. (Richardson may have sold me on Twitter- but I don’t think I need another thing online to distract me from my work.) There are so many new ways to accomplish things with digital technology. (Alvermann, 2008) When students are on homebound they often receive no interaction from their peers and their teachers just send packets of work with no real explanation or meaning. These readings sparked a number of ideas I am going to incorporate into their lessons soon. Greenhow’s article provided me with resources to start using social bookmarking websites for research. I thought it’d be really great to incorporate into a Social Studies classroom. I’ll be checking out Delicious and Diigo when I get some free time.

Alvermann answers a number of really important questions in her article. “…literacies so powerfully motivating that young people are more and more willing to invest a substantial amount of time and effort in creating content to share with others online” (Alvermann, 2008) Social networking plays such a big role in the lives of adolescents and their engagement is high.   As educators, because they have such a high interest in 21^st century literacy practices, we need to bring that into the classroom to help students acquire the skills they will need to enter into the technological world. Students are creating, editing, and publishing in an online context. With Social bookmarking, students have the ability to collaborate and share in the research process. (Greenhow, 2009) They’re acquiring and using a number of skills without being in the classroom! Moreover, they have an audience for their writing which makes it a powerful tool. Through one of my other readings, Williams, 2008, I found this website http://www.space2cre8.com/. When you choose an account type you can be the teacher, student, or mentor. I think it’d be an interesting website to learn more about. In my opinion, something like this would be a more appropriate classroom social networking tool because of all of the issues surrounding websites like Facebook.  I know Richardson gives ideas for using Facebook in the classroom and backs it up with examples of success, but I am just not sold.

On a last note, Alvermann talks about opposition from teachers but I think using these tools is really a gift. Is there such thing as too much time reading and writing?