Chris' Blog

So this week we were tasked with creating an assignment for perspective students to produce something using Web2.0 tools. I thought this was a challenging assignment. I thought so because I do not really know the students that I am teaching. This can be a big indication if such an assignment is going to work. However, I trudged ahead and began to let my mind wonder. I created an assignment where students had to take information from classroom study and put that information on to a wiki page. This page could then be used as a study guide for the whole class. The students would be divided into different groups so we could collaborate to create the whole. After this portion of the assignment students would then create a voicethread that contained the information as well. This might seem repetitive but this forces the students to synthesize the information into their own words and thoughts. It also helps students who are not typical read and learn kids. Overall, I though this assignment c

So this week as we are all working on our various assignments I found something that I plan on using and sharing in the future. This site is called Planboard. Planboard is an online planner. Now just for the record, I am the worst planner ever. Trust me you can ask my wife! However this site I found was so easy to use. I used it this week for our produsage assignment. The plan I had was going to take about a week for students to complete. So, instead of turning in 5 different lesson plans I did the, whole thing on Planboard. I was able to put them into an easy to use calander just like the ones my wife uses except, these are free and online. I could put the subject I wanted to teach, set up classes, and even schedule out the semester. I found it super easy to use. It also was helpful because you could look up standards. This is always time consuming for me, when I want to do something out of the textbook. So for this assignment it was perfect. If you have any interest in this helpful t

After reading this week I really started questioning how we learn on-line. Most of the time I have struggled with trying to get my students to get things out of using social media tools. I have used the, for extra credit but I still do not get enough participation to see growth using the tools. After reading "Networked Knowledge Activities" by V. Dennen, I can see several examples of activities and how they can engage students. She also says that to engage is to emerse themselves in an on-line tool.  I really think that taking this information and applying it to the classroom will help engage my students. I honestly want to avoid some of the activities because I can implement them in the class with regular activities. For example, collecting, I can accomplish this by ordinary classroom assignments and can ignore on-line tools. Some of the others are better and I think they are going to be fully helpful in engaging students. Activities like curating, negotiating, and constru

Since the beginning of time I have always been told that the most important thing in the world is trust. I still believe this is true whether it be personal or professional relationships. When you enter into a personal relationship the other person is trusting you to be a partner. When you enter a professional relationship the employer is trusting you to do your job. In online communities it is vital to instill trust in participants so that people are willing to participate. If you are comfortable in your network you will be able to fully engage in the community. This is why social media tools like Facebook and Twitter are wildly successful. You build your networks yourself so you are more likely to be comfortable with those you interact with. This is trust 101. The friend model or follow model of the sites allows you to be more comfortable with people in these communities. If you are thinking about building your own network you should make sure that people have a sense of trust to pa

Edmodo is a platform that enables teachers, students, and parents to communicate and collaborate online is a safe controlled environment. I have used Edmodo in the past. I have not used it in a little while so getting back on there was a little different this time. When I first heard of Edmodo I was a young teacher just starting out and thought it would be a good way to connect with students outside of the classroom to make sure they were staying on top of assignments. I did not get a lot of feedback from students or parents so I stopped using it. I am here to say that I want to use it again this year after having a better understanding of how to use online platforms for students. Edmodo is very teacher centric so the teacher controls the members and conversations on the site. Next week when I get my student rosters I will begin to build a class. During orientation I will have the information posted so parents and students can sign up on the spot and will also have the information dis

So this week has been pretty hectic. A lot of things had to be done for my new job, this class, and things around the house. So on Tuesday I decided to take a little time off of social media and took a step back from the computer. I do this often in the summer because I need to recharge my battery so that I can get ready to deal with 120 students for 180 days. There are some great reasons to go offline and other times it can feel overwhelming. So I am going to share with you some of the pros and cons of going offline. Cons- Going offline can be hard. Most of our lives are on some sort of online platform. If you are not the social media type you still have a lot of communication through online areas. Email is one of those things that can really hurt you if you do not check it or reply quick enough. This is the hardest for me. I communicate with colleagues the most through email. I have to check it everyday or I might miss something important like a training or a meeting. Social media

