Week 10 - ED566E.1

For this week's class we visited Joyce Valenza's school library at Springfield Township High School. This was my second visit to Springfield and I was highly impressed at the lack of overlap in what was presented. Those things that were repeated: igoogle, students blogging in character, and voicethread left an even more lasting impression on me.

The last time I left Joyce's library, I had a note to myself to make an igoogle page, but guess what I did not do. So on Thursday, after I got home, I immediately got to work on organizing my own igoogle page. I truly feel this is a way we can help educators and students organize themselves and the applications that are available on the Read/Write Web. Instead of having a del.icio.us social bookmarking page and a Bloglines RSS feeder, I can now utilize these tools in one place: igoogle. I got to work organizing these things as well as others - like a notepad. I can't tell you how many countless pieces of scrap paper have now been saved from my to-do list making.

Among other new topics presented were: image generator, open courseware, video searching tools, slideshare.com, survey tools (can't wait), bibliography tools, concept mapping, animoto, and avatar creation. To say that my head was spinning would be an understatement! So, as Joyce said - use a take out box and take away two or three things. I've already created my igoogle page (finally - I know!). I'm going to attempt next to embed a survey into this blog and I'd like to create an avatar just for fun. I plan to utilize all the things we learned from Joyce, but not necessarily today. I want to learn by doing, but I want to move forward with a purpose as well. I spoke to my students on Friday about making book trailers for picture books that we read in class and they're floored. It may be more of a whole group project, but one I hope to accomplish this year with my first graders.