Thing 16

I spent some time today looking at the online productivity tools. I wasn't really impressed by many of them. I finally selected Knowtes to examine. This program allows you to make online notecards to study from. You can share the notecards with a group. The group can also add notecards to the pack ( if you allow them). The notecards can be sorted into a variety of different Tags that you select. It also allows you to be tested by the notecards. The problem with the testing is that the computer isn't involved in determining if you got the correct answer. You have to visually examine the answer and then tell the computer if you got it correct or not.

After reviewing this program, I thought it was a bit of a gimic. Why not take index cards and write your notes on them? How often would you share notecards with a friend or a group of people anyway? Maybe I am very old school but I just don't see this as being very useful to me. To a student who doesn't like to write but prefers to stare at a computer screen, this would probably be up their alley. For me, old school is probably the better option.

Thing 15

Google docs will probably be one of the most useful of all the tools that I have been working with thus far. Prior to this, I was making up worksheets and sending them to my email account at school. Now, I can prepare them on google docs, and then just print them out at school.

Personally, it will help me access everything from anywhere and any computer. I often wish I could obtain files and spreadsheets from home but I can't get into my computer. Now all of these can be at my fingertips from any computer. Additionally, I can have other people making changes from the files and spreadsheets. This is a great asset,especially if you are writing grants and papers.

For the students, they can also use this (in a seperate file) to ask questions about certain problems or to discuss different answers to questions. They just need to have their own email account. Not everyone may have this so I need to remind myself that there needs to be other avenues for students to access this information.

I look forward to using this alot!

thing 14

I visited my RSS account and I was surprised to see the number of updates on my account. Especially the number of updates regarding AP chemistry. One of the accounts I ended up deleting because it was basically a bunch of Twitter statements made by people. Some of them had nothing to do with Chemistry at all. Thus, it was deleted.

I believe that this is going to be a very useful tool. I can get regular updates on AP Chemistry topics and find new information in other science areas. Additionally, I can get information for myself which I can find useful (new recipes, new exercise routines, etc.)

thing 13

I have successfully set up my delicious account and now I am saving things to my site. My name is drgrab2001 so you can look it up anytime you want. Right now, I am having a tough time organizing the site. I have loaded about 5 things into it but now I am thinking that I should arrange them according to different topics in the curriculum, gas laws, nuclear chem, etc.

Once I get everything set up, this should save me alot of time. I can just sign in to my delicious account and pull up the sites I want my student to view. The only concern I have will be if our school computer system will allow me to do it.... Sometimes a website that I use in the morning become unavailable or blocked in the afternoon and no one can explain why this happens.

I can also give my students the delicious account name and have them browse through the topics I want them to see. This will save me classroom time to do this. Hopefully, they will be able to find other websites and can add them to the account.

thing 12

I like the whole concept of tagging and keeping things available for easier retrieval. One of the things that I must keep reminding myself is to keep the tags useful and specific. If I tag everything Chemistry, I really won't get any help when I am looking for one specific website.

The one disadvantage to this social bookmarking will be in the colleagues that also work with it. They can add tags also and if they don't have the same or a similar tagging system as I do, than it will quickly become a rather useless. I won't be able to access any of their work and will continually keep using only my work because of the different tagging. While I like the concept of sharing with my colleagues, I also like to have a constant system to be able to separate the different types of topics on the website.

thing 11

Widgets are fun to add to blogs but I guess I am always trying to find something meaningful for my students when I look at all these different widgets. I was thinking about using a miniclock until I realized that most of my students have difficulty reading anything but a digital clock. I want the things I do to be meaningful to their education and not a gimic.

The embedded code is much easier to use now than in the beginning. I also know what I am looking for so it doesn't take as much time to do it.

I spent some time on "twitter" this morning. I found most of the discussions superficial at best. To me, it wasn't as meaningful as having a discussion "face to face." I can't determine tone or intent when someone is writing to me unless I have already met the person so I don't really know how they are saying it.

Students must like this kind of interaction because they don't have to really interact with the other person in depth. For example, you could tell someone on an email or a twitter posting that a relative or friend died. The person on the other end of the posting could reply: "Sorry to hear that, that is too bad." But what was the intent of their reply?..By looking at facial expressions and tone, you could get a good idea about it. The person could have just posted that to get on to another subject, didn't want to hear the person whine about it, or seriously did care. You don't know unless you see the person face to face.

Thing 10

I signed up for a twitter account but I am afraid I don't see the usefulness of it. I can read what people are doing but I am not sure I want to do that. I could just as well use a telephone to find out what people are doing and I have a cordless phone so I can go outside and enjoy the day. I don't have to sit in front of a computer to do it!

I did find the website My Heritage useful. My sister and I have been working on the family geneology and I believe that we might be able to get some additional information from that site. We are exploring it and seeing what comes of it. This could be a very interesting site for a history class to have kids go through and determine their own geneology.

As far as science is concerned, I don't see this as a great application unless I can find a science, in particular chemistry, networking site. For my classes, I would probably use blogger where I can interact with each of my students on a regular basis.

thing 9

WOW!!!.. I just finished reading all of the Copyright and Creative Commons material and I have to admit that my head is spinning. When I think back to my time in high school, I was the last computer class to use punch cards!... Then again, I was the last chemistry class to use a slide rule!...Now we have the web and a expanding amount of information at our fingertips... It is growing by leaps and bounds every day. Fortunately, we have the creative commons website to assist with helping to sort out the information that is part of the public domain and what is copyrighted.

