Media Specialists & Technology in Schools

Andy and I have been interviewing applicants for a district-wide media specialist position the last 2 nights which is why I haven't been posting. Of course, one of the very important qualities we are looking for in our new media specialist is their knowledge and ability to integrate new technologies into instruction and facilitate teachers to do the same. We have been very impressed with several applicants' knowledge and the ease with which they talk about 2.0 tools that the two of us have just become aware of through this course. I know I am SO GLAD that I have taken this course and learned something about blogging, open course software, Google reader, and had at least "heard of" many other applications that I can't recall right now because I don't know them that well. For these "younger" people, technology is simply pervasive in their lives.

Two New Blogs

Somehow long before I took this class, I had been getting regular email notices about new and interesting technology articles from a website called SimpleK12. I used to just read them, print them if they were good, or delete them if I didn't really want to keep them for any reason. But today I went poking around and found their blog. The URL for their blog is http://blog.simpleK12.com. It is really a neat site. There are 2 articles/posts that I found of great interest today. One was titled "Is Moodle Secretly Hijacking Your School District's Resources?" As best I understood the article, the author maintains that Moodle as a free "open source software" isn't really free when you count the costs to install, customize, train, and then purchase the supporting hardware you need to run it well. Course I believe the article is on a site that is some kind of company that sells a website service - so it's a bit biased!!!

The second article was titled "Are you REALLY an Ed Tech Leader in Your School/District/State/Country?" It led me to another site of a guy in the United Kingdom (http://www.ictineducation.org) This guy has an interesting project he is dong and blogging about. He calls it "31 Days to Become a Better Ed Tech Leader." He challenges ed tech leaders to give a specific hint to their constituents every day for 31 days. He is modeling examples on his blog of what you might do. There was also an ad on this website for a book titled Amazing Web 2.0 Projects.

Now having done all this poking around, I have to confess I am confused about what's an ordinary website versus what's a blog when I go to some of these sites.

Adding Titles to My Blog Posts

I just discovered that I had not been adding titles to my blog posts. I decided that was something I should do so I went back & edited my posts to add titles. Don't know if it makes a difference to anyone.

Third Assignment

OK, I think I have completed all 3 activities in Module 3. I added RSS capability to my blog. I added some RSS subscriptions -- first of all, everyone's blog in our class and then I tried to add some other subscriptions to different kinds of feeds. First I tried the Keywords "Technology in Education," but I was so disappointed with the quality of what I found. Most had only 1 - 2 subscribers and only 0 - 2 posts per week. So I decided that many of these were perhaps class assignments that were not very actively used. So then I tried keywords SMART Boards in elementary schools and got much better results. I selected two particular ones to subscribe to. I checked them out and they had some good information. I will pass this information on to the two teachers in my building who have SMART Boards in their classrooms. Then I decided to follow Andy's lead and look for feeds on a hobby -- Pink Depression Glass. I have 2 patterns that I have collected pieces over the years. I found a number of sites, but the 2 I selected were really disappointing. They didn't have much information right now.

Finding Other Blogs

As I was browsing some new educational blogs, I found a familiar name - Kathy Schrock. Anyone who has been an elementary teacher will recognize this name. For years and years and years, Kathy Schrock has been offering up educational ideas and tips. He blog site URL is http://kathyschrock.net/edtechblogs.htm. Over the years she has had 4 blogs. She has been blogging since 2004 and began blogging to explore other avenues of providing and gathering information from educators. She has had a blog titled "Lighthouse Learning Island." This blog was literally about a professional learning community she had developed on an island near Cape Cod. It is disbanding in August of 2010 & so this blog will be no more. She has a second blog titled "Nauset Public Schools Podcasts" where she posts podcasts of what appears to be district inservices. A third blog is called "Cache the Wave" and has items of interest to the gadget geeks of the ed tech world. The final blog is her newest and is called "Kathy Schrock's Kaffeeklatsch" and is designed to share in a very low key way the newest things. Her most recent posts were about Google's Doc Viewer and Apple's new iPads. I found this blog to be very teacher friendly and one that I would share with my staff.

Educational Blogs

Well, after some searching I have found two blog sites that had information I found of interest. One site was http://www.clearvieweducation.com/blog This site had the "100 Best Blogs for Teachers of the Future." It literally had 100 different blog sites all about education organized under various headings such as ""Technology," "Blogging Teachers," "Special Education," "News & Politics," etc. I read a couple and they were interesting. I wonder how often they are updated. I'll try to check every couple days and see if there seem to be new ones.

The other blog that I found valuable is http://blog.simplek12.com/education. Tonight I found a very interesting article & comments there about "Students and Schools Not on the Same Digital Track." It was all about social media tools and how schools are not capitalizing on student interest in using technology for socializing.

My First Blogging Experience!

The process of creating a blog was very simple. Your step-by-step directions were very clear and concise and everything worked the first time! I was amazed and impressed!

I really enjoyed reading Henry Jenkins' article about "Why Academics Should Blog..." I thought he made some compelling arguments and gave specific examples of how blogging can be beneficial and valuable for different constituent groups within the education profession. All of his reasons for the value or purpose of using a blog for each subgroup were very positive. I can see how current and prospective students would respond well and use the information found in a blog. I am intrigued by the possibility of participating a blog from the two higher education institutions from which I got my BA and my MA degrees as an alumnus and being able to keep up with what's going on in my field at my former colleges/universities. Jenkins' examples of how blogging can be used within the field of education also helped me understand even better the two-way interactive nature of one Web 2.0 tool.

I made my Blog Title "Web 2.0 in Elementary Schools" and my Blog Address as "http://web20inelementaryschools.blogspot.com" so hopefully I will attract people who are very specifically interested in discussing examples of how Web 2.0 tools are used at the elementary level. We'll see how that works.

Diane