Social Bookmarking and Excel Take On Education

Social bookmarking creates endless opportunities for educators to gather and organize vast amounts of information. The whole social aspect exponentially increases ones ability to expand his or her database of educational tools. Social bookmarking will help me stay organized and ready to present interesting, stimulating, and motivating ideas to my students. I chose Diigo as my preferred bookmarking site. My address is www.diigo.com/dashboard/alexchristina.

Now, let's move on to the subject of using Microsoft Excel in school curriculum. In history class students can create a timeline using the Excel timeline template. For instance, let's say you're studying the life of Thomas Jefferson in your class. With this tool students can plot all the significant dates in his life on a timeline in a well-organized document. This will allow a clearer picture of all of his accomplishments and the order in which they occurred.

Another way Excel can be used is for students to collect and graph data they have collected in a science class experiment. In one such experiment students can simulate earthquakes of different magnitudes and observe the effects on different buildings. Students will then be able to draw conclusions on the effectiveness of earthquake-proofing construction by analyzing the graphs they have created from their data in Excel.

A fun thing to do in health class would be to gather nutritional information on different meals from different fast food restaurants and graph the data using Excel. Students would pick comparable food items from each restaurant and find out the fat and calorie content for each item and for the total meal at each restaurant. This data would then be graphed so that students could see the amazing, and scary results of their research.

You could engage your students in a lesson involving something that affects their everyday life. Have them form a hypothesis about why the amount of daylight varies during the year. Then have them collect data on the times of sunrises and sunsets and use the data to create an Excel chart. The chart they create will help them understand how the Earth's rotation affects the amount of daylight over the year.

Bring to class several bags of M&M's candy and have students sort and classify the contents. Students will investigate the color distribution in the bags of M&M's. They will learn to use formulas, summarize their findings, and convert numbers into charts all by using M&M's and Excel.

By using some of these entertaining lesson plans you will be teaching without your students even realizing they're learning. So, go ahead and have fun!

Google Apps

Google Apps is a suite of collaboration and communication applications whose capabilities are numerous and varied. Through Google Apps teachers are provided with a more open, direct way of collaborating with other teachers in real-time. Everyone can access and work on a task at the same time without having to be in the same physical location. Joint research projects with faculty from other schools become more feasible and less time-consuming. It becomes easier to work in groups with administration. Google Apps move the focus from the individual to groups. This is the case for student activities as well. When assigning projects to a classroom full of students a teacher can keep track of the interaction between group members and monitor their progress. Students can also work individually on their group projects from their home computers. Members of student groups can contribute and stay informed as their project is planned, develops, and comes to fruition. There are many times that Google Apps could have helped me as a student, but they did not exist. Now that I am a student again I will have the opportunity to benefit from this new technology. And, in the not-so-distant future, it will assist me in my new role as a teacher.

Lesson Plan 1: Historical Novel

Students read an historical novel, based on a period in history, and arrive at its meaning and main ideas, discussing it "all class." Various Google tools are used for information gathering, working with partners, and final student projects. Students will study background information, read and discuss the novel, and work with partners collaboratively. Then students will write questions and the novel will be discussed in class, using the questions written by the students. The Google Apps that are used in this lesson plan include: Docs, Blogger, Form, Maps, and Earth. ISTE standards that are linked to this lesson plan are 1, 2, 3, and 4.

Lesson Plan 2: Telling Time & Google Calendar

This is a k-3 lesson plan and introduces the agenda format as a way other than the use of digital and analog clocks to teach students how to read and calculate time. This format allows students to see "blocks" of time and challenges them to find different ways to visualize and think about segments of time. This lesson uses Google Calendar. First the class reviews times on an analog clock. Then the passage of time is reviewed. The teacher introduces Agenda Format on Google Calendar. The class reviews how time works on Agenda and everyone makes their own agenda on Google Calendar. ISTE standards that are linked to this lesson plan are 1 and 4.

Read/Write Web

It's here to stay. I'm here to stay. Coincidence? I don't think so. Being born in the last year of the Baby-Boomer era (I know. I can't believe it either.), I do like face-to-face contact. It's how I grew up. You have a question, you go see your teacher. We didn't even have microwaves or CD players for God's sake! I took typing class in high school--that's right, on a typewriter. However, here I go. I'm on my way to being an educator of the 21st century, well into the "new millennium", if you will. I will speak "their" language. I will make it mine.

