What is on our agenda for the 2nd weekend?

Here is a rough outline of what we will be covering this weekend.

• Web Design and Accessibility
• Basic HTML Primer
• Web Page Creation with Dreamweaver 8.0
• Other web page tools-Moodle, Weebly, TeacherWeb
• FTP-Learning how to upload web pages
• Class Web Site Presentations
• Podcasting and Screencasting
• More on Ethics
• Design a T-shirt Challenge
• Final Project Proposals- I will meet with each student to talk about you plan or ideas!

What is missing? What would you like to explore that has not been mentioned? Is there a topic you would like explore more from the first weekend. Leave a comment or e-mail me with any suggestions.

Great posts from around the Classroom

I have collected a variety of posts from your blogs so you can see bits and pieces of what your classmates are discovering and thinking. There is alot of great reading, writing, and commenting going on! Great job!

Many of you chose to read David Warlick's, "A Future Fiction" and had alot to say!
Mary and Jodi compared some of the ideas to the Marauders Map in Harry Potter. Tish holds out hope that there is a future like this sooner than we think while Heather looks a bit more pessimistically at the article. Lastly, Gypsy ventures into the area of web filters in the school as she reflects on this article.

Caroline discusses Will Richardson and a better understanding of RSS. She answers the question of "So what's the big deal with this guy? Ellen also read the article by Will Richardson and points out that you can be on the cutting edge of information with blogs and RSS.

Claudia points us to a nice video on why students should blog while Patricia Germano points us to a great video on wikis! Kelly brings us some humor with a subtitled video about a Help Desk.

Julie discussed the feeling most of us had after learning so much new content-How to Digest it all? Speaking of digestion, take a look at Rebecca's blog and a Lego creation found on Flickr.

As I reread Stacie's first post, I noticed she had six comments. One was from the author of one of the Web sites she linked to. How cool!

Nancy's blog incorporates some really cool videos and surveys into the sidebar. I am going to have to ask her about this!

So much to read, so little time...

In my recent post on What makes good Blogging? I received five comments with a similar theme. The comments were very thoughtful about balancing time with so much information. I do think we have to balance what we read. Many of you noticed that you had too many feeds in your Bloglines account by the end of the first weekend. If you have more than ten feeds try to weed them out and leave only the ones with the best information. Will Richardson's and David Warlick's blogs happen to be the only technology-related feeds that I read on a daily basis and this is why I recommended them to you. Try to treat your Bloglines account like your e-mail. Give it a quick check each day and if there is something you want to look at later, mark it as new or save it to a folder on your hard drive.

1st Weekend Summary

Here is a recap of our first weekend!

• Reviewed Syllabus

• Monster Exchange Activity

• Discussed uses of E-mail in the Classroom-See our class Wiki for more ideas

• Netiquette-This article provides a nice overview

• Search Strategies and Browsing tips-See our class wiki. Many remarked how this article on Google was very informative.
  

• Social Bookmarking

http://www.del.icio.us.com
http://www.furl.net/
http://www.portaportal.com

• WebQuests and other ways to develop web-based activities in the classroom. Check out Bernie Dodge's site and Filamentality for more on these formats. We also tried the Tanka WebQuest and loaded our Powerpoint slides onto our wiki.
  

• Blogging with Blogger

• Wikis-Like PBWiki and Wikipedia
  

• RSS-We used Bloglines to aggregate our feeds.
  

• Flickr-For more ideas with Flickr check out this article

• Youtube and Teachertube
  

Did I forget anything? Please feel free to let me know and I can add to the post later.

What makes good blogging?

Will Richardson talks about good blogging in a recent post. If you have not subscribed to his RSS feed, please do so immediately. He is one of the top people to follow when it comes to new and interesting education discussion on Web 2.0 tools and what our kids need. Good blogging is about connecting to other's ideas and reflecting and responding. Before me meet again, blog about something interesting you have discovered through your RSS feeds. Link to what others say and put your own ideas out there on the topic.

Also check out this post from Will:
Aggregator as Textbook
Will has a cool feature in this post that links to snap shots of the web pages. You can do this with your links using http://www.snap.com.

New sites and software

As I "played" on the web today, I discovered a couple new tools and sites worth mentioning.
JingProject
Here you can download software that allows you capture images of your screen and videos too! This is very much like Snagit that I tried to demo on the first weekend, but the cool part is that you can use it for free and it is available on Macs and PC's. When you capture something it automatically generates a URL where you can direct others to view your video.
Here is a URL of a screen capture I tried using a cool site called Scribd.
http://www.screencast.com/t/bOTjTuRfK

I also came across a collaborative mind-mapping tool called Mindmeister that I am going to play with a little more. Maybe anyone interested could try this together before our next class?? I'll be exploring it more this week.

More will be coming!

Thanks to all who have posted to your blogs. I hope you have received some comments from fellow Lesley students in Cummings as well as your class blogging partner. I have been immersed in Harry Potter and sick kids recently so my apologies for the lack of posting especially to summarize our first weekend explorations. I will be adding that soon. I found Angela Roy's blog today that reminded me of your blogs and purpose. Please check it out!! Angela writes:

As I sit here and reflect on what I have learned these past few days, all I can think about is how my brain is on overload - WOW. I am not sure how I learned about all of these technology tools (blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, RSS, aggregators, podcasting, and much more - even a little about second life) in just a few days.