Week #3 in CED 535

This week we took a look at RSS readers and how you can use them in education as well as how to use photo sharing websites.  I have been a fan of RSS feeds for a long time and use them to follow a number of personal websites, but I never thought about using them for class activities.  I use RSS to follow webcomics such as xkcd and it helps me not waste time checking the sites for updates when I know that the RSS will let me know when there is a new comic to view.  I also like to subscribe to the RSS feeds of fox news, cnn, msnbc and the BBC, since articles of political interest are usually written with completely different slants. By comparing these news tid-bits you can get a pretty accurate picture of what went on.

In education I'd love to use RSS for professional development and for possible homework updates for students.  Hopefully we'll look at RSS in depth in the future and its impact on education.

Week #2 in CED 535

This week we are taking a look at Wiki's in education.  I've found some great Physics Education Wiki's in my search for how we use wiki's in education.  My school got wiki crazy back two years ago and we did not implement them very well in the classroom.  It was really just an add on that we did not engage very much.  These websites do a much better job of using a wiki appropriately:

http://fnoschese.wordpress.com/ - A great resource for using the modeling method in physics education. It has a couple of neat thoughts about how to use wikis in a few of the posts.

http://www.slideshare.net/dannynic/blogs-and-wikis-in-science-teaching - This is not a wiki or blog, but it is a presentation of a lot of great ideas about how to implement a blog or wiki into a science classroom. There are a ton of links inside the presentation about current science teachers and their pages, blogs and wikis

http://teachingofscience.wordpress.com/ - This blog is a must for all of us in the course to take a look at.  The writer gives a lot of great ideas about how to use blogs and wikis in the classroom.  Most of the posts are very well written and contain a lot of great stuff.

http://mrmackenzie.co.uk/ - This is a very neat physics wiki from a British Physics Teacher that  has the same sense of humor in the classroom that I have.  The wiki is incredibly well laid out and has an outstanding use of video, weblinks and other resources for students.  While it is not a blog, it is a shinning example of how you can harness a lot of different media to get students to learn.

I was also able to get a twitter account going: http://twitter.com/JohnBWilkinson 

I don't know how I'll use it yet, but it might be a homework reminder tool or a professional development tool.

Lastly, here is a youtube video channel that I have been having some fun with after finding it on one of the blogs above:

CED 535 Week #1

New School Year, New Course!

We just started CED 535 this week and we will be talking about blogs, wikis, podcasts and a bunch of other tools that will harness the web for classroom use.  I'm pretty excited about what the course will have since this is something I have been trying to incorporate for years, but never really had the background or operational knowledge to do.  I'd like to get to the point where I could have a "flipped classroom" for my AP courses so that I can help the students more with problem solving and have less time that I have to lecture to my classroom.

My only worry about podcasting is trying to control the commenting.  I have had students in the past make fake Facebook and MySpace pages about me and they always start off innocent enough, but the commenting features quickly get out of hand.  I'd love to have some way to control this a little more while still giving students ownership of their own web presence.