Barnes Blog for Class

Well, I have tried Facebook. It is interesting. I am amazed at how many people are on it. I have only had my site up and running for about 2 weeks. Everyday I get another 2 or 3 signing on as friends. I am not sure what I think about it. My son told me that it was orginally set up as a networking for college students but that more and more of the older people are using it (my generation). It is fun to see what some of my friends have. I get to see some relatives that I have not seen for a really long time.

I do find that it could become very time consuming. I will save more judgement of the use till later.

I was just reading the newspaper from Sunday. Yes it has taken me that long to get to it, but it has been busy. As I was reading the section entitled The Wall Street Journal, I read an article called “Use Social Media to Bond with Consumers”. In this article they talk about business using social medias to get word out about their business. They mention in the article about how business can use blogs and podcasts to advertise. The advantage of the blogs was that they can have customers respond to them thus giving recommendations for that business. One event planner even used the blogs to post pictures from events she had planned and even articles on planning an event. They also mentioned twitter.com, ning.com, and del.icio.us. I would not have understood any of this several months ago. It was really neat to read the article and actually understand what was being talked about.

Thank you to each of my classmates and my professor for making this understanding possible.

Wow this is really interesting!

This can be found at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln webpage. Very interesting use of Jing by having studnets record audio answers in a language class. This is not a use that I would of thought of for Jing.

I also found some sites that suggested using Jing for assistive technology and also for distance learning. What a great tool for the distance learner. If they are not understanding something then the teacher just needs to video tape directions in Jing and there they are for the student.

I really liked the idea of Ning but there were some things that bothered me. One of the was the ads. I understand that they do not need to be there. I think that they can be removed. I have been looking for how. I still need to some more research to do this. The ads can be removed for 7-12 years old. Not sure why those ages but I will take it if I can find the way to do it.

I also found a great page with great ideas. It is titled Ning in Education – tricky title right!!! It all sorts of info. One of the interesting items is at Groups, it lists many different groups that teachers can join. There are groups of all different interests.

I am looking forward to spending some more time research some of these groups and even joining some of them.

There is also a page with all of the different gadgets that can be added to the Ning site. You can add anything from games to movie trailers to music onto your own Ning.

I was searching the web and found this blog that I thought was interesting for using bubbl.us in the classroom. http://www.classroom20.com/forum/topic/show?id=649749%3ATopic%3A7014&page=1

Ben Davis has students brainstorm for their research papers and as he says it gives them their “daily fix of networking”. He had the students have their own account so they were able to network together. The could collaborate together on the topics.

I also discovered that the webs could be printed as html which put them into an outline but without the Roman numerals.

I decided to try Flickr. I do like this program. I was able to upload the pictures of my son’s new house in Ohio. I am struggling with some of the details of the program. It does not have a good help program. I have read several other’s blogs on this and see where it would be a good program for storing and making school activity pictures available. I just need to be able to play with it some more.

I have been playing with Jing a bit more. I just created a video using Jing. Wow is that ever fun. I actually made my video using another new item I just learned today in class. That is that Google maps have photos. I have seen the word in the menu before but never realized what it actually does. Soooo, I just created a video using Jing showing where my son lives in NYC along with the pictures that are in Google maps.

Well after trying to upload my video of 25 M down from the original of 54 M, I have given up. Do not know if there is a way to make them smaller. I guess this would be one disadvantage of the video feature. I guess as long as it is on a computer and needing to be sent or put into a program, then it is great.

Still really like Jing. I can think of many advantages of it. Particularly for recording directions for doing programs for students who were absent the first time it was explained.

Jing seems to have become the favorite of several people in my class. David, my professor mentioned it and then several classmates have started using it. I agree that it is a great project. I see so many uses for this. It is a great tool for giving directions. When you download Jing, you get scads of tutorials and other information in using the device.

I decided to try Jing with just highlighting first. I was reading an article and found that I could highlight it for later reference. Here is my highlighted article.This was inserted as an image.

The image that is at the top of my blog page was taken by my husband. I was working on projects for a previous class on the deck. As the sun went down, my screen light was allowing me to continue to work. My husband found the right photo op with light, reflections, shading, etc. I felt that this was a good image to head my blog.

As I have thought about how to use podcasts in my classes, several ideas have come into my head. As a reading specialist, I have become very excited about one way of using them. This would be to work on fluency. I would be having students create their own podcasts to practice fluency. After making the podcast they can listen to their own or each others to critique. I would have students use various Reader’s Theater productions. Besides critiquing how their own fluency is improving, they can also share their productions with students in other classrooms, schools, nations. This gives them a new sense of pride in their work as they are creating podcasts for production. I can see the students wanting to practice their parts for the reader’s theater which then increases their word recognition, fluency, and comprehension.

Another way to have students increase fluency would be to practice repeated reading following a teachers’ example. The following podcast has been made using the first 20 phrases of the first 100 words from the Fry Instant Word List. Tim Rasinski in his book “The Fluent Reader” recommends that students do repeated reading of the high frequency words in phrases to improve reading fluency and overall reading achievement. In this podcast, the students would have a list of the phrases in front of them as they listen to the podcast. They would first listen to the teacher read the phrase, then repeat the phrase after.

practice-on-first-20-phrases3

Students could also use podcasts to put together a reading of a book for another student to listen to. This could be done by several students reading some sections of the book and then putting them into one podcast. A student who has difficulty reading the text could then listen to the podcast as they are reading the book for themselves.

One of the teachers I with whom I work, has students create readings of a particular chapter. This is accomplished by dividing the chapter into several sections. A group of students is responsible for each section. They are to read the section with each student being a different character or narrator. They then add sound effects to their readings. This is usually done with a tape recorder. I think that the same activity could be done by making a podcast using “garage band” . The sound effects would be more authentic sounding using some of the ones un the program. After the chapter is completed into one podcast, then the other classes could listen to each podcast and vote on the best one.