Web 2.0 is a social network in education. I have been looking at this website for about a month, impressed with the openness atmosphere shown between colleagues. Discussions can be from how to motivate a student, to how to challenge a non-traditional classroom. There was a conversation that caught my eye talking about the student’s usage of cell phones in school. I enjoyed reading the different points of view, and reminded me of our school policy. In our school we have banned cell phones for 7 months last year because our students were abusing the usage of them in the classroom. Then once we had control the principal allowed the students to use their cell phones only during breakfast, lunch, and during dismissal. If there cell phones were used during classroom time they would be taken away for the rest of the day. I can say this plan has been a success because the majority of the students have been responsible with their phones. At the end of last year I had made a survey with Survey Monkey and had questions for the students on how they thought about their subjects. With survey monkey I was able to send the survey to their cell phones and all of them responded. This year we are continuing the same cell phone plan since the end of last year, but are considering the usage of cell phones in the classroom for educational purposes.
Thinkfinity is a nice website that gives teachers learning materials in any level of education. I can find multiple lesson plans for any given subject and grade from K-12. At the same time the website has activities for students and parents that can be used at home. This is great resource for any person looking for information on making a learning environment.
With being on top of new ways for teaching, I think it also important to be on top of the new computer technology. I like visiting this PC world news website, so I can see what type of new technology I can use in the schools. Since I know how to build my own pc and install any operating system, knowing advance parts are coming thrills me. When Droid came out with apps, I started to think what type of app I can make for the classroom. I haven’t learned how to make apps yet but I have a friend who can so I collaborated with him to make an app that can take data in the classroom using voice recognition. At the end of the day the app would email me the data from each teacher then I would collect the data and sync it to my excel datasheet. PC News is a nice technology website to use.
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