So a long, long time ago, while I was in college, we were tasked with creating a personal wiki so that we could share with potential employers. I honestly did not know what a wiki was or what purpose it served at the time since it was such a new tool on the web. Now looking back I think that a classroom wiki is a great way to create produsage in the classroom. My idea for the class is to create a space where all students can share what they have learned about the course. I will go ahead and preload in the documents that we are going to cover over the course of the year and as we move along students can add in parts that they enjoyed and found interesting. I want to ultimately use this as a review site for upcoming assessments but this is something that students can collaborate on together. I really think that students will enjoy posting what they know the best and it would be a great way to share knowledge across the class. It is also something that I can control as the administrator

So one of the more interesting pieces that I read this week was about how students can't fully research things because of blocked sites at school. This is a problem in a lot of cases but substantial research can be done without getting on these restricted sites. So what do you do as an educator? Well here are a few of the things I have done in class to avoid this problem. 1- You have to make sure that students know how to research first. Their first call can not be to Wikipedia but they can use it as long as they know to scroll to the bottom and see where the sources are. It's also important they know where to look for research articles online. These sites are largely unblocked. 2- Social media can be used and accessed in schools. Facebook is a no-go anyway because of the process of them using their real names. Other mediums like YouTube or Twitter are great as long as you walk them through how to set it up and get parents permission. I would also suggest a tool like Edmodo

To be honest with you guys this week was tough for me. There was a lot of new information that I had not really ever thought about. It was hard to understand the purpose in which we use hashtags, crowdsourcing, and intellectual property. However I came away feeling like I have a better grasp on those three things. I know that I can use hashtags in my classroom to help the learning process. I plan to do that this fall when school starts back up. I also can have my students and myself use crowdsourcing to enhance our learning together. I also want to share this with other faculty because I think it is a good way for us to collaborate more effectively. I am going to try and produce some of my own materials for certain lessons that I teach and put those things on Teachers Pay Teachers and slideshare. I also signed up for the site diigo and it lead me to a group that was already formed that I joined called Web 2.0. With the help of this group I signed up for voice threads and am going to pr

I find crowdsourcing a very great concept but in practice I do not know if it works. I am going to use an example that I recently experienced. I have an app called Nextdoor-Neighborhood. This app is a way for community members to keep in contact with each other. There are several things that people can do. Community members can advertise for businesses, sell items, share experiences, and most importantly complain. I was really pumped to get on there and read all of the complaints. Now however, I have discovered that if crowdsourcing was used effectively we could have avoided a huge calamity in our neighborhood. Recently we have had a problem with parking on the streets and the HOA solution was to put up no parking signs. Sounds great right? Wrong! People we so mad! I really think if the HOA would have used crowdsourcing on our neighborhood app they would have had a better way to solve the problem. Instead now they are receiving multiple complaints because now people are seeing the prob

What's in a hashtag? That which we call a hashtag by any other word would still mean the same thing. Okay, okay enough of the Bill Shakespeare. Really though why do we use hashtags? I really never considered the answer to this question. I always thought that hashtags were there just to continue a joke or find away to be clever. For instance, my favorite hashtags to use were #merica and #hashtag.  I know pretty dumb right? Well after figuring out what the actual purpose of hashtags are I have a new understanding of them.  We can use hashtags to categorize many things especially for learning. This past year I participated in learning walks. These were for a select group of teachers who volunteered to go out into different schools and figure out what are the best practices for teachers to help students. I thought this was a fantastic idea. It worked to because I saw a lot of differnt things to show how we can be better teachers. The people in my group also learned a whole lot as well

This week during the reading I say something very interesting that I feel like I knew about but I did not know exactly what it was. A few years ago I had a colleague that said he was taking a course at Yale University and I had no idea what he was talking about. So I asked him. He told me that Yale offered some free courses and he decided to take one over the summer because he thought it would be fun. Not really my idea of fun but it was cool none the less. I forgot about that until I started to do some of the reading this week. Caswell, Henson, Jensen, and Wiley make some great points and give some great information about this thing called OpenCourseWear. The idea behind this is something that I wholeheartedly agree with. I think that if you are someone or some business and God has blessed you with more than you need you should give back. These universities decided that they would start offering some, and in some cases all, of their courses for free for individual learners. You might

