TeachersHomework

Del.ic.ous
Love it! Have loved it for a while then my laptop had to be reimaged a few times & I began to get lazy reapplying my Del.ic.ous buttons to my toolbar. But not to fear I fixed it.....I will be tagging like a third grader at recess again =) I have used it the past to share sites with a colleague I was presenting with as we researched and created our presentation.
Wiki's
My district recently switched our teacher webpages over to Wiki's. It is new this year and we are still playing around with it. My campus has a private wiki for faculty only in which we use to post our upcoming calendar of events for the month, praises from our pricipal, links to sites we all use often........ then it has a blog section embedded where we are able to post questions and comments to each other. My pricipal often posts questions on our feelings about a recent training etc. As I said it is a new tool and slowly we are broadening the horizons of those who are new to it.
The downfall is in the past year we have had server problems and our wiki's wer not available. Now that the problem has been solved I am looking forward to updating my school wiki!
http://reinhardtwordwall.wikispaces.com/
This is my wiki concept that I am reforming from another teachers idea. I saw the idea and thought this would work for my students with our challenge to have all students indentifying and reading 300 high frequency words by the end of second grade. My hope is that students will enjoy typing in not only their word wall words but their word study words(spelling words) as well. My campus has a cart of alphasmarts which I plan to use so that students may type their mastered words in each week. I think it will also be rewarding to see their word bank literally grow!
fur.ly
what is this?!?!?!? is it even a website? yes and this is my newest fav 2.0 find. My distict ITS showed this to us during a training designed for tips & tricks when presenting to adult learners. I am going to use it in Aug during our Technology Integration Conference in my session Extreme Wiki Makeover.
fur.ly simply sortens several url's into one so that you may have your websites up and ready when you need them......whats that? Explorer and Firefox already have tabs? But with fur.ly you can save up to 5 and they are there and at your disposal ......but wait! you also can give your unique saved fur.ly url to your participants and they too can instantly have the sites needed.
Final Reflection
I have a growing list currently sitting next to my computer of  ideas for my school wiki, wordwall wiki and what needs to be implemented concerning student effectivness in evaluating a websites validity. During the beginning stages of my word wall wiki idea I thought students could go to the computer lab to type their new words mastered into their wikispaces. The problem for me was that I do not like to take away lab time for just typing I prefer to use it for creating. Then I remembered the Alphasmarts! This will be perfect! I am very excited to roll this program out in a few months!
I also feel that if I am going to take the time to educate my students on website authentication then why not parents too? I plan to put resources from this class on my wiki and offer a session at our technology nights this upcoming school year. Hey maybe I will invite Aunt Sally ;) 

I just recently have begun to see old e-mail hoaxes becoming facebook posts. For example my Aunt Sally(name has been changed to protect the digitally naive) recently posted the following:
DON'T BUY THE PATRIOTIC PEPSI CAN coming out with pictures of the Empire State Building, and the Pledge of Allegiance on them. Pepsi left out two little words on the pledge,"Under God."...Pepsi said they didn't want to offend anyone. So if we don't buy them then they will not be offended when they don't receive our money that has the words 'In God WeTrust' on it. HOW FAST CAN YOU REPOST...
I immediately knew to check validity of this story to go to snopes.com. David and Barbara Mikkelson are the hoaxbusters behind the website where you can check to see if the e-mail or now Facebook post you just read is true or not. In Aunt Sally's case this one was horribly false and severely outdated. Yet she received two comments one just saying they liked what she posted the other commented "What is our country coming to?"
It is situations like this and those presented in our schools when a student is researching for a biography in which we need to educate ourselves, parents and students on the resources available to determine what we are reading on the internet or in our e-mail box is true.
Students have acess to Facebook they are reading the posts of their older relatives like my Aunt Sally. They are also being asked unassumlingly to complete research projects at home without a filtering system like at school. Without a filtering system the link for martinlutherking.org which is actually a site created by a white supreamcy group will come up #3 in a Google search for Martin Luther King. This site also has a large blue link at the top of the page saying Attention Students: Take Our Quiz Here!  
My awareness level just went up not only as an educator but as a parent too. I'm feeling a summer lesson for my daughters coming on. I plan to share this with my parents next year and educate my students as well.

In life everything changes, technology is not different. It is constantly updating or renewing itself, taking on a forum expanding our current ideologies of how we not only communicate socially but how we communicate or understanding of the world we live in or new studies. Embracing this change with the knowledge that it can be a bit unnerving, however self-gratifying, is my personal goal. As a creative person and I find the many technological mediums in which you can use to be fascinating. Children learn best through their own creations. We now have opened the door to a blank template that allows for an individualized explanation, exploration or creation of each students unique understanding.


It is in the best interest of not only my students but for me to continually grow as an educator. I wish to be a participator in the ever-changing world of technology than a by stander. I am intrigued. I want to know more if there is something I don’t know how to use I seek out someone to teach me, learn it myself by trial and error or go to a workshop.

As an educator I will do my best to always open minded, whether it be a new idea, situation, or curriculum. I am truly in the experimental stage of my teaching career. I have chosen many strategies to test and continue to explore.

By committing to these goals students in my classroom should possess the ability to create for themselves. I prefer to play a small role in teaching them what to do. We as adult are groomed to go into a classroom and be instructed on what the assignment is and what we need to do to complete it. I want students to take from my classroom or adult learners to take from my trainings the ability to create and problem solve on their own creating a collaborative community of learners