caught up: week seven

this will mark the end of my starting late series of blog posts, and usher in the period of time when (hopefully) i can stay caught up with the monster blogs, and not have to stay up late to crunch five or so blogs in one night to relieve my stress...in any case, this past week (yesterday) we went over using iGoogle...my first response on seeing this last semester was "Oh god, Apple corrupted Google..." which isn't actually the case (as i understand it) iGoogle is a useful tool that allows all kinds of useful (or distracting) Widgets to be applied and checked regularly. as a starter to iGoogle, our assignment was to find a few widgets to add to our hoard. we HAD to get Gmail, Google reader, Google Docs, and two more widgets of our choice...i chose a few widgets last year to use as well...my current widgets (at the time of writing) include a stock ticker where I keep track of Goggle stock, for entertainment value, and Disney stock, because I own [a piece of] Disney, i also have a few fun widgets, a pair of eyes that follow my mouse, a hamster that does the same thing, but can also run on his/her hamster wheel, i also have a family of penguins that can interact with the mouse and be dragged across the widget, these three are fairly distracting...i also have a simulation of newtons cradle...wicked fun stuff...we also reviewed a few google tools, the entire class got a crash course on Google Docs, and I chose to review Google Earth and Google Sketchup...bot are useful applications, and i forgot to mention, as part of my review, that google earth and google Sketchup can be interconnected, allowing you to import buildings from google earth, and edit them in sketchup, seeing dimensions and size comparisons. Spelling mistakes be cursed, i'm ending this here

Goodnight and good luck,
Neil

Continuing Late: Week Six: Week Five: Part 2

as promised here is week five, part two. During this class, a continuation of using the internet as a teaching tool, we learned a few great things. we learned the process of making a webquest, and the process of making a portaportal. Both were surprisingly easy, intuitive, and disappointingly anticlimactic, considering the hype I'd heard about them in the previous semester. In any case, i teamed up with a classmate as we ventured into a webquest covering the battle of Hastings in 1066. Doing the webquest, i learned a few things besides how to make a webquest and a portaportal: i learned that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066 C.E, between the British and Normans, with the Normans ending up as the victors. in any case, we had a lot of fun, and i was able to learn something. I learned that not only could doing a webquest making learning more entertaining, but creating one was a fun time, and was doable inside of an hour, and the portaportal I created makes a neat, if convenient, repository for my miscellaneous links. Portaportal can be used as a good resource for teachers and students alike, where teachers can put websites with a wide variety of informational coverage, allowing the students the experience of sifting through resources, but at the same time allowing the students to stay safe out on the big internet.

Big thanks to all (one or two) readers,
Neil

continuing a bit late, week five reflection

I've let the information from week five stew, and sink in...this was an interesting class based mostly on an activity, and practice that I already performed: Vetting your resources. the material covered in this class was about making sure that your internet resources were as reliable as most people consider text based resources to be. the internet is a great places to start any research, as long as the material is viable. to quote one of my favorite video bloggers on Earth: "with the advent of the internet, information has been liberated" this quote, to me, means that where once, one would have to go to a library, search through the 2 ton catalog of books, the go find their desired book among every other book in that same category. while this system worked for a couple hundred years, since Ben Franklin decided to make the first public libraries in America, you no longer need to do that. this sounds powerful, but like all things powerful, one has to be careful or it will backfire, we need to not only be teaching students the old methods, involving that two ton catalog, but also, how to appropriately use Google, or similar search engines. many teachers have a small list of pre-approved websites that their students can use, which sadly doesn't teach students how to do research, though it's a safe method for getting the information to their students. I seem to be drawling...alot...so i'm going to end the post here for now, and pick up next post, with: continuing late: Week six: week five:part 2

starting late, with week four

I remember week four like it was yesterday, despite it being a few weeks ago, we were discussing podcasts, blogs and wikis as the subject matter of that class. As a part of this class, being on the above matters, I did a few things for the FIRST TIME: i used a mac for the first time, performed my first podcast, and as a direct result of Ithat i'm doing a (hopefully regular) blog. I've done blogs in the past, but they...ended up failing after a few posts, mostly due to lack of interest from my end...as to the results of the above firsts: first use of a mac, I don't recommend it, the controls were annoying, and I found myself losing patience, were it not the schools computer, there would probably be one less macbook in the world, and I would have been out a couple hundred dollars. as to podcasts, I look forward to making them a regular part of my classes.

keep on keeping on,
Neil