Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Mme Naditz's French Wiki
Today I found an absolutely beautiful wiki page from a fellow French teacher (Mme Naditz - California). She has so many wonderful ideas on her site and I wrote to her on her blog (embedded with her wiki) about what an inspiration she is to me. She continues to try to find new ways to make her lessons more robust by engaging her students in technology. I complimented her on her style and content and told her that I could only hope that more teachers could be as forward-thinking as she is.
Thoughts about RSS
RSS . . . Really Simple Syndication. I find it amusing that I now have an aggregator for my RSS feeds, have created a blog and a wiki and various podcasts, but still have trouble operating my "really simple" TV, DVD and VCR at home without referring to the step-by-step instructions my 15-year-old typed for me regarding the operation of these "dinosaurs!"
But back to RSS - I truly am amazed by this sort of reverse "push" of information to me that Web 2.0 offers. Now I don't have to randomly search for information on the Internet - I can create favorite sites to send the information to me whenever there are updates. At first I thought this was going to cause me to feel overwhelmed with even more things to keep track of; this turns out to not be the case. I can simply skim and delete. Or I can "star" it and come back to it later - a simple flagging tool like e-mail. However, RSS is nothing like opening e-mail and seeing 150 unread messages. As I get my RSS feet wet, I see that I do need to create some folders so that I can look at topics in an organized way, but that is really easy. I am trying to train myself to read my feeds each day after I check my e-mail. I think this skimming and scanning task is a valuable concept to teach students as well, what with everyone looking for ways to improve PSSA scores these days in our neck of the woods.
What I also like about RSS is the ability to use it as a classroom management tool with regard to student weblogs. I plan to have students create blogs in my French 4 class this year when we read our novel (Le Comte de Monte Christo - Ugh! Hoping to be able to change that reading selection within the curriculum soon). I can collect the students' weblogs in my aggregator using their RSS feeds and can scan through the entire class content in one place rather than traveling to their individual sites. I also love the automatic date-stamping of their posts within their blogs - assignments are either completed on time or they're not!
Regarding student safety, I do believe it will be wise to get free membership to Technorati.com for indexing weblog content with their "Watchlists." Inappropriate content can be stumbled upon too easily.
I am also including a few links to some great feeds that I will use for my classes, including French newspapers, French Word-A-Day, and learning French by Podcast.
But back to RSS - I truly am amazed by this sort of reverse "push" of information to me that Web 2.0 offers. Now I don't have to randomly search for information on the Internet - I can create favorite sites to send the information to me whenever there are updates. At first I thought this was going to cause me to feel overwhelmed with even more things to keep track of; this turns out to not be the case. I can simply skim and delete. Or I can "star" it and come back to it later - a simple flagging tool like e-mail. However, RSS is nothing like opening e-mail and seeing 150 unread messages. As I get my RSS feet wet, I see that I do need to create some folders so that I can look at topics in an organized way, but that is really easy. I am trying to train myself to read my feeds each day after I check my e-mail. I think this skimming and scanning task is a valuable concept to teach students as well, what with everyone looking for ways to improve PSSA scores these days in our neck of the woods.
What I also like about RSS is the ability to use it as a classroom management tool with regard to student weblogs. I plan to have students create blogs in my French 4 class this year when we read our novel (Le Comte de Monte Christo - Ugh! Hoping to be able to change that reading selection within the curriculum soon). I can collect the students' weblogs in my aggregator using their RSS feeds and can scan through the entire class content in one place rather than traveling to their individual sites. I also love the automatic date-stamping of their posts within their blogs - assignments are either completed on time or they're not!
Regarding student safety, I do believe it will be wise to get free membership to Technorati.com for indexing weblog content with their "Watchlists." Inappropriate content can be stumbled upon too easily.
I am also including a few links to some great feeds that I will use for my classes, including French newspapers, French Word-A-Day, and learning French by Podcast.
Week 4 Audio Podcast Assignment
I had a great sample podcast that 2 of my French students created when I was asked to demonstrate podcasting during a "Flip the Switch" event for our Classrooms for the Future launch, and I recently learned how to post an audio podcast to my blog. I used Box.net to host my audio file, since blogger doesn't seem to be able to do this for me. It was pretty easy to then enable this link within blogger.
This podcast is the recitation of the American "Pledge of Allegiance" translated into French. French students were required to memorize and recite via podcast in the 2008-2009 school year. Many thanks to "Brigitte-Georgette" and "Alice" for their great work!
This podcast is the recitation of the American "Pledge of Allegiance" translated into French. French students were required to memorize and recite via podcast in the 2008-2009 school year. Many thanks to "Brigitte-Georgette" and "Alice" for their great work!
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Information Overload!
Web 2.0, Wikis, blogs, podcasts, RSS . . . YIKES! While completely fascinated, I am definitely techno-stressed. The best remedy, I have been finding, is to simply play around with each new tool so that I feel comfortable. Truly, it is my desire to teach with tools that my students will enjoy using, so I need to go through this suffering part first in order to reach that goal!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