So this is the last time I will check in this week and I wanted to update you guys on how my community observation is going. I have decided to follow two message boards, forums, if you will. So far it is going great. I have been lurking on a site called CoachHuey.com which is a message board for football coaches. There you can share thoughts, tips, videos, and really anything that can help someone become a better football coach.  The other site that I am monitoring is VolNation.com which is a message board for the University of Tennessee football team. I can not tell you how much I am a fan because I would run out of space on this blog. Just know I bleed orange and white. This site I am going to be a more active member of. I feel like I have more experience with the Tennessee football fanbase and would feel more comfortable interacting with the people on the site. I have commented on the boards I am just giving some time for the replies to come in. I hope all of you guys have found s

So earlier today I embarked on a personal challenge of mine. This was to try and reach different groups of people through the social media outlets Periscope and YouTube. These are two tools that I want to use in my classroom for students this year. In this post I am going to tell you a few things about why I want to use these two outlets, what they are, and how my experience was while using them. First, the reason why I want to use these two outlets is because I am drawing inspiration from two people that I look up to. The first is my friend Andy who is a teacher in Osceola County, FL. He has used YouTube successfully in his class for a few years. Seeing the students comment and talk about the videos in my own class caused me to have a desire to use it in my own unique way to help students learn. The other is a radio personality I find fascinating. Clay Travis is a prominent radio show host on Fox sports network. He started his rise to this position by using his Pe

I'm going to show my age here but when I was younger (back in my day) we did not have this crazy thing called social media. I remember going off to college in my beat up old car and in my wallet was a name and address book, so I could call and write. Now, people did have cellphones and all of that but we are talking the stone ages of 2004 and I was a poor kid from the country so I did not have a phone. After about 3 months into my freshman year of college I met a guy named Phil. Phil was a pretty cool guy, had an xbox, loved to play halo, super cool. Phil introduced me to social media. He was playing on his myspace account when I walked into the door of his dorm room one day. "Hey man what the heck is that?" He replied, "Oh this is myspace." From that point on I was hooked. I would spend hours trying to make my profile on myspace awesome and find as many people as I knew in high school. A month later another friend, Ben, showed me Facebook. Again I was hooked an

So this week during the voice thread we were tasked to use some more tools that are in the Web 2.0 framework. I got really excited when I saw Instagram and Youtube. These two I probably waste more time on than any other social media platform. I am totally a lurker when it comes to these two tools. However, I want to use these tools in my profession as an educator this year. My good friend Andy Wade is a US History teacher at a Middle school in Osceola County, FL. He has been a teacher for around 10 years like myself and was a great guy to work with. He came up with a fun little way to get more students involved in learning US History. Before we go on you have to know two things. First, Andy is a huge history buff, and he loves to travel to historic Civil War Battlefields. Trust me, he has a map in the back of his class and has a pin in all of the fields he has been to. He has gone to most of them. Second, he loves phone goggles. These are the things that you can attach your phone to

This post is to sum up what I have learned this week. This week in class we have discussed many introductory factors about web 2.0. This was a term that I had no clue about. To be honest I have never heard the term before. Now however, I can not look at my phone or the computer and not think about web 2.0. It is all around us. I think this week has opened my eyes to what the purpose of social media is. For the longest time I was a self-proclaimed lurker. I have a snap chat but never have sent a message. I have a twitter but seldom tweet. I do not even post of Facebook that much. After doing some digging on the web to get a clearer picture of what web 2.0 is I see that in order to get out of the habit of web 1.0/lurking, you have to produce content. I follow countless people on instagram, who are fellow teachers, and have learned tremendously from them. They give me inspiration on classroom design, topics to discuss, projects to try. I am not giving anything back however. I am going to

Social media is a great tool that I use on a daily basis. When I wake up in the morning I go straight to my phone and open the twitter app. I search my app for my favorite morning news personality and click the link to start my day. Social media has become such a vital part of our lives that we do not even think about why we use the tools that we do. Facebook came along around the time I was in college. When I used Facebook back then it was always to try and get girls. That was really the only reason I had any social media to begin with. I still remember 4-5 mins into a conversation with somebody at a party and throwing out the line "you on facebook?". Since then social media is not just a place where people hook up and hang out it is a vital life line to the outside world. I know that social media does not make up the entire population but it is a massive number of people. Twitter is one of the social media mediums that I use the most. As stated earlier, I use it first thin