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CEDU 534 Week 4

Social Bookmarking seems like yet another way of connecting to people about information and content. As far as application to the classroom, this one seems more applicable to teachers in the classroom and to a lesser extent to students. Teachers can really benefit from peer to peer collaboration. I know that I've always benefited from this collaboration.

Over the last couple of weeks I've had an idea that I think would be a good one. Any school district (mine for example) could spend one inservice day hooking up all of their teachers in a social networking site of some kind. They could pitch it as fun and entertaining - posting pictures and at the same time posting cool lesson plans that they've done and evaluations about them. In addition to this why not give all of their teachers an account on a social bookmarking site. The growing number of teacher and education related sites is getting too big to keep track of. By having these this could really benefit all teachers and thus their students.

CEDU 534 Week 3

As compared to the other online class experience over the summer I like the dim dim a bit more than the other one that was used (educator?) I think that it was refreshing to see a face on the other end of the "line." The main experience from the week was all about RSS. I'm finally beginning to "get it" and like anything it was beneficial to experience it first hand with actually using an aggregate to subscribe to blogs. Sure I had read it and written about it before but it's not until I did it myself that it sunk in. I think that RSS feeds are a new way to experience the web and in a way make it "custom made" for each user. The biggest application that I could see for classrooms are first, teachers learning from other teachers. By subscribing to other teacher's blogs for example through an RSS feed the teacher uses less time and learns more in a more efficient way. Of course research (particularly at the high school level) would be greatly improved by RSS technology

CEDU 534 Week 2

Week 2 was an interesting one. For one it became clear to me that social networking sites and the corresponding technology in general are/have been completely adopted by the youth of today. It seems to me that there are certain duties that come along with our profession of teaching. One of them is to adapt to serve the needs of the children that we have in our care. Their world is changing and to not address that is in essence educational malpractice. A school district that has a blanket policy brohibiting many parts of the web runs the risk of also neglecting to teach our our students how to be safe and responsible on the web. Lets be careful as educators to work with our district administrators to provide the best online saftey information we can.

CEDU 534 Week 1

It was a nice to be back and get right back into the swing of things with web 2.0.

Hate to get philosophical but. . .

I really like the concept of web 2.0 being an interactive - dynamic - back and forth- web where anyone can contribute. There's something democratic and egalitarian abut it. The flip side of course is the other edge of the sword. Since everyone is on the same playing field, the moron who tells you that the Holocaust never happened is right there getting their message out with regular folk. But . . . I think in a way there's more personal responsibility with web 2.0.

Now on to the teaching applications. . .

There's no doubt in my mind that this is the future of teaching. The textbook will become an accent to curriculum and will be replaced by a plethora of 2.0 possibilities. The classroom itself will be transformed with interactive web experiences replacing the paper and pencils of today. That can start today with blogs wikis and podcasts used in my classroom. Personally this year the easiest one that i'd like to start with is podcasting constructed responses for math

It's exciting to be learning about this now - ahead of the curve.

CEDU 527 Educational Leadership in sum

Truth be told one of the reasons I got involved in this program was because of a friend and fellow teacher at my school. He finished up his accelerated program at Stritch in Educational Leadership last year. While I had no interest in being a principal I did want a masters and he spoke highly of Stritch and the accelerated program. He will be getting a position as a principal next year and leaves a void of leadership in my school. He was a key player and got a lot done at the school. Well, I've been thinking of how and in what capacity I'll fill in at some of the leadership roles that he left behind. This class comes right into play with that. To quote John Gabriel "most teachers accept leadership as a reward in itself: they derive a sense of self worth from having their voices heard. . . " I'm looking forward to making a difference this coming year not as an egomaniac but as someone who is legitimately interested in making the lives of children better.

Educational Leadership week 4

I enjoyed playing the game "systems thinking Systems changing." I got the feeling that it was a reasonably accurate portrayal of several key personalities and players within a school district. It was clear after reviewing the biographies on the people that we've all met people exactly like these before. From the eager go getters to the sullen nay-sayers it was an accurate portrayal. The thing that I was struck with is that influencing certain people effected others around them and moved them along with the person. I believe that that is accurate. So it lead me to ask which one am I, the one leading or following. It's my goal to be more of a leader this coming school year.