For those of you that are stressed

Haha...lol cats
This is how I feel today!!

Head Explosion/wiki

I have been reading over the blogs, and it is nice to hear some commiseration about the crazy amount of work on top of discussion topics. I find that I am liking the blogs more and more compared to the discussions.

I'm glad our wiki is finally set to go. I think it looks like a good tool for collaboration. I have read about them quite a bit, but I have never participated in one before. I like the discussion tool at the bottom of each page. It's nice to have a place where just you and the collaborators can discuss the page. I don't know about anyone else, but I love the email feature in the wiki that allows you to be notified via email when things are changed. It not only keeps me on pace, but it let's me know what has been done to the wiki without having to log in all of the time.

Wikis in Education

I'm not very far into the Wiki topic, but I have already seen what is somewhat paramount in Wiki use: leadership. It seems that Wikis are an amazing collaborative tool, but my students will most definitely need a strong leadership component to a Wiki. I'm seeing that just with us College students, the Wiki is getting chaotic. I think that perhaps an outline set up by a leader or teacher would be best for Wiki set-ups. Perhaps I will see a difference when actually doing the Wiki project, but for now I feel unsure and disorganized. This does teach a strong lesson about creating a Wiki for my students.

READ THIS! to motivate

One key to making sure students read your blogs or discussions:

As I am reading the countless discussion headings and blog titles, I realize that I more often read the titles with catchy headlines first. I try to write to motivate my reader when I write, but sometimes I don't think to start with my title. When I am writing to students or teaching them about this, I think this will be an important pointer to make. Students need to include catchy, content-specific titles in their online writings. So simple, but I took a look at discussions again and realize how many of us don't do it!!!

Another great resource

Got this from our classmate L. Best. It's a hash tag resource reference.
Http://edudemic.com/2011/10/twitter-hashtag-dictionary/

Blogging better than class discussions

I am surprisingly liking this blogging stuff. I like it much more than the classroom discussions. If people would comment on each others blogs often, it would be almost the same thing. Feeling seriously overwhelmed with all of these discussions AND blogs.

My Top Twelve Uses for Blogs in a classroom

1.       My favorite use for my younger students: Tattling Tiger. Students tend to tattle so much on each other. I am going to start a blog next year for the students to tell to tattling tiger (clip art of tiger at the top of the screen). Students will write in their complaints. I will monitor these and give attention to those who are valid. Students will need to have anonymous blogging ability for this one to work. Maybe allow students to write their complaints in the comments section below?

2.       Use blogs to talk about perspectives, whether it’s the author’s viewpoint or that of one of the characters in a story.

3.       Use as a journaling tool for students

4.       Freewriting (prewriting for a writing project)—from our readings: E-learn Space Website (Siemens, 2002)

5.       Take an issue from a classroom lecture and ask students to apply it to a real world situation

6.       E-portfolio (Richardson, 2010)

7.       Blog the summary for each chapter in a book (students would not be able to look at each other’s blogs for this one).

8.       Back and forth response between students and someone else (author, motivator, etc). (Richardson, 2010, p. 23)

9.       Between colleagues on a school committee, or between people involved in parent/teacher organizations (Richardson, 2010, p.24).

10.   Use them to share teaching tips between grade levels. Some teachers just have better ways to teach a certain skill. This may even avoid all of the sometimes pointless weekly or monthly grade-level meetings.

11.   New form of classroom newsletter

12.   As an exit ticket at the end of the day. Students can list the top ten most important things they learned today, or a summary of a particular subject.