It's been awhile

Hello anyone whom reads my blog.

I just want to give a quick update about my life and where I am at now. Last week I accepted the Library Media Specialist position in New Berlin. I currently am working in 2 schools trying to keep the libraries running and hopefully make them be a wonderful place for all in the school. I am excited about the new challenge, but know I will miss teaching 6th grade. I am putting youtube video on this site because it really made me think when I saw it last year and with my new position I wanted to re-visit the thoughts going through my head while watching it. Hopefully some of you will watch it and tell me what your thoughts were.

End of class

Now that class has come to an end I am still swarming with information in my head. I have so much new technology wisdom and am excited to start using it in the classroom. Besides for learning all about web 2.0 tools I also took a class on digital media and learned how to edit video. I edited my first video this past weekend since the one I created for the class. I impressed all my family by creating a video of my niece's baptism. I had a lot of fun and was able to pull off giving her the video as a present instead of searching around for another cross or religious trinket. I think my present is a little more meaningful than her 4th cross!
I am looking forward to learning more technology at my districts technology academy. I will be learning how to create webquests for and with my 6th graders. One more piece of technology to take to my classroom. A huge perk for tech academy is that I actually get paid for professional development, this never happens! I hope many of you will keep up your blogs since I do enjoy reading them occasionally and learning what is going on in the lives of my education partners!

uh oh

So I just finished my podcast/vcast paper. In the paper I discussed podcasting and then I went on to discuss vcasting, which I thought was using skype, oovoo, or sightspeed. In my mind I was thinking it is a video cast of people conferencing with each other. Then I went and looked at the syllabus and saw that the paper was actually about podcast/vlog which vlog to me means a video log like the gentlemen who video logged his proposal. So now I am wondering if I have done the wrong assignment and should I do it over? It is hard for me to start over since I worked on this first paper for a few days and thought about it for even longer. Maybe Louie will like my rendition of the paper, or maybe he will have me do it over.

Another item about ning. I have been working with my ning and cannot figure out how to add links to the ning. The whole idea behind my ning is that teachers can add different websites that help teachers teach reading and writing. I wanted to have the