I see great possibilities for my students to develop their own style of learning by being more creative. Imagine if my students develop a new way of teaching a concept that was previously considered "impossible" to them. We could actually post it to the web and have other students get assistance from it. They could even copyright it as their own property! By doing this, teachers would be able to accommodate for individual learning styles.

While I support and encourage creativity, I always have to keep in mind that content is important. Creativity is not always supported in college and I need to make sure that my students have the ability and the capability to handle college material. While high schools are continually asked to accommodate for different learning styles, I don't see colleges doing this as much. I need to be balanced in allowing for some creativity and yet, allow the content to be preserved.

thing 8

I found an excellent video on the bombing of Hiroshima... It explains what the people saw on the ground before during and after the bombing.




This would be a good assignment for me to give to my students. Watch the video and write your thoughts and feelings about it.

I never realized how easy this was until I actually did it myself. Downloading was just as easy. Overall, this isn't as painful as I thought it would be..

Thing 7

I find youtube amazing!. I have explored several different classroom topics that I can use this coming year. You tube has an excellent series on the atomic bomb, on scientists that discovered the atom and its components, the actual experimental equipment used and things on exercise, old movie stars, and home repair. I never realized how much material there is on this site.

The one thing that concerns me is that youtube is blocked in my school. So, how do I use this material when I can't get it in my building. We have so many roadblocks to technology, that it makes it difficult to use them. Hopefully, teachers will have less restrictions than the students.

flickr frenzy 2

Flickr will be a great asset to me because I can organize the pictures I save as "sets." Now when I have a specific unit that I want to demonstrate with a picture or a film, I don't have to cruise the internet to find this information. I can have it in my Flickr account and easily access it. It will be a time saver. I can have all the pictures of the "old dead scientists" seperated from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki/ atomic bomb photos.

Additionally, when I have my students make videos or use pictures for presentations, I don't have to worry about them being in the correct format. They could download their pictures and videos onto flickr and we have one website to access them all!

The only difficult I could see with this is if students didn't have access to a home computer so I would need to make time for them in the computer lab or the library to access the information.

flickr frenzy

The problem with using the internet for me is that I get wrapped up in a variety of different topics and never seem to accomplish anything. This was part of the problem for me today. I spent hours exploring Flickr and found some really great information. One of the problems I have with teaching students about the history involved in a scientific discovery is that they have no idea the conditions that these great scientists worked in. Some of the laboratories were nothing more than leaking barns. I found several pictures of the actual scientists working in their laboratories that I could use in class. I also found this picture of Marie Curie:

http://photography.si.edu/SearchImage.aspx?id=5796#

I have tried to load it but we will see how successful I am with that. After spending an hour with it, I am still unable to get the picture in the blog. In every book I have, there is always the same old tired picture of Marie. This was a new one that I had never seen and really shows her in the prime of her life before the effects of radiation had ravaged her body. Students would probably like to see what she looked like before and then after extended exposure.

thing 4

I have just finished the section on RSS. I found the google search engine very easy to use and the subscription system to be a breeze. Everything seemed to work. Of course, I am doing this from home... what happens at school is anyone's guess. I like the concept of keeping track of new posts and not looking at things that I already have examined and determined to be a "bad fit" for my students.

I subscribed to some of the material on health and fitness and chemistry. It worked very well and I found some crystal growth experiments that I am considering using for the upcoming year. I was looking for some earlier this year but didn't find any that I thought that my students could do.

The only problem that I find with this is that I have to check another website on the computer to see if there were any updates. I barely have enough time to do what is necessary on the computer, never mind look up other things. This is always part of the problem. I am hoping that by subscribing to some of these sites, I won't have to spend more time looking all over the web to get my answers. Somebody has done the work for me and has given me the connection to actually get the information quickly.

thing3

I am trying to think of ways that I could use a blog to work in my chemistry classes...As there are multiple ways to solve a problem, maybe I could ask a general question and see how my students answer. I might be able to get a better view of their method of problem solving. Another way I could use a blog is to allow students to have a general discussion of the chapter problem sets that they are given. They could log on and discuss with each other and me the difficulties and frustrations that they are having with the problems.

As I get used to working with blogs, I might be able to expand them to get more broader topics... For example, we could discuss the ethics of nuclear energy and nuclear reactions. How can we limit the amount of chemical waste in the environment? Is global warming a fact? This would really enhance their scientific education by allowing students to apply some of the information that they have learned.

thing 2

I think that I addressed most of my concerns/questions in thing1 but the document requests that I write a second blog... so, I am writing a second blog... I don't seem to have my google gmail attached to this yet, but, I am sure that I will figure this out...

thing 1

Alright, I watched the videos but I am not sure that I agree with them. I would like to have the time to do all the suggested items on the video. I would like to have the time to look all over the web for different items that could improve my teaching. However, who has the time? I am hoping that this program makes me a faster researcher and thinker to help give my students some extra support in their classes. With the help of other bloggers, I might be able to obtain information quicker and more pertinent to my subject matter.

I am looking forward to this new adventure