Basically, what I want to do is focus on tagging. I am going to use Wordle to capture the blogging that’s been done by all of us in class so we can see/analyze the most frequent words that have been used. In doing this, I am going to model how you could take all of your students’ blogs and put them into Wordle in order to analyze what they are writing about. Imagine this in a science curriculum. After a couple months of students taking notes, the Wordle created by the blog entries will serve as an excellent review of main concepts.

In order to bring in multiple blogs, I spent a long time today looking for the ‘perfect’ RSS Mixer. Whew… not easy. There’s some good ones out there, but mostly they gather just the summaries from the blogs. I wanted full posts. What I ended up doing was heading off to Yahoo! Pipes to learn a bit and build my own.

My head is buzzing with the possibilities of this very simple tool, Wordle. Running the daily RSS from Google News would be a great way to start current events discussions with students (Why are these words the biggest?). What a great way to analize your own writing (pump in your own blog and see what you’re mostly writing about).

Image: ‘Where did my love go?‘
www.flickr.com/photos/46425925@N00/43197077

I love regular wikis (don’t get me wrong), but I think that they can be a bit text-book looking. Students will be engaged when asked to write, say, a textbook in wiki. But looking at the features of Google Sites seems to be more inviting. A class would see this as their ‘virtual spaces’ (where many wiki’s can be placed) and they are able to also put up their own web-type page.

I’m first setting one up for my own family and part of this is to model that I think a Google Site could give a “family feel” to a classroom’s site.

The best use of del.icio.us would be to have students collect links to benefit the instruction. Many things can be accomplished by having them do the work, but most importantly, they need to validate, review and assess sites in order to defend/explain their usefulness.

Image: ‘Laptop, the well-travelled suitcase years‘
www.flickr.com/photos/36778932@N00/2218440756

Choose 1 of the 5 goals from the NETS for Teachers. Write a post about how you might use the goal in your teaching and how if fits in to what you want to learn in this class.

“model collaborative knowledge construction by engaging in learning with students, colleagues, and others in face-to-face and virtual environments.”

I’m going to be focusing on Wikis this week. I definitely want to start having students create “textbooks” with wikis at all grade levels. This can be done even with audio and pictures, but I want to start creating these books that will live on and be added to year after year. Using a wiki really brings in the discussion of how to collaborate with others online AND how to work ethically with others: discussions about copyright, ownership, and treating others’ work with respect.

Alice’s class is off to an amazing start. She rocks!