Thing #23. Beyond Facebook: Other Social Networks

Social Networking


Classroom 2.0


GROUPS

I explored the education suggestions in Ning. Most of the sites, you have to sign up for an account in order to view them. I signed up for Classroom 2.0 and completed more extensive viewing there. In this blog, I will share some of my findings with you.

Classroom 2.0 Beginner Group by Steve Hargadon includes videos, blogging, and other resources to familiarize yourself with Classroom 2.0 tools. So that’s where I began.I can see there are many things that I can learn here as soon as I’m finished with 23 Things when I have more time on my hands. I already found many helpful sites.

Here I found the RSS Feed of Beginner Show Host Sue Waters' Blog Post Go Wild with Wikis, Part II

The Edublogger – Tips, tricks, ideas, and help with using web 2.0 technologies and edublogs

Forum discussion blogger posted by Connie Weber – This edublog is a blogging discussion about the book Five Minds to the Future by Howard Gardner. Connie Weber states, “Members of this group read Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner and talk about how the ideas relate to our experiences. "The World of the future will demand capacities that, until now, have been mere options. Have you begun developing..."

Google Apps for Teachers - A group for people interesting in learning and sharing ideas around the implementation of Google Apps for Education

In Connecting Content and Technology by Katie Mathews, I found an article titled, ‘The Power of Project Learning with ThinkQuest’ prepared by SRI International in Menlo Park, CA (2009). Being a strong teacher and advocate for Project based learning, I found this to be informative.

Another interesting student centered website I found was ‘Dance Mat Typing. Keyboarding for Kids’ used to teach young children keyboarding skills. My kids use keyboarding software that is very boring to them. I’m CERTAIN my students will love this learning to keyboard using this program from the UK.

As a bilingual teacher, I am always looking for quality websites to support my students in their native language. So I decided to search for items tagged as ‘Spanish’. I still need to research this some more. I found some of the following sites.

A Discussion Forum created by Wenda Coota was held in November, 2009 addressing the question, What are the best web 2.0 tools you are using to support your language teaching?

Teaching Spanish with Web 2.0 Tools created by Wenda Cotta

Best Web 2.0 Tools blogger Wenda Cotta

Through the discussion, I found several links to more sites and resources that I can use for my bilingual learners.

Lingtclassroom – language learning through listening and speaking is a place I can create online assignments & assessments for oral and auditory language learning as well as provide feedback and track student progress

Voicethread – visual, audio, comments which includes sing voie (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or vide (via a webcam). I saw some amazing student products. It is a way students can reach out to the community of learners showing and discussing their work. Others can view their work and post audio comments. This is on my list of one of the 1^st things I’ll do when school starts in August.