We hope you enjoy this blog! Share it with everyone! It's designed to introduce some of our favorite things about classroom blogging. The blog posts go in order, which is kind of upside down for a blog. We just changed the dates on the posts to make this happen. It's a good way to keep a welcome message at the top of your blog. On the left, you will notice pages to click on. Make sure to look at The Goal page before you go any further.
Some quick background on myself and my teaching partner: we teach fifth grade in Littleton, Colorado, where we have students speaking multiple languages, reading texts at 1st grade through high school levels, and using wireless netbooks throughout the day across the curriculum.
Our goal for this presentation is to share with you our main purposes for blogging, some specific practices for classroom blogging, and all sorts of fun and engaging material for you to consider adding to your own classrooms blogs, websites, etc. We'll do our best to share through the lenses of critical thinking, differentiation, audience & purpose, and collaboration.
Last year's regular classroom blog is located here. We've started working on a new one for 2011-2012. You can find it here. At the moment, it's definitely under construction.
We realize that we all learn differently - please work, listen, participate, relax, and do what you need to do in order to be the best learner you can be! Please, please, please stop us to ask questions, discuss, argue, and enjoy the time we have together!
Click all over and enjoy! But first, take a moment to play with the embedded "Lino it" below and introduce yourself. If the screen seems too small, use this link for the full size cork board.
We often give classwork, directions, and resources using our blog. Posting directions for activities is always helpful and fosters students' independence, because students can go back as often as is necessary to complete assignments without needing to be re-directed by the instructor. One of our favorite assignments to post on the blog is directions for Discovery Education Science activities.
If you would like to see how this type of assignment looks on our classroom blog, take a peek! When you do, you will notice some other things we do to help students; we have a qwiki (an attempt increase comprehensible input) in there, as well as the "Listen Now" widget, which is another way to make our blog more accessible. You will also notice some of the other widgets - one for translation, and another for AnswerTips. Each of these features is designed to make the blog more accessible, interesting and appealing to our students and visitors.
The first thing we usually try to embed is an image. You can see a collection of "image" links here. You can have lots of fun with images, avatars, etc.
When you begin to embed anything in your blog, and you can embed just about anything (check out embedit.in or embed.ly), you need to consider copyright issues. This is true for images as well. Instead of digging into this subject, we will point you in the right direction (if you haven't found Larry Ferlazzo's "Best of Lists" like this one for images - we highly recommend them). You can embed copyright-free images, and make sure you always site your source, no matter who or where you get images from. Another great choice is Wikimedia Commons. This is a practice which should be modeled at all times for your students.
If you are wondering, "What the heck is an embed code?" you are not alone. Once you understand how these codes work, you can embed nearly anything into your blog, wiki, or website.
The process is usually fairly straight forward. Many websites now provide you with the choice to embed the content you create. Generally, you'll find some type of "share" link which provides you with html code. You then go into your blog or website editor and add that copied code in the correct place. Once you save, your embedded content appears on the blog or website.
Once you have successfully embedded an image, you are ready to play around a bit. Try some of these tools:
zoom.it - make any image online extremely embeddable and zoomable.
snacktools - much more than images - nice, simple tools for your blog.
Animoto: Use your images to create and embed a musical slideshow.
There are many ways to get videos onto your blog or website. Videos can do all sorts of amazing things for your students. They can provide relevant, comprehensible content for all learners. They can be used to differentiate content for sub-groups of learners. And they can be great ways to show off some impressive student work! Some tools go above and beyond with video, and some keep it all nice and simple. Here are a few of our favorite new tools:
If you would like to embed some excellent science videos, try out the Science on the Simpsons website. Need something a bit more advanced? How about free MIT courses? The point is that you can find great videos for your use, no matter what your content or level is.
Have you ever thought of recording your lessons as videos and making them available for students? Do you know about ustream? If a kid can teach us all about writing with it, we can figure it out for our own classrooms! We have just started with this, so we have no videos yet, but here is where we are all set up to begin next year!
SMART Notebook lesson recorder - Our classrooms have SMARTBoards; other interactive whiteboards may have a similar feature ...And there are more and more coming out every day! Again, pick one that works for you, and start experimenting with it! Your students will love to create content for you with these types of tools.
PhotoPeach, Stupeflix, and Masher are all tools which can be used to make slideshow videos with your images.
Since our focus with students is on audience and purpose and since this is the main goal of our blog, it is a big deal to share the work of students. Showcasing and sharing student work can be accomplished through presentation tools, especially the ones that allow us to embed the presentations on our blogs and websites. Here is a partial list of some great presentation tools.
Prezi - A great tool to use, especially if you are looking to show how different things are related as part of your presentation. We had some fun with students the other day, and they used a collaborative Google site to post some of their work... Here's an example prezi...
To share/embed your presentations, you might consider using a tool like Slideshare. You can create all sorts of presentations, upload them to Slideshare, and them embed them wherever you like. Think of it as YouTube for slide show presentations.
As we started to see what was possible once we learned to embed, we became very interested in making our blogs and websites look cool to us and our students. We were like kids in a candy store, playing with everything. We acted like our students do anytime they are given to many choices! We played and messed around until we had enough.
Once we got serious, we found that some of our favorite blog "dress up" tools had a lot to do with mind mapping, timelines, and other representations of higher-level understanding and thinking. Our goal for the coming year is to get more of these types of tools into the hands of students.
Here are some new tools you may not have heard of for creating and sharing mind maps, concept maps, and timelines.
Just a thought - some of the best mind maps are hand drawn and colored. Take a picture of your students' work and put that up on your blog. Throw it in a voicethread and let your learners comment directly on the mind map. Tons of fun, and a great learning and collaborating experience.
Bubbl.us - You can embed, share and collaboratively create mind maps. Almost no learning curve for our students the first time we used this. Here's what we found on YouTube re: Bubbl.us
Creaza - A full suite of cool tools, but for mind-mapping, the tool is called Mindomo.
Cacoo - Primarily used as a collaborative drawing tool, but could easily make concept maps as well.
Here's a video explaining Cacoo, shown through another video tool called Vimeo.
Mindmeister - Here's an example. You can publish your min map in several different formats, including PDF.
Spicynodes - A very cool mind-mapping tool. Here's the example. It's not exactly a mind map example, but it was just to cool not to share this!
Timelines Dipity - Gotta love this... A Google Site with multiple Dipity examples.
Another idea that seems to show some real promise is letting students respond to their reading or their learning in any content area by creating comics and/or animations to represent this thinking. We are only scratching the surface right now. He is one example of how we have started this brainstorming.
That example comes from a guided reading blog we created. After it was created, we posted ten assignments and let students really run with some content creation. We made them authors on the blog, and away they went. They did some great work, and some not so great work, but if you scroll down to the bottom and read your way up, you will see that our kids were able to do some amazing things with embedding their work. After teaching one student how to work through one application, they became the group expert, and everyone else went to them. We were busy teaching another student another "trick" on the blog.
As for the comic creators, we will cheat and let you in on another "Best of list" from Mr. Larry Ferlazzo.
The animation resources are great, and they range from really easy up to just about as complicated as you want to get.
One thing we have learned in our quest for audience and purpose is that we need feedback. There are plenty of ways to get it, but this is a simple embed that seems to be perfect.
