Mission for This Week: 02/08-02/14

Kudos on undertaking the ambitious task of collecting the ‘wisdom of the crowd!’ I look forward to seeing the project take shape over the course of the year, and into the future.

I have had some luck in implementing blogging and social networking that I’ve put to use in my gifted students grade 9 / 10 classroom this past semester, and have blogged about in a few instances I thought might be of use for your current chapter. I would be willing to contribute to further discussion of any of these posts if you prefer, but figured they would be a good place to start:

Twitter & Accessing Primary Sources: http://bryanjack.edublogs.org/2009/11/09/if-a-student-asks-a-question-in-a-classroom-how-many-people-hear-it/

Student Reflection on same experience: http://talonskatie.edublogs.org/2009/11/11/word-of-blog-another-way-to-interview/

Student Blogging as Assessment for Individual Study: http://talonsjordan.edublogs.org/

The class’ RSS feed of blogs can be found here as well: http://www.google.ca/reader/shared/user%2F12194173047228092373%2Flabel%2FTALONS%20Blogs

Best of luck in continuing toward your resolution, and a noble project!

Bryan

Jason I would have to start with twitter. When I first heard about it I thought it was the dumbest thing ever. I thought it was just a way for people to talk about themselves more than they already did. Then I had a class at Seton Hall where we had to subscribe to twitter and to post to it and respond to classmates. I enjoyed it and thought that I’d use twitter ocassionally for sending out quick messages. But then a former student of mine at Seton Hall ( I both take classes there and teach as an adjunct there) told me that she was getting some good ideas from some people on twitter. One of the people she suggested was @web20classroom. Once I started following Steve Anderson (AKA web20classroom) the rest was history. I found so many good tips, ideas, inspirations and resources that I now wonder how any teacher (or especially any library media specialist) could get along without it. But twitter not only led to many digital resources it also led to many wonderful people who I now view as colleagues. I have a whole army of people to reach out to if I have a question or need some help.

Twitter led to my branching out to diigo. I had favorited sites for months on twitter but never bothered to catalog them in any way. Finally I knew that I had to do that and after researching diigo and delicious decided on using diigo as my bookmarking site. I took all of the sites that were recommended on twitter and some from my own research and created a giant database of resources for my district. I have well over 1000 sites cataloged that not only can other teachers in my district view and utilize but can also tag and annotate with sticky notes as well. I have not as yet used twitter in the classroom but have thought of possibilities for doing that but I have used diigo with several english classes.

Jason,
Before I discovered Twitter and all of its power, I thought it was stupid. I did not understand it and figured it would pass as all do, (i.e. myspace) but soon discovered just how very usefull it can be. A student I had once told me how he would use it if he had a question on homework or needed advice on basically anything. I thought that over and decided to try it out, and the result was amazing. Now I use it if I have a question for just about anything. If I cant figure it out in person, I go to what I consider my online family. I even used it before Zoey was born, asking for advice about other first time parents, ecspecially any single mothers. It has also opened me up to other websites, such as Facebook and Allpoetry, which isnt really a social networking site in the same sense as twitter, but still a public community where writers can publish their work and get feedback almost instataneously. It has been an interesting adventure, and I wouldnt give it up for anything, because I have met some of my closest friends on these sites.