Friday, August 10, 2012

Unable to comment on a post

Using storify to keep a scrapbook of sorts for use in the yearbook is an interesting idea.  It is difficult to remember all the little details at the end of the year, so having somewhere where you and students can keep pictures, quotes, and/or comments is a great idea.

Monday, August 6, 2012

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

As a part of my participation in digital citizenship I have a serious fan-girl collection of blog feeds.  I just read John Spencer's blog and thought, "Wow!  I like what he has to say!"  So, naturally, I want to be a devoted follower.  But here's where my devotion and follow through part ways.  As is my habit, I sign up for the RSS feed to be fed to my google reader.  And, I never see it again unless by happy coincidence because I forget that it's there somewhere in space and move on to the next shiny thing.  So, my question for all of you is this, is there a tool or app you use that aggregates all your feeds and actually feeds them to you in a place you frequent frequently?  I just don't have time to coast over to my reader in the midst of a usually busy day.  Somehow, I need to find a way to bring those feeds to me where I live and breathe most of the time.  I like blogs that I can subscribe to through email but those are becoming less frequent and, let's face it, my email inbox becomes a pretty cluttered place and there's a lot of guilt when I finally end up deleting posts that I hoped to get around to but whose expiration date is long past.  What are the best ways that you keep up regularly with your favorite blogs and news feeds?  Thanks for any suggestions!  Lisa N.

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Blogger Blog

I created a blog for my future students to see what I have been up to this summer. Since I do not have my own classroom yet, I wanted to make something I could edit and use in the future with changes. My thought is that I would include the url to my blog in my back to school letter so that students and parents could check it out throughout the remainder of the summer and at the beginning of the school year. Then, once we get back to school, I would have the students create their own posts under the blog about what they have done in their spare time throughout the summer. That way they could all share their experiences with one another.
here's the link... hopefully it works!!

http://thecrazylifeofmswengert.blogspot.com/


Interest Inventory

I created this blog to share with my students about myself and will hope to use it in my classroom to get to know the students and stay connected with them inside and outside of the school building.

My intent with this first blog posting was to give the students an idea of what interests I have and to open them up to have students share with me what interests they have so I can get a better idea of the students I will have in my class.

Here is my blog!


http://msryansclassroom17.blogspot.com/

My Weebly Experience

Miss Smedley's Classroom Website


Digital Citizenship


Hi!  I am Lisa.  I am a middle school librarian in a surburban district. 

This was, perhaps, the topic I was most looking forward to during this workshop.  As a school librarian, it is incumbent upon me to address digital citizenship but not only as I teach but inclusively within our entire school community.  I am hosting a parent technology evening in a couple of weeks to present some of the tools parents can use and can expect to see their student using throughout the year.  A component of this will be socially responsible use of social media.  Although our school does not have a facebook or twitter presence per se, we often deal with the fallout.  Many parents are not educated about how they can and should monitor their student's digital presence nor what limitations we as a school face when students misuse technology outside of the school environment.  For me digital citizenship extends far beyond cyber bullying and I feel frustrated by our school's current "digital citizenship" lesson as it is implemented by our technology teacher and school resource officer.  Much of the information is outdated and limited in scope.  But, there is little interest in changing the approach.  Last year, we implemented a school wide plagiarism policy and a progressive plan for student responsibility and citations.  This year, I would like to continue to work on digital citizenship but I am quickly overwhelmed by the scope.  I was hoping for a couple of handy resources that I might be able to adapt, but, alas, we did not cover this explicitly.  I will continue searching!  I did find one new resource through an edmodo blog -- it's a start! Digital Citizenship Poster

Using Storify in my Publications class

I thought that this would be a great site to implement to help my students stay up-to-date with what is going on at the school and create a sort of on-line yearbook and newspaper. while creating a hard copy yearbook  Inevidently each year at the end of each sports season the staff members assigned to the yearbook pages are scrambling for quotes about games or looking for photos of the season.  This would be a great way to allow them to keep up to date on the teams and go out and ask for quotes immediately.  This would also get the information to followers in a timely manner.  Pro's -  In a short time I had created a storify about the first couple weeks of my summer vacation.  It was really easy to use.  It would be a good and immediate way to have student immediately apply concepts that we are learning.  Sometimes my students get overwhelmed with thinking that they have to write an article.  They can use this to practice journalistic concepts while writing about topics that they are interested in.  Con's -  When I went to log in it told me that I needed to download a new internet program AND I don't like how you can only use photos on the internet or ones that have an internet address.  In order to utilize this program I will have to get it approved to download both a different search engine in my computer lab AND download picasa so that students can upload pictures from their phone.    Here is the storify that I created. 
http://storify.com/crewsang/my-summer-vaca#publicize

Being a model of digital citizenship for my kids

Over the last handful of years, I have created numerous presentations that I use in my classroom to share information for my Geography classes.  I know that I need to model appropriate citation practices for my students by citing the sources of the bazillion images that I have snipped from Google, but my first thought was, "UGH!!  I have so much time already invested in creating these docs." Then when I step back from that initial gut reaction, I know that it is the best thing for my kids.  Plus, I get the chance to "refresh" those presentations and fix all the bugs that I never got around to doing before.  I just have to keep those last two thoughts in mind and not worry about the "time investment."

**Sidenote:  I explored some of John Spencer's website (great resources!) and one of the posts was a comment about throwing away your lessons every year and starting over with your new group of kids.  A daunting idea, but it makes good sense, and reinforces my need to not only recreate my presentations to model correct citations and usage, but also to better customize for each class of kiddos.  Thanks, John.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Welcome and Thank You for Joining Us!



This space is for participants of the July 31st Day of Learning. Please add your post to this section of the Ridiculous Innovation blog. Share your creations and curations with us. Also feel free to share your thoughts, learnings, and concerns as you go through this process.