Progress Report

blog
Since beginning this blog at the start of the year, a lot has been happening, and I have been learning a lot. I set up another blog for a group of 4th and 5th grade students interested in environmental issues. I have been spending more time on that, and the children are enjoying learning about the nature of blogging and in protecting the environment. We have invited students from an elementary school in Singapore to take a look at the blog and comment. Our children are totally wowed by the ClusterMaps showing our visitors from around the world. We are getting ready to add a poll this week, surveying our faculty and friends, and the global community at large. Any words of environmental wisdom for our students? Feel free to visit us and comment!
wiki
In addition to working on the student interest group blog, I am also diving in to a new classroom wiki for my 4th grade students. Parents signed a permission form for their children to engage in the wiki by posting discussions. Tip- after some frustration and research, I discovered that Wikispaces will give students membership to your wikispace- you email the list of usernames and passwords you want to set up for your class, and they set it all up and email you back when the member list is created. Awesome, so after parent permission for their child to be a member, I did not have to worry about them having, or me creating, an email account for them- 10-year olds don't all have email accounts! Right now I use the wiki as a classroom, posting curricular content and engaging the children in "owning" the site through positive and thoughtful discussions. I have also added a student showcase area in which the students can add school work, such as poetry or artwork, of which they are particularly proud(an idea I got from BobSprankle's Classroom site- see below.) It's going well. The children seem happier to study the material in this way, and I am getting more classroom response than I used to with open discussions. The children take time to respond. Children who normally would not raise a hand an contribute find this non-threatening. It is successful so far. The enthusiasm for being in class is much higher- the curiosity level- the what's next? One student went off the first day the wiki was introduced and created his own at home. Bravo. We have just being adding our own pictures to our member names. I have the children using MS Paint: set the attributes to a 2x2-inch workspace, save as a JPEG, and upoad their new picture under My Account back at the classroom wiki. We are learning so much, and having a great time doing it!
resources
I am continually finding that the best way to learn new web 2.0 tools is to use them and become part of the web 2.0 community- visit other blogs and wikis, post comments, read what others have written. I contacted Bob Sprankle in Maine, who is well-versed in the use of web 2.0, and he suggested we use Skype to converse online. Well, talk about getting your feet wet- in trying to learn more about the nuances of various blogs, I also download Skype software and gave it a whirl- how convenient it was to talk after hours via Skype and learn right from home, Thank you, Bob. I also joined the WOW 2.0 (Women of Web 2.0) and viewed a live cast (Tuesday nights.) I'm getting there. I am enthralled with how much there is out there- so much to learn.
curious
I really want to find out more about a few things- OpenId for logging on to sites- is this a single username and password set up that logs me on to just about any site that supports OpenId (starting to get confused which sites want a email username, which not, what that password is- oh, yeahhh-- after 3 tries), and I want to learn more about good use of RSS and tags, so I might get more people contributing comments to my blogs. Another goal- collaborating with a 3rd grade homeroom to get a podcast newscast-for-the-week created. Lots to do- until later- and hopefully sooner than later-