New Literacies

The students in our classroom today are known as learners of the digital age. In order to reach these students and to provide authentic learning experiences, educators will need to overcome their own barriers in using technology and instructing with Web 2.0 tools. An additional challenge in some school districts is the lack of computers for daily use by all students in a classroom. The lack of computers makes it difficult to plan daily lessons using Web 2.0 tools that students need to be productive in the 21^st Century. Currently in Pennsylvania, many schools are cutting educational programs and teachers just to balance their budget. Unfortunately, improving technology is not their focus at this time. Many are just trying to survive.

In order for students to be successful in the 21^st Century, teachers and school systems will need to rethink what these students need to be able to do and know when they graduate from high school. School Curriculums will need to be overhauled with these digital age students kept in mind. Regurgitating facts should no longer be stressed in most content areas. Instead, students need to become critical readers to be able to evaluate information found on the web. Since the web is now a read/write experience, students also need to learn how to collaborate with others around the world and to gain the skills needed to get along in this web environment. Students will also need to understand how to organize the information found on the web for future use.

Ready or not, the digital age is here and schools need to change how and what they teach in order to engage these students. Hopefully, for the sake of our students, teachers and schools will get on board with how technology and change is needed in order for our students to be successful and productive citizens in the 21^st Century.

Favorite Web 2.0 Tool

I have really enjoyed working with all of the Web 2.0 tools I have mentioned in this blog. I believe all of the tools would be useful for the classroom. However, if I had to choose just one, I would have to say that my favorite tool would be Social Bookmarking. The ability to organize a large amount of websites saved to Delicious through tagging is simply fantastic. It really boggles my mind the amount of information that can be found on a subject through the public tagging process.

Teaching younger students about this site by simply starting with how to tag a website is a great introduction to this tool. By creating individual accounts for the students, I will be able to share individualized websites with a student based upon his/her needs.

Podcasts

If you did not know, there are many podcasts in the world on any topic you could imagine! For my exploration in the world of podcasts, I limited myself to education and music education podcasts. This is actually not my first time looking for podcasts but I admit it has been a while since I have actively listened to some.

I think podcasts can be very useful in the classroom, especially for lecture material or for student created podcasts. I like the fact that lecture material can be reviewed often if needed by a student, especially for ESL students. For student created podcasts, there is a lot that the students need to decide before they can start recording. I think that most students try harder when they can see or in this case hear the results of their hard work. Having the opportunity to share the podcasts can make this part of the students community of learners and family.

My try at a new podcast through the recorder, Audacity, was going fine until I decided to add a midi file for background music. I am not sure why the import did not work as it should have. I ended up having to turn my midi file into an audio file so I could import it that way. I am not sure why something that should have been so easy turns out to be so difficult! My podcast is titled "Instrumental Musical Tips". I found it to be really easy to publish my podcast at podbean.com. Overall, I enjoyed exploring different podcasts and I will listen to some of my favorite finds.

Podcast Powered By Podbean

Photo Sharing

Maggie, a photo by cjmiddleton on Flickr.

I enjoyed my experience with the photo sharing site Flickr. It was very easy to upload photos and to tag and add descriptions to them. Once I uploaded some photos, I enjoyed looking around at all of the photos available on the site. A neat feature that I never knew about was the ability to add comments on areas of a picture. I can see how this can be used in a classroom setting.

One of the group areas I viewed was the tag “dogs”. Above is a picture of my dog Maggie. As I am writing this blog, she is laying under my desk waiting for me to go for a walk with her.

I never considered before how a photo sharing site would offer learning opportunities in the classroom. After reading and exploring Flickr, I can see how photos can be used for an online travel trip, a class could create a community of learners through the tags and comments of photos, a photo can also be used as a story starter. Any of these ideas would be using Communication and Collaboration in addition to using Critical Thinking, Problem Solving and Decision Making skills from the NETS-S standards.

Social Bookmarking

My experience with learning about Social Bookmarking was exciting. This is something that I have never heard of before and could not even guess what it was about. I was happy to learn that there was a better way to bookmark interesting websites found on the web. This new way allows the user to tag their website with multiple descriptive words in order to make finding websites in the future easier. What I find exciting is that I can share my sites with other people and I can search for sites that other people have already saved pertaining to a certain keyword used for tagging the site.

The social bookmarking site I used was Delicious. My site is found at: https://delicious.com/cindymiddlet

I became very frustrated when trying to create a linkroll from Delicious onto this blog’s sidebar. I guess I am not really sure what the linkroll should look like after it is attached so I am not sure if I was successful or not. I know that I need the html code from my Delicious bookmark site and that seemed to be my biggest problem. I will need to check this out and try again. What I decided to do was just add a link to my Delicious bookmarks on the sidebar of this blog.

For a class situation, I would at first find websites as a group and decide together what keywords should be applied to each website bookmarked. This will show the potential of the site to the students before they are required to bookmark sites themselves. This will cover the Communication and Collaboration of the NETS-S

RSS Feeds

As I was exploring music education blog sites, I had some difficulty finding a site that had an RSS feed to add to my new blogsline reader.  Some had none and some were sign up for e-mail notice. This was really disappointing as I found some great sites. Eventually, I started finding some RSS feed sites. I picked MusicEdMagic to add the RSS feed to this blog site. This site had some neat features of free music to download in addition to music education articles. I must admit, I was frustrated when I went to add this feed since I could not find the “Add a Gadget” feature in this blog site. Eventually I had success – I reread the directions a couple of more times before everything clicked for me!

I believe that using a reader like Blogsline or Goggle Reader would be a great asset to the classroom. I know of some classrooms that like to use the newspaper as part of their class. With budget cuts, this is not possible for some schools. Signing up for the news through a reader would be a great way to continue using the news in the classroom especially for current events.

RSS use in my instrumental lessons will be simply providing feeds of different sites that might be of interest to parents and students on my blog site. This would cover the Communication and Collaboration in the NETS-S Document.

Exploring Wiki's

While exploring different wiki sites, I found educators using them for many purposes. Collaborative writing was common in the early elementary classes. For the older student classrooms, there was a lot more information on the sites. These sites often contained class information and student lists and their writings. Some sites were very simple and others were complex. 

I can see the benefit of using a wiki in the classroom. It can be for one project where all of the students need to collaborate or it can be broken down into small group projects. I like how you can see the changes made and if need be, the information can be changed back to an earlier time. I think knowing that everyone can see their work, students will be more careful with their research and writing skills.

I used PB Works for my wiki : http://kcsdelementaryband.pbworks.com

My biggest problem was deciding what content I wanted to put on this wiki. I decided to keep it very simple with a couple of pages of information and a question and answer page. I did not add student users. I decided to leave the students post their answer in the comment section. I am not really sure how this will work. I think this site will definitely be a trial and error type of site to see what works and what I want it to be in the end.

The way I would use this wiki in the classroom is what I have created. Since I do not have time for students to create or write on the wiki in my lesson time, I have created questions on the site for students to go into and answer. This would just be under the Communication and Collaboration part of the NETS-S. It might be interesting to create a page for students to post questions and have other students post the answers. I will have to really sit down and think on the best way I could use a wiki with my elementary band students besides just posting information like a website.