Why educators should consider creating and participating in a personal learning network.

SEDU 183 PSA Video

Drunk Driving PSA

Fish Rights PSA SEDU 183

Going Green PSA SEDU 183

PSA Texting and Driving

Blog Survey.

Museum Box / Go Animate

More Museum Box

Museum Box is based on the work of Thomas Clarkson who collected items in a box to help him in his argument for abolition of slavery. Clarkson collected items in a box to demonstrate the fine craftsmanship and abilities of the African American culture. He used the box as a sort of travel museum to aid his debate on slavery.  

Educators can use Museum Box as a medium for classrooms to learn about and collect materials about a historical event, person, and time period. Allowing students to upload their own content to a box you could easily have them create a box about themselves. A geography lesson could be fun. The students can make a box all about a place including items in their box that a unique to that place. This tool is great! After a class has constructed boxes, spend time viewing other classmates boxes and leaving comments about the box. This tool is so great because it builds a science fair atmosphere for history, geography, and literature. I wish I had this tool while I was in school!

Go Animate

Go Animate is another good website where students can easily make animated conversation with a short typed dialogue. By choosing the settings, characters and written dialogue to be spoken, this site can generate a speech very quickly.

The Web tool is FREE at the BASIC LEVL, some scenes and characters will require payment. A login name will be needed, so you might want to set up a class account. Finished videos can be linked to or embedded in your blogs. You may also download a HD video file for a small fee. Here is a funny political Wasabi video produced in Go animate

ENJOY!

Wordle, Storyjumper, and Popplet

The website http://www.wordle.net/ tool looks to be helpful by using word clouds to show important words from an article. The words you make are can be printed out and shared with anyone. Creating a Wordle about yourself could be a good tool for a class room to learn who you. This website has many different uses allowing a classroom many more ways to better understand any topic.

www.storyjumper.com allows anyone to create a children’s story book. The book you create can be viewed online or ordered in a hard cover. The possibilities of this tool are almost endless. Children in classrooms could all create their books and share them with each other. Storyjumper is a very good tool for early childhood educators. 

www.popplet.com is a great brain storming tool. You can create webs that can prepare a student to make a well organized paper. This can also be used to show connection between historical events.  Most of all Popplet can create class room discussion allowing students to learn from each other’s ideas.

Web 2.0 Tool – Museumbox

 

 The Museumbox site produces tools for anyone to build a difference of opinion or description of any event, person, or historical period. In Museumbox users create a virtual storage box with individual boxes inside. Each box has six sides; on each box side creators can add images, text, sounds, videos, actual files, and links. With these boxes teachers can break events into separate boxes, allowing a viewer to better understand the drawer topic as a whole. For example, a storage could be created for a US history class on the women of WWII. Using pictures, videos, audios, and text in a single box, a teacher could establish why more women were sent to work during this time. In another box the instructor could show the jobs the women were actually doing during the war. Finally, the instructor could include a third box depicting what happened to these women after the war was over.

Museum box is very similar to PowerPoint; each box has six different sides that are presented like slides in a PowerPoint. So far to me this tool seems like it can be very helpful for a classroom lesson should be fairly easy. I believe Museumbox helps create a better understanding to the viewers, than perhaps a lecture or just reading from a book. Although using Museumbox inefficiently could cause a student to not learn much at all if anything. For example the instructor could create boxes with little information on the drawer topic leaving the viewer in the dark perhaps. Using all text or images on every box side could limit what is actually taken from the whole storage box, not meeting all learning styles a classroom deserves. These same issues exist with slides inside of PowerPoint. Although exploiting this tool currently, educators can touch on every different learning style students may have.

What Museum box is and how it works.

Cool Educational Boxes to check out.

Thomas Clarkson's box                        Khufu's tool Great Pyramid                Steve Jobs

How would you use this tool in your educational environment?

A Vision of 21st Century Teachers

Here a really inspiring video on the 21st century teacher.

How to Become a Better Blogger

Now that we all have blogs I thought that it would be a good time to make a blog about becoming a better blogger. First we need to explore the definition of a blog. Weblog (aka: blog) is a website that has an online personal journal with reflections comments and hyperlinks. Blogging is a very simple way to communicate; creating a family blog could possibly create a lower telephone bill by keeping families updated on news within the family.

So, how do you become a better blogger?  The first and most important thing you should consider as blogger is who your audience is. Knowing who will be looking over and commenting on your blog helps a blogger understand how the blog should be written, essentially intriguing your readers and provoking them to invest their time into reading your blog. Another aspect of blogging etiquette to keep in mind is to not to be too formal. Being formal could limit the comments and interests your audience might have on your blog. One way I myself have learned to become better at blogging is to write like you are having conversation with a friend. Allowing conversation should allow your fellow bloggers to be more comfortable reading and commenting on your blog.

Other ways to better a blog might be to recite your blog post to yourself prior to posting think to yourself as if you were reading someone else’s blog for the first time. You could also visit other blogs like the one you are making to gasp a better understanding of your blog subject. Bloggers should be inviting to comments thus expanding the audience of one’s blog. Like any other paper turned into class your blog posts should be spell checked.  And finally, don’t sweat it! Remember to write passionately.

Below are some additional links that I have found on the web to help you better your blogging abilities.                            

Enjoy

101 Steps to Becoming a Better Blogger

10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers

Tips On How To Become A Better Blogger

P.S.  I forgot to mention always keep your blog updated you will lose followers if you don’t have a constant stream of new information. Update! Update! Even the smallest posts keep bloggers coming back!

Major League SEDU 183 Lessons

Over the past five weeks we have learned an abundance of classroom appealing technology tools.

PowerPoint

        We started PowerPoint the the first day of class with short introduction of ourselves. From there we turned it up a bit using PowerPoint as a lesson to teach multiple teaching standards at once. I now know how to utilize PowerPoint in ways I never did before.

Google Docs

       Google Docs allowed the classroom to calibrate in small groups on universally the same document no matter  if we were in the class room or at home. I enjoyed how we explored open source resources (another tech tool) to write a Google doc.

Blogger

       Using the Blogger website with the class and finding out the massive varieties of blogs was boggling. Now knowing how easy it is to create one I now can understand how they can be on just about anything. Blogger has been fun and I hope we do more with this tech tool.

Word Documents & Emails

Mr.Smith has done a phenomenal job of creating word documents of the classroom's  itinerary for every class. with the classroom getting the agenda emailed before the class I believe this has also been a great tool to get the ball rolling as soon as class time begins. 

All in all these were great lessons, I look forward to the next weeks wishing they will be as intriguing as the last.

Using this blog

I hope that using this blog will help me learn about other blogs. Using this blog will allow me to better understand other blogs as well as improve my blogging abilities.

Educational aspirations

I am aspiring to graduate college and get a job as teacher. As a teacher I hope that I can inspire young adults to enjoy learning and attempt to further educate themselves in some form.

Who Am I?

I am a current Edinboro University Student, studying education. I graduated from pymatuning high school in 2009, in Andover, Ohio. Besides being a student I am also a brother, son, friend, employee, and i am sure there are others. for more info about me feel free to email at cody0948@gmail.com.