Using Wikis in the Classroom

For the final project, as you know, we used wikis to post our Lesson Activity Plans. If you click on that, it will take you to mine. I have used wikis before in a class at BYU for posting information of periodicals from the Victorian period. They called it the Viki Wiki and they actually created it at the Center for Teaching and Learning, where I work. I really like wikis because they are easy to use and they allow students to sort of publish their work, especially if you are collaborating with other schools or classes. I think that using wikis in my future classroom would be a great idea when we have assignments on short stories or things that are new and exciting that the students would want to share. I think that not only does it make it easy to share, but it also forces the student to take a certain level of pride in their work, as it is going to be posted online for their classmates as well as others to read and learn from.

Mindmeister Tutorial

I went online to look for tutorials for the program that I'm learning for my project and this was the most useful one I was able to find. It very simply goes through how to create maps and is a great way to get started. I think it would be a great recommendation for anyone starting to use the program or perhaps to show students in a classroom who will begin using this program for something.

Mindmeister Blog

I discovered while I was browsing through the Mindmeister website and trying to familiarize myself with its content, that there is a Mindmeister blog where they share new information about Mindmeister as it comes up. While I only have the free version and so not a lot of the upgrades and promotional things matter to me, unless I become attached and in the future decide to sign up for an account, there are still a lot of useful things on there. They put updates on when the program will be going through changes and so will be down, there is one blog about someone that works with Mindmeister and his experiences with the program. There are also other posts that are more helpful to me, such as the blog entitled, "Online guide to mind map drawing services." This is a great resource and I've added it to my blog list so that I can get updates when they come and will know of any new features or things like that as I learn about his new technology.

Personal Techonology Project: Mindmeister

In deciding what I thought would be the most important and useful technology to learn about for use in my future classroom, I was torn between Accelerated Reader and Mindmeister, but I settled on Mindmeister because I felt that it would be useful for students to use in their learning and I also felt that I would probably end up actually using it more than I would Accelerated Reader. I signed up for an account with Mindmeister and I'm excited to learn more about it. The reason I chose this technology is that I feel that one of the most important things I can teach my students that will help them in their learning is to not be afraid to share ideas and to talk about the texts that we read. Discussion is the best way to discover things about a text. I know that for myself, when other people's perspectives and ideas are brought into a text I am reading, it adds a whole new dimension to my understanding. And so I feel that discussion is absolutely essential to learning about literature. However, I understand that not all students are comfortable participating in class discussions and they might be afraid that their ideas are stupid or invalid. I have traditionally been one of the shyer students in my classes as well so I understand where they're coming from. This would be a great way for students to share ideas about a text without forcing them to do something that they may be very uncomfortable with. I want the sharing of ideas to be a positive experience and so I think that this technology might be incredibly useful in allowing students to share ideas in a less scary setting.

Photo Story 3

Maybe it's cheating a little bit to do my weekly participation blog on the tool I used for my instructional video, but I really liked this tool and I'm excited to use it in the future. My video is a little bit unexciting but that's because this was my first time using Photo Story for Windows. I really love this tool! What a great way to make videos of any kind using pictures. It is incredibly fast and easy and I think in the future in my classrooms, I will record something similar to a power point lecture using this tool so that students that miss class can view what we learned at home. I may also use this simply to create supplementary matieral for students to learn and study on their own and then come to class to dicuss what was discussed on the video. Having this information saved can also be helpful for students when reviewing for tests. Also, I think this is a great tool to teach students to use because it is so easy. And this way, they can create instructional videos for the class for say a book report or something like that so that the students can have a little bit of fun and use creativity as well as technology to do a report instead of just turning in written summaries or something like that.

Instructional Video

I did my video on commonly confused words. It's a little bit long. I probably could have cut out a couple words to make it fit better.