Thing 18

Here is my ClustrMap .... and my Widget of Michigan Pictures .....

Thing 17

I think the Wikki is different from a blog because actual changes and additions can be made to the page where as a blog can only be commented on. This has both good and bad results as the info is only as good as the poster. This is what has lead to the creation of sites like snopes.com to check out info. Students tend to believe any info that is posted, we need to teach them to be more discerning readers as with the newspaper, everything can be slanted with a bias of some sort. Wikki's would be great for collaborative projects that need a final presentation. The teacher can go through the history info to track what students participated and to what extent. Information could be verified by various methods, students in the project and the teacher. Blogs could be useful to develop a dialogue on a given topic where opinions are encouraged. This could be another form of debate with older students . At the elementary level I could see issues with this due to keyboarding skills, spelling, and vocabulary. I think the research topics on a Wikki would better suit our current curriculum topics. The issue with Wikki at the elementary level is going to be screening, filtering information that is appropriate for students. When students research their topics, unfortunately, there are always in appropriate materials, photos, and links attached to otherwise quality materials. There is also the oops factor which happens due to their lack of keyboarding skills. Filters, site permissions, capability of the hardware and software at the elementary level is also going to be an issue. Students have limited storage capacity, external flash drives have not been permissible, and access to advanced software available at the MS and HS has not yet been made available. I have reviewed the Tech GLCE's for Upper Elem. students and there are some of these that can only be met through use of the teacher log in and the "teacher's computer" in the gen. ed classroom and not in the lab as these computers have more limited capabilities. I am planning to get around some of these issues with the acquisition of the 3M Infinity System for my classroom as the students can then work on my log in and permissions in a way that I can readily monitor through the projection system.

Thing 16

My Wikki space: http://dmiller4th.wikispaces.com/ I hope to use this to gather and work on sources and media for teaching the 4th Grade GLCE's. I was recently had my technology proposal accepted by the school district. I will need many new resources for my 3M infinity system that will be installed in my room. I hope to use all the resources I have used and have my students work with their collaborative projects and wikki should be a great resource. I would like to create a space to collaborate with the other teachers across the district where we can support each other.

Thing 15

Success!! I was able to upload a picture of the LA State Capitol Building from flickr, as well as a link to the Louisiana.gov website. In addition, at the bottom of the page I was able to add the link to the Travel Guide page. This was great fun once I got the hang of it. I spent a lot of time on it yesterday with little success. I believe the problem was I was trying to grab photos that were not to be shared, and did not hit the save button on the wikki as I was trying to preview so I did not take out anyone else's info. I did eliminate the state seal. I think we need a second page at this point to get all the info on it. This would be great for collaborative projects with students on report topics. I believe the initial teaching of the technology would be a little cumbersome for the original technology teaching; but still doable in 4th grade. We would probably do a class project and then work in groups getting smaller as skills progress due to teacher management issues. As others have mentioned in their blogs getting sites unblocked and granting permissions in the various areas due to content may be difficult. Also screening all the info to prevent inappropriate pics and videos from creeping in during searches would be an issue especially at the elementary level. However, I see tremendous potential if we can work out the glitches.

Thing 14

I searched the wikkis site and found a great link for Math for 3rd - 6th grade. The link: http://eduzoomerone.wikispaces.com/ma3 . I posted it to the wikki on the MCISD page of course. I found that one could spend a whole day finding and developing useful links to utilze in the classroom. This could easily become addictive and there is no possible way to get through it all. I think this will be great to utilize materials that can be downloaded, or site based with students as teaching materials in the standard form are expensive and become quickly outdated. It is also difficult to capture and keep elementary students attention in the video game era with the standard text book and worksheets (who wants to spend time grading them anyway). I will have to strike a balance because paper/pencil testing is still the norm, so the skills will need to be translated. Great resource, made the price of the class worth all the work to get this info.

Thing 13

I picniked a photo from my computer. This was pretty easy and I could see how this could be quite useful for reports, sales flyers, lesson plans, etc. I think to get more of the features that I was able to view on the site, you need more then the basic membership. I originally attempted to modify a pic of my son's motorcycle to eliminate all the background junk and pop the motorcycle to the front of the picture and add text. The site kept directing me to the membership page. Paying additional for for the premium. $24.95 a year may be worth the investment for an individual, but I am not sure that it would be available to an entire class at that price. A site license would not fit into our current budget if it was more then that. Individually, I thought it was awesome .... to use for a classroom, I would need to look more into the finances as things are very TIGHT now.

I changed the contrast and saturation of this picture to brighten the colors. I also used the crop feature to cut out the background, which was easy for this object as it is a rectangle. I played with all the other features to get different looks but settled on this one. Contrast, crop, and color saturation I believe were the only options I used. It was cool. I will probably try this again.

Thing 12

The flickr badge gadget was broken. I finally figured out why it would not work. It is broken. Therefore; I substituted a slideshow for this thing. Hopefully, that will satisfy the requirement. I was able to steal and post several other peoples badges to my blog. Then spent another half hour trying to figure out what to do to delete them. I think besides learning how to use a lot of gadgets (I ran through a lot of them trying to find out why things did not work), I have perfected the use of the help searches, not helpful, but have learned a lot of info while trying to figure out the problem. I think the most valuable lesson I learned was to play and explore. What could I do, crash the world wide web, not sure that would be a tragedy considering the current economy in MI. Therefore, playing with the technology is ok. I finally stumbled on the answer, badge gadget broken, posting a slide show in its place. I hope you enjoy the slide show. These are photos from the IKAN Walk in Success project we did at Ritter. Ask if you have any questions :)