Our perspectives are definitely different. There's no way they couldn't be, but all is not lost. I'm on my way to opening my mind to a whole new world of communication, education, and life. Technology. It's all there for me. I just need to embrace it, and hold on to it, and teach with it as if it's my right arm. I can do it, and I will. I'm on my way to influencing and enlightening a whole, new generation--the Net Gen, and the generation after that, and the generation after that.

We sat quietly, for hours and listened to our teachers, and watched them write with chalk on the blackboard for hours, I mean hours! We didn't give our input. We listened and believed. There was no multi-tasking. There was no bricolage. There was no figuring out stuff on our own. We copied what was on the blackboard. We memorized it. We took tests. We got report cards. There you have it--public school in the seventies. Sounds fun, huh? I don't think so.

I am so excited to become part of the educators' world of today. It's a whole new world and I'm going to be part of it. Technology. The read/write web and all that it consists of and is capable of. It's mine to use and thrive in, as a student and as a teacher. How lucky am I?

The R/W tools available to today's teachers are amazing and limitless. Blogging, wikis, online rubric construction, podcasts, web cams, and streaming video are all examples of what's out there for teachers to use and thrive in the Net Gen world of education. RSS, or real simple syndication, is a read/write tool that allows authors to syndicate their content so that readers can subscribe and collect all the content they want, rather than searching for and visiting each individual site. This is made possible by an aggregator.

Blogging gives students a forum on which to write freely, receive feedback, and become motivated to write more and better because of the potential world wide audience. Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in the world. Online rubric construction is a tool used by teachers to share assessment ideas and strategies. Podcasts, web cams, and streaming video, provide a combination of audio and visual interaction among and between users.

Google Docs, formerly Writely, is a free and collaborative alternative to Microsoft Word. It is used mostly in k-12 education. Google Docs can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection and can be worked on collaboratively, therefore it is considered an R/W program. However, students find more use in Word because they know how to use it better. I have, personally, never used this tool.

I am beginning to learn that student-centered, project-based instruction incorporating R/W tools needs to be today's educators' goal. And that any stability other than acceptance of instability is insufficient. Here I go...

Week 1

It is fascinating to learn how and why Net Geners/Digital Natives think, learn, and process information fundamentally differently than Digital Immigrants (those of us who did not grow up using computers, cell phones, iPods, etc). Today's teachers are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language. Today's students learn by being connected. They don't just want to be lectured or talked at. They crave interaction. They have never known life without the ability to interact and connect with others immediately. Many students are bored and want to be listened to more. There is almost an urgency to know what is going on all the time in many different areas of their lives. This can be referred to as CPA or Continuous Partial Attention.

Students want their teachers to have technological and pedagogical knowledge and skill. However, many of today's teachers are either unwilling to learn to use or afraid of the new technology that is now available for use as teaching tools. One tool, PowerPoint, is being used more and more frequently by teachers with mixed reviews from students. Students praised PowerPoint's ability to help teachers convey specific information, but expressed frustration when teachers simply transferred their lecture notes to PowerPoint.

Interaction is of extreme importance to digital natives. How they interact with each other, with technology, and with life in general is different from that of digital immigrants. Today's students want to be heard. Blogging has become a way for students to be heard. It is a fast and effective way for students to interact and learn from each other and the rest of the world. Blogging enables students to develop a personal learning network (PLN). Blogging also redefines the audience for student writers, thus encouraging better writing and a more well-developed thought process.

It is, however, of the utmost importance for teachers and parents who have children using the internet as a learning tool, to make sure that it is being used in a safe manner. Sometimes
children innocently publish personal and unsafe information about themselves on the internet, putting them in danger. There are ways of protecting children with filtering tools and close monitoring of their use of the internet.

I feel that the singularity of technology has given educators only one option. Technology is here to stay and it is such a huge part of today's students' lives that we, as educators will need to incorporate as much of it as we can into our curriculum to give students the edge they need in today's fast-paced world.

Wow!

OK. So, this is a little overwhelming, but I should definitely learn a ton of stuff in this class.