Activity 4-D-1
Wikis in Your Classroom

While surfing through the education wiki sites, I found a great wiki by “Bud the Teacher”. It has some wonderful resources on it including sample acceptable use policies, resources for teaching blogging and wikis, and a collection of audio resources. You can see it here: 

Bud the Teacher Blog

I liked creating the wiki as a group project. I guess the most challenging part of it was not getting there until late in the week. My partners did a great job of setting it up. I was able to go in and add my topics and graphics and format it.

From the group project I learned that this is a very valuable collaboration tool. I will try to use this technology in my classes to get students working together on projects. They always complain that their group cannot get together outside of class—with this they can work remotely.

My opinion of Wikipedia has not changed this week. I have my students do a fairly large project on Wikipedia. Here is our link on Wikipedia: Southwestern Illinois College. I have them look at our school’s Wikipedia page to find:

• what date it was started
• who started it
• when it was last edited
• what changes they would make
• what errors does it contain, if any

I haven’t had any resistance to using wikis. Since I am at the college level, my students enjoy this activity. 

Electronic Textbooks Anyone?

Today I started my face-to-face PLS class on Student Engagement and Standards Based Learning. As you know, one of the best parts of PLS classes is networking with fellow teachers. The Middle-School Math teacher from Nashville, Illinois, who sat next to me today told me how they got rid of all of their textbooks and will issue each student a laptop with e-books instead. They are saving so much money on textbooks that it will pay for the laptops.

Now I love my Kindle and would never trade back for reading real books, but I am wondering about the feasibility of e-textbooks. Here are some questions that maybe you could answer:

• Does your school use e-books, if yes for what percentage of classes?
• Do you think the students will want to print out pages and use up our paper and toner?
• How will we know if they are working on our class or looking at Facebook?
• Will this work for all subjects? What about teaching Math without a text?

I would love to require my students to all buy the same Windows tablets at the beginning of their program. My Dean is not a big fan of the e-Textbook idea.

Here is an interesting article from the Chicago Tribune that discusses the Pros and Cons of digital textbooks. Pros and Cons of Digital Textbooks

Another article I liked was from the Chronicle of Higher Education. This article talks about colleges forcing students to switch to digital texts. The End of the Textbook As We Know It

I will be interested to hear your thoughts on this issue.

Wow! Another great resource for us this week. I had never used Diigo. In my Intro to Office Support lecture class, I talk about many web pages. Until this point, I would stop talking and make them wait until I typed in the web address. This is going to be great.

In my Diigo site, I created a List for OAT 121 Chapter 1. In that list, I have all of the bookmarks that I will use when talking about Chapter 1. This is going to be so much faster!

My colleague, Tina Dierkes and I are the only two on campus who teach this class. I would like to collaborate with her so we can both add bookmarks for the chapters as we prepare.

I added the Google Chrome extension for Diigo. This made it really easy for me to click the icon and save my links.

Google has been doing a lot lately with signing in. If I am signed in to Google on my phone, tablet, or laptop, all of my links and history show up no matter what device I was researching on. This has saved me lots of time as I work on this class in many places. Bookmarking is becoming more customizable.

My OAT 121 Chapter 1 discusses Technology and Your Career. I have already added the following bookmarks to my Diigo List for this chapter:

• Our textbook web site
• The Virtual choir site
• A Youtube video on Data Mining
• An interactive body site
• the Modern Museum of Art

I look forward to continuing to add bookmarks. I will add the Diigo extension on all of my devices!

I enjoyed working with Netvibes. I put all of my Microsoft Office and Technology blogs in the left column, my news sources in the center column, and fun stuff (sports, comics, etc) in the right column. Check it out here:
http://www.netvibes.com/lutzml#General

I don't know - maybe I messed that up and you can see it at this one:

http://www.netvibes.com/privatepage/1#General

Arggg... I'm so confused. Someone tell me which of these they can see.

3-B-2
Well, it looks like I have a lot of work to do on my Internet Essentials class. In this class I have them create blogs, but I didn't have a great way for them to learn about RSS feeds. I really liked The Old Reader. I think I will have them do a project there since the Google Reader has been discontinued.

In my Intro to Office Support class, each student is required to give an oral report on technology. This semester I will have them subscribe to an RSS feed on that subject as part of the assignment. I think this will be a great way for them to learn about blogs.

I know a lot of people create blogs when going through an illness at caringbridge.org. This saves them time in communicating what is happening to lots of people individually. My daughter had a fellow dance student who was blind and went to China for stem cell injections. Her mom updated us with pictures of Claire and her nurses every day. The girls all sent messages of encouragement. I think this is a great use of a blog.

In my student blog searches today, I found some great examples of college students' blogs from Cornell University. I was very impressed with Ian Perry's blog post on going digital. Ian discusses the advantages of "Going Digital" and buying electronic textbooks.

Our dean seems to think e-books will be bad for our community college and that students will try to print out hundreds of pages in our labs. As a tech-lover, I would love to have each of my students buy a Microsoft Surface computer/tablet at the beginning of their college career and have all digital textbooks. I think that students will save enough money on books that the device will eventually pay for itself.

Here is the link to Ian's blog:

http://blogs.cornell.edu/ianp/ 

You may want to check out his posts. His blog is a great example that I will use in my classroom when my students start creating their own blogs. 

I also commented on Ian's blog to refer him to my blog so he can track my progress in creating my assignment for my students in my OAT 121-Intro to Office Support class. The link to my comments on Ian's blog is:

http://blogs.cornell.edu/ianp/2014/01/31/going-digital/comment-page-1/#comment-24

Thanks to students like Ian, student voices can be heard. I am hoping that the voices of my students will convince my Dean of the benefits of e-books and getting more wi-fi in our building.

As you can tell, this is my "blog of blogs" that I use for my CIS 164 Internet Essentials class. In Tutorial 5 of this class, my students learn about user-generated content on the web. I require them to create a blog using blogger.com much like we are doing in this class.

I can see the read/write web affecting my classroom in many ways. Some of the web 2.0 tools I use in class are:

• YouTube (mostly to view videos in class although I have posted videos in the past)
• Prezi to create interactive slides to enhance my lecture classes
• Wordle word clouds for introductions at the beginning of the semester
• Wikis to teach vocabulary from my chapters and for class reflections
• Google sites to create ePortfolios

My college students enjoy all of these activities.