Week 4 Responce Social Bookmarking

What value (if any) do you think social bookmarking might hold for teachers and/or students? You may think about students sharing with each other, teachers sharing with their students, teachers sharing with other teachers, administrators sharing with teachers, sharing with parents, or any other scenario(s) you can imagine.

It seems like this is a truly valuable tool for teachers and students. I can see this being extremely useful for teachers of all subjects. The applications for this across the curriculum are infinite. I know that I often find a site at home that I think would be perfect for the given subject I am teaching that trimester, but invariably I am not able to find it at school to show them for a myriad of reasons: 1) I cannot locate the site, 2) the school’s ridiculous filters will not let me go to the site (this is extremely annoying). If you want to find images at my school, you cannot simply go to google.com and click on images. No, that would make sense and be too easy. If I want to show my students an image I have to go to www.google.co.uk, only then am I able to show them images. Apparently the US google site is a bit too liberal for them). 3) It may violate the school’s incoherent acceptable use policy. With social bookmarking, I could easily have students go to my delicious pages and locate any site I have on there. They could do this from school or home. If you are one of those teachers that has up-to-date websites (you know, the kind that have each day’s lesson posted), students who are sick or absent could access the assignments and you could direct them to a delicious account where they could find bookmarks for websites that would be helpful in completing the assignment.

I know that I get dozens of emails a day. Often is it another teacher or a principal sending me a link to a page. I open it and go to the page and think this is really cool. Usually I do not need that site at that moment so I close the email. Days, weeks, months later, I will be creating a lesson and remember that someone, though I am not sure who, sent me a link to a site that would be really good to use for this lesson, but I cannot for the life of me remember who or what the site was called. With the ease of social bookmarking, I could save the site and put in descriptions and tags to help me get back to the site when I need it.

I know that sometimes my best resources for finding information on the web are students. Often times a student will tell me about a great website or clip he or she found online, but usually this student will follow that up with, “…but I am not sure where I found it.” If we taught our students to use this technology, they could more easily share the information they find with teachers and other students.

Back to the Trends & Issues reading, to what degree do the definitions in this chapter correspond with what you have thought about this area and what it is you hope to do in your line of work (or in a future career)? Does is there anything surprising or very new you read in this chapter? Does something seem to be missing?

I was not really surprised by anything that I read in this chapter, because about 3 months or so ago, I would have agreed with many of the things I read. What did seem to be missing was how we can use technology to draw our student into lessons. How do we truly use instructional technology that is meaningful to students? We have a lot of neat stuff we as teachers can use - computers, overheads, video streaming, the Internet. But this was all stuff that we used only from time to time, not really something that was used, at least in my case, all the time, or was necessary for learning to occur. That was until our school passed a bond and our school was set up. Every teacher was given Macbooks. There are digital projectors in each room. We have smart boards, and Avervisions 300AF (more or less elmos), We have this program, Ebeam Interact, which allows students and teachers to project anything on the smart board, either through the computer, or the Averision. From there we can highlight, write, search the web, draw pictures, type, edit papers, fill in notes, and many other functions. This technology draws kids into the lesson. It even engages those students who have difficulties with attention because it allows them to interact with learning in a way they had not before.

I did not realize how amazing this technology was until I started talking to a colleague that has not really used it. She used the Avervision like you would an overhead. So really the only thing she has gained from this wonderful technology is: 1) She does not need to make transparencies anymore, 2) She has a really big projection television in her room now, and 3) She has a Macbook instead of a PC to take attendance and type word documents.

As I have mentioned before, I teach special education, and our special education staff knew that this technology was really going to help our kids and our teaching. We knew we were going to have to learn to use it, and make our students use it too, for it to be effective. We spent the first week before school learning as much as we could about how to use the different programs and functions, whereas other teachers were afraid and stayed away from it. I have found that when I use it or when I have watched others use it, the kids are more engaged and attentive. This interactive technology is the future in instructional technology as I see it. I hope more schools get it, and more importantly, train their teachers how to use it.