Facilitating Collaboration - Week 3

This week was a great learning experience. I was able to use Flickr and get used to how that service worked. This is something that I had been wanting to do but just had not committed the time to the project until now. I can see where teachers might be able to use this in their classroom with posting artwork, activities, and more. For me, I can see a personal use but not a professional use. I also used Flickr to post to my blog. It was extremely easy to setup and use.

The RSS reader was also quite informative. I had been following RSS feeds for a number of years. Until now, each RSS site was bookmarked and I checked each one individually. The reader now allows me to view all updates without going to multiple sites. If teachers knew about RSS feeds and readers it could save them lots of time and energy browsing different sites.

I am most excited about using Google Sites. I have already started working on a web site for our tech department. This will be used for professional development (videos, documents) for my staff. I am hoping to link our ticketing system to a page so all teachers can go to one page to search our knowledge base, submit a trouble ticket, and get professional development.

Star Wars

Star Wars
Originally uploaded by Bartels Family

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Star Wars in Concert show at the Bradley Center in Milwaukee. I had 7th row, center seats on the floor. It was a great show and was hosted by actor Anthony Daniels who played C3PO in all six films. The orchestra played music to the movies on a giant 60 foot LED screen. It was an awesome show and would go again.

Facilitating Collaboration - Week 2

Well, I have had a couple of days off of work so I was able to get my course work done early this week. What will I do with all of my extra time?

Anyway, this week we spent time looking at Wikis, Microblogging, and online photo sharing. This forced me to get a Twitter account. I will be honest, just like Facebook, Twitter was one of those things that I just don't have a desire to use. I see its purpose and understand why people use it. I also see how it can be used by a teacher or by the school but it is not something that I feel the need to use personally. I am finding some good information from the people I follow but many of these things are retweets or post from RSS feeds that I already follow.

Online photo sharing is something I have dabbled in for the last few years. About 6 years ago I had a MobileMe account from Apple. Here I created a web site and used iPhoto to post and share photos with family. I decided that the cost was too much for the use I got out of it so I let the account expire. I have been looking at other ways to share photos. I have a Flickr and a Picasa account and am trying to determine which is better. I do store most of my photos in iPhoto and that has a built-in publishing tool for Flickr. It works fine with the testing that I have done. The one thing that worries me is that, while I want to share photos with my family members, I do not want photos of my kids posted for the public to see. If family members do not have Yahoo or Google accounts they are not able to see the photos unless I make them public. At least that is what I can tell so far. I have not explored all of the options so I will continue testing different services until I find one I like.

Facilitating Collaboration - Week 1

Blogs. Lots of info about blogs this week. I recall when I first heard about blogs. I wondered why anyone would be interested in what I had to say. It wasn't until about 2 years ago that I started using it in my job to communicate with teachers and staff. Since then almost all of our teachers have some sort of way to electronically communicate with their students. Some use a blog, some use Moodle, and some have used Google Sites to create their own classroom web site.

It is amazing how far blogs have come in the last 5 years. It seems that everyone has a blog with something to say. It has really changed how we communicate and get information. Now, the important part is to have the ability to determine what is fact and what is opinion or fiction. Our students need to learn this skill. It is a similar to the debate about Wikipedia. Blogs also have the power to influence people. I think it is important that we also teach our students responsibility when it comes to blogging.