Thing 14

In the Wiki 1001 Flat World Tales it is so interesting how student in Korea, Colorado and Hawaii are all able to post, comment and suggest changes on the same story. What a wonderful tool to get input from so many places. Students will take suggestions from their peers better than from their teachers. This is an awesome tool to strengthen students writing skills.

I also explored Grazing for Digital Natives. It was great to see all the tools that are available on the left hand of the page. I went in and played with Voicethreads. This program allows you to upload pictures and then you can put a voice in that explains the picture or have someone in the photo talking about what is going on. This would be fun to do a reflective activity after a lesson. Pictures could be taken during the activity and then the students would be able to talk about what they were learning or thinking about. When students see their own picture and are able to talk link their voice to speak about the picture they will have excitement about learning.

The third site that I really enjoyed was Code Blue. This is a 6th grade medical informational site. Some of the items that really caught my eye were the links on smoking, drugs and alcohol. This is a wonderful way for young people to get information on the danger of these habits. This site had sites about the actual body as well as safety items such as bicycle safety and even sun screen. Hopefully this will help students to consider the dangers of bad habits early in life.

In my position I am considering trying to implement a Wiki page for our New Teacher Orientation (NTO). We could set up a Wiki page and everyone could post items that we needed to make sure we finished before NTO started. As we completed an item we would be able to go in and mark it as complete. With so many different people work on NTO it would be great to have one location that we could go and make sure everthing is being taken care of.