Final Exam

I feel very proud of myself for completing the Pi2.0 class. When I first heard about the class a couple of years ago, I dismissed it as something beyond me. I also knew I could not do the class during school. I am too busy with my class to spend hours exploring the internet. However, this summer was the perfect time to do this.

I really enjoyed my time working on the class. I spent a couple of hours every week doing the tasks. I felt good finishing the work. Checking off the tasks was satisfying. It was great to learn so much in the summer. I think I learned as much as if I had gone to a workshop. I actually will use a lot of what I learned.

My life has changed with the addition of this technology: I check my googlereader every few days and read articles and listen to podcasts. When I found readwritethink this week, I signed up for the RSS feed. Before this summer, I didn't know what RSS was. I set up our class wiki. I have several links and pages ready for fall. I had tried in the past to blog, but I didn't stick with it. Having to blog about each task was a good exercise. I have learned how to attach and embed photos easily. Now I always send photos to friends and embed them to perk up my blog. I am using delicious to organize my bookmarks. I think it will be useful once I have lots of sites tagged. I really like the technology I've adopted.

The down side of technology is that it is overwhelming. I tried lots of sites that were listed on the syllabus, but they had too much information. I don't care about what strangers are reading. If I don't know the people, I don't value their opinions or their choices. I do value sites found by teachers at Paideia. I think this course does a good job pushing us to look at lots of sites, but cleaning off and omitting some of it after you've tried it is also important.

There was no real down side to this class. I could not do this during the school year, so I think you should encourage teachers to do this in the summer. Amy has been a huge help to me. Brandon and Tami also assisted me at times. Being able to come in and ask for help during the class was important. I got stuck a few times and spent a crazy amount of time trying to do something small like make a photo fit a space. So one tip would be to encourage teachers to come in. Maybe you should have a beginning class and one day to come to school for help.

This has been a lot of fun. I know I will use the technology I noted above. Thank you for all the help.
Martha

Task 12

I will share my new-found skills with Patrick, my new teaching partner, all year. I already am sharing the class wiki with him. I will help him find and attach links to add to our history class.

David Millians is a patient friend/teacher, and he will let me show him "Answer Garden" which I think is a fun link and a way to see what the class is thinking or doing.

I am pretty good about sharing my skills and asking for help. (Just ask Amy.) So I have really enjoyed learning this summer, and I look forward to sharing my skills.

The photo at the top is George and me with Addie, our new granddaughter. Addie was born yesterday, August 8, 2010. As you can tell, we are thrilled.

Task 11

Task 11 is to choose one web tool and use it in class. Since we haven't started the new year, I'll tell you what I hope to use. I want to blog with my students about lit. books. I plan to ask open ended questions and require kids to write one answer and comment on someone else's ideas too. We will need guidelines for how to respond to each other. Maybe we'll practice blogging the first week of school. Maybe I'll jump right in and make a new school year blog. We can blog about class values. Mostly, I don't want to put this off. Life will get very busy, and I want to use some tools, so I don't forget how.

I have been working a bunch this week on our class wikipage. I'm happy with how it's developing. Amy is a huge help.
First
I have also learned to use imovie this summer. I love that. First I made a movie about George and me at home. This week I made a movie about George's parents. I wonder how quickly kids can film and make movies in class. I would love for them to make grammar and history movies or podcasts. We have to find time.

I am not worried about lecturing too much to our class. I want them to read and write and use the netbooks for research and study. We will keep the students active. One problem I've found in the past is that kids find sites but don't really read them. How can we get students to read and take notes?

(The photo above shows me holding the blanket I knitted for Addie, my almost to be born granddaughter.)

Task 10

Tonight I could not sleep. I have too much to think about - Jessie and Hunter and their baby about to be born; school is starting and there is so much to do. So I got up and worked on my Pi2.0 class. I explored web tools, cool tools.

I tried time glider and letter pop. I might use time glider. However, I was unsure about how to add photos to the timeline. I made a family history timeline. That was fun. I also made a wikipedia timeline for 1968. I looked for photos to add to my timeline. But they just appeared; they did not really join the time line. TimeGlider may be useful in history class.

Letter pop seems useful only personally. I like to send class notes to parents as emails. Just composing the emails and editing them is a big job. I don't really need to take the time to make the letter look like a newsletter. There was so much space for photos and not as much space to write in the letter format I chose. I think in real life I will not use this.

I tried to find games for kids on my own. The math game was too easy. In order to get a better quality, you had to pay. I found chess for kids (chesskids.com) I think I have been on that site before. It looks fine.

One tool I found on my own that I like is Answer Garden. (http://answergarden.ch/view/1406) If you click on that link, you will go to my question. When you ask a question, others can answer it. This could be a fun addition to our wikipage. The questions can be fanciful or serious. Then the answers appear like a floating cloud. I think I will try to add this to my wiki page. I did add it to my sandbox page.

The only problem I have with these tools is that there are too many of them. But Answer Garden is a good find.

I already use Writeboard. That is a great tool. I use it to plan my parent conferences. It's also great for planning parties.

(The photo at the top of this page is Harper, Yukari and George in Muir Woods in July.)

Task 9

I have been working with "delicious" for the past week. I converted all my bookmarks from Firefox to Delicious. However, that was a mistake. I didn't realize that there were so many bookmarks on my computer. These were sites I had not saved. So I had to go back and delete lots of bookmarks. Quite a job.

I like the tagging feature of "delicious" but I find that I'm not repetitious enough in my tagging. So when I press a tag, only one or two sites come up. This will improve with more items saved.

I looked at sites recommended by others, but those don't have much appeal. There are just unlimited sites to read. I need to get away from my computer and not read sites all day. I prefer to sites that I find because I need specific information.

I just found "Answer Garden." Definitely looks interesting. Here is the link:
http://answergarden.ch/

Task 8

Even though I have added pages to our class wiki, this was a hard task for me. I had no trouble creating my page. But then I wanted to add photos of my garden. I had so much trouble figuring out how to do that. Amy saved me. Thank you, Amy! I sent her an email, and she helped me learn how to copy the photo from my desktop to the wiki page. Still I took forever to figure out how to make the picture smaller. So for most of today I had a giant bloom covering half my page.

Anyway, I did learn how to add photos to the wiki and to make them larger or smaller and move them around. I also created a newspaper about my garden and added that to my wiki.

Then I visited other teachers' pages to try to add comments to their pages. I felt like I had no imagination. Joy asked, "What restaurant is my favorite?" Finally I settled on Watershed. I think we go to such ordinary places just so we can eat with our friends. "What were my favorite books?" Lina asked. I did come up with a couple. But once I read other peoples' favorites, those all seemed like my faves too. I will need to get my brain working faster in a month.

Task 6

I've been looking at and trying the teacher tools listed under Task 6. I already use Quizlet for Vocabulary. One of our parents last year found this site, and Brian connected our class. Quizlet is terrific. We post our vocabulary words and definitions, and students used the site to study. They also could take practice tests. We eventually used Quizlet to design our tests. The kids can all take the test online and sit beside each other. Tests are randomly produced, so there's no worry about cheating. Quizlet's tests were easier than those created by Brian. So he supplemented by writing a story that students had to fill in with vocabulary words.

Yesterday and today I used Ta-da! to make a list of activities I want to do in San Francisco. George and I are going to visit our son, Harper, and his wife, Yukari, for 5 days starting on Saturday. I made my list from ideas two friends gave me. Then I checked out the ideas online. I edited my list several times. Today I sent it to Harper, Yukari, and George. They can edit, and I'll see their notes. Ta-da! looks like Writeboard, which I love to use for teacher conference sign up.
http://marthaa.tadalist.com/lists/1652350

Today I signed up for TeacherTube videos. This seems like a fun idea. The videos are created by teachers and teach various subjects. I watched a math video about changing fractions to mixed numbers. The guy rapped and was entertaining to watch. Then I looked for a video on American Colonies. The one I tried to get was not there. I saw part of a video on earthquakes. It was not worth my time. The charts were hard to read. Also, the introduction was frightening. If I use TeacherTube, I will need to spend time finding and previewing the videos. Not sure if this will be a worthwhile site.

(This is my niece's new baby, six week old Ollie.)