Pageflakes

Today I discovered Pageflakes and could have spent the rest of the weekend playing with it! There are so many interesting feeds in their directory and it will take time to really customize the flakes but I'm anxious to share this with my students. Good thing I have until the end of August! http://www.pageflakes.com/rebereed/11764062

Learning via RSS

RSS is a handy tool that really saves time. It's taking me some time, however, to get in the habit of checking it on a regular basis but when I do I'm always pleased to see some new and interesting information waiting for me. I hope to continue to add new feeds to keep me informed of issues related to my teaching areas and I also plan to use RSS to keep me current with my students' blogs.

Other teachers have already incorporated RSS into their classrooms and there are many blogs with some good ideas. http://blogs.earthlink.net/2006/08/how_do_you_use_rss_in_the_clas.php

Using Read/Write Web in My Classroom

Over the course of the past few years I have found that my students really enjoy collaborative projects and working with others throughout the day. Because I teach computer programming courses most of my students are proficient with computers and very knowledgeable about new technologies and tools. To offer them a more refined collaborative learning environment I could meet my course learning objectives in a way that would really suit my students and create a network learning community.

I envision that I will continue to use Moodle for delivery of information and some assessments, receipt of assignments and chat sessions as I have in the past. I would like to add some journaling/blogs and more interaction between the students in similar courses and even among students in diverse courses within the department. I find that the AP students (the “varsity” kids) are valuable resources for students just starting out in our programming courses and would like to network them as well.

Student Blogging Projects

Many student blogging projects that I found were from college students discussing their experiences and day-to-day life in the college environment. As many of my students are high school juniors and seniors and much of their lives are consumed by choosing the right college to attend, I feel that reading/interacting with student blogs from colleges they are considering could be very helpful. An example from Cornell University:
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Nov06/student.blogs.dea.html

Also, for those high-achieving students who are considering careers that require grad school, there are some great student blogs that really give a clear picture of what is required on a daily basis. http://med.stanford.edu/blogs/students/fall06.html

I think I'd like to use this idea in my own high school courses. For students who are considering taking courses offered by our department or to give introductory students an idea of what is entailed in an advanced course, exposure to other students' blogs could be helpful. Finding out about what's going on in the classroom could really give them more information than the usual one paragraph description in a course catalog.