"Journalistic Bloggers"

In my search on YouTube for video that relates to the topic of blogs, I stumbled across this clip from the Daily Show with Stephen Colbert discussing bloggers as a form of media. I find Stephen Colbert, as well as Jon Stewart, to be absolutely hilarious! I'm hesitant about posting this because I'm concerned that someone might find it offensive, but then I think "It's my blog - can't I post what I want?" There's the question of the day ... do you need to be concerned about someone finding something you post on your own blog offensive?

Do we really get credit for having so much fun?

There have been quite a few days in my teaching career where I have had so much fun that I felt guilty about getting paid. (Of course, that is balanced out by the days where it is less than fun and I feel as though they could never pay me enough.)

As I have spent the week exploring new ways to teach using the Internet, I am starting to feel like I'm having too much fun to get credit for a class! I know that we are supposed to be focusing on the Write aspect of the Read/Write Web, but call me a ludite if you will ... I am excited about some of the things I've found for the good old-fashioned, old-school Read Web. My assignment focus has changed five times so far (did I mention that I'm indecisive?) so I've been able to learn quite a bit about many different strategies. I am currently working on Option #2 - developing a resource to inform my colleagues about various strategies. My morning has been spent looking for examples of Digital Resource Centers, Simulations, Virtual Field Trips and Webquests. I have found some amazing stuff! Don't worry ... of course I'm going to share with you all. Just be patient ...

Even though I have been teaching computer technology classes for eight years and thought I knew it all, I learned about some great new strategies this past week. Since my class is integrated so heavily with Social Studies and Language Arts, the tools that I learned about will be immediately useful. I wish I would have known about some of these two weeks ago when we developed our final projects for the semester. Although the upfront time would have been tremendous to prepare Knowledge Hunts or even just Topic Hotlists for their research projects, it would have been worth it in the end to not have to watch them flounder aimlessly around the Internet. Over the past couple of years I have used a form of each of these strategies, but I am excited to formalize and organize them into something even more useful for my students.

Although I am excited by the Knowledge Hunts, I have to say that I spent a large chunk of time this morning playing around with Virtual Field Trips, Digital Resource Centers and Simulations. Man I found some cool stuff! Did you know that there is a site that provides 360 degree views of the Great Wall of China? Or how about visual representations of various physics topics? Then there are the Digital Resource Centers which provide a ton of digital information about a multitude of topics in American History and another that contains beautiful images of Tibet. Not only do they provide extensive libraries of digital images, but they also contain video and audio clips.

I always knew the Internet was an amazing tool for the classroom, but I'm finally beginning to see all the parts of it that I've been missing!

Helpful Hint ...

Ctrl-S will publish your post ... even if that's not your intention. So, for those of you (like me) who use Ctrl-S to save your work all the time ... don't use it in Blogger unless you're really done and really ready to publish.

(I've done it 3 times now and have to keep deleting my accidental posts - how many times until I learn??)

Wondering ...

The purpose of this blog has yet to be determined. Inspiration has yet to strike, but I hope it does so quickly. In my experience, the eight weeks of class fly by quickly, and I would hate to still be wondering what to blog about in Week 7.

Since we are learning how to use various Web 2.0 applications in this course, perhaps I should blog about my thoughts on each one and how I could see it being used in my academy. What I would really like to do is actually implement a different one each week (my seniors would make fantastic guinea pigs) but that is not possible given the red-tape that I will need to go through at school to even get blogs up and running in my classes.

Back to the drawing board ... waiting for inspiration ...