Using Flickr In The Classroom ? Or Should We?

I posted earlier today about the break-in at our school - In that post I mentioned using our class Flickr account. That prompted a comment and question from Jim:

“Sorry to hear about your break in. Looking at your pictures generated a question. I have been wanting to use flickr … but am sort of hesitant because frankly I am concerned my kids are going to get places they shouldn’t and getting both me and them in trouble.
How is it working for you?”

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Implementing Podcast/flickr/Wiki in the Classroom

Aaron Campbell has some pretty interesting ideas for implementing some of these tools in his classrooms. He’s an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher who’s doing some great thinking about how to make all of this work. With Podcasting, for instance:

I just listened to Dave Winer’s Nov. 1st podcast this morning as he rambled on about this and that and I realized that it would valuable to produce a short 10-15 min weekly broadcast designed specifically for my students; one in which I could speak naturally about extensions on the various themes and topics covered in class while introducing relevant phrases and recycling vocabulary, not to mention current events, music, and movies. Not only could I present a link to the Mp3 file on the web, but I could also email it to their cell phones if they so wished. Now, if I only had an iPod…

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Podcasting In Your Classroom

Putting audio and video on the web is not a new concept. Though using this technology in the classroom is. Many teachers do not have the time to seek out what podcast could improve a lesson or concept. However Podcasting has emerged from just uploading audio and video clips to your hard drive to this much easier cataloging and searching community. Applications such as itunes, Yahoo! Podcast and Odeo make searching pretty darn easy. Not only is it easy to search for educational podcast but also itunes allows you to subscribe to podcasts so the newest version automatically downloads to your itunes podcast playlist. It’s like getting that monthly magazine subscription, but it is free and won’t get lost in the mail!

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Flat Classroom Project Wiki

Ok…sit down before you check this out.

If you want to see the potential of what we can do with this stuff, take a look at what Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis have created in their Flat Classroom Project. Julie, who is at the International School Dhaka in Bangladesh, and Vicki who is at Westwood High in Georgia, have collaborated on an amazing undertaking that will connect their kids in a study of the 10 Flattners from Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat. In small groups comprised of students from both schools, they’ll be taking the next few weeks to really dig into what’s happening in the two countries from a global perspective and report out in a variety of ways using Read/Write Web tools. In the end, if the grading rubric is any indication, these kids will know a heck of a lot more about their places in the world, the complexities of the age, and the ways in which these tools are changing the way we do business in more than one sense.

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Treasure trove for constructivist classroom projects

Dr. Alice Christie from Arizona State University has a wonderful site packed with great resources and reading for constructivist educators looking for project-based learning resources. We know Dr. Christie well from her research on student collaboration and GenY, student voice, and many other student-centered papers, presentations, and resources.

The educational technology resource page lists subjects like geocaching, webquests, podcasting, multimedia, and more. Not only are there great examples and ideas, but links to many school websites showing these ideas in action.

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Mosh Pit as Classroom

(So this is my first post using the Flock browser blog posting interface. After an hour of using it, I’m loving the browser…we’ll see how this goes.)

Kathy Sierra writes about the “Mosh Pit as Innovation Model” and I’m wondering about a “Mosh Pit as Classroom Model.” I mean, check out the Old vs. New chart that she includes and read it as an educator.

Old Classrooms vs. New Classrooms

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Five Years of Classroom Blogging

I know that I have said this before, but very few edubloggers out there have more practical experience than Barbara Ganley at Middlebury College. She’s back from an extended break with a post that talks about getting ready for her fifth year of using blogs in the classroom.

And so, here I am, back again, delighted to be a part of this evolution of blogs in our classrooms, convinced that we should take the time to help our students develop a grammar of and a practice of academic blogging, both individual and collaborative, then pretty much step out of the way except to ask questions and provide feedback (i.e. step out of the center of the blog and thus the classroom). Our students will surprise themselves by how much they accomplish even in a single course in a single semester. Imagine if all their courses, all their semesters, all their disciplines of study were connected via their blogging…

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Blogging From Guantanamo to My Classroom

From the “15 Minutes of Fame” and the “It Feels Weird Actually Posting About This” Departments comes news that this month’s issue of Teacher Magazine is not only carrying a feature length story about yours truly but has for some insane reason actually decided to put my picture on the cover under the heading “The Blogvangelist.” (Free registration required.) I’m flattered, obviously, and somewhat embarrassed by the attention. (My kids, however, think it’s cool and actually took out the garbage this morning.) Regardless, the story does focus primarily on the work, and includes quotes from such luminaries as Alan November,Darren Kuropatwa, Anne Davis, Sree Sreenivasan, Chris Lehmann, and others.

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Blogging in the classroom

“Could you explain to

me how blogging may be used in the classroom?” Now that’s a question

that was asked of Tom that I would like to answer. First, I’d like to

refer you to a couple of previous posts I’ve made on this topic. One

was Ways to use weblogs in education and the other is Weblog think

abouts. Perhaps those will help anyone thinking about blogging in the

classroom. As I reread the posts, I kept thinking that I need to update

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Twitter In The Classroom

I tried to leave a comment on David Warlick’s redesigned blog, but alas it wasn’t accepted or worthy or something, so I’ll post here instead. David wondered whether he should put a “Twitter-like” app on Class Blogmiester - and I say do it (of course I’m not the one doing the programming).

I do several activities that require students to write short “notes” to each other (I blogged about it here). Its fun, it promotes writing as a fun activity, it fosters editing skills, each “note” is short but when you add up all the writing students do in 5 to 30 minutes it is pages. Anything that promotes writing is aces with me. My kids beg me, offer me money bribes … er… um … seem so excited by these activities that they MIGHT offer me bribes ; ), to play what they consider games. I’m sure that smarter teachers than I will come up with even better activities and uses for Twitter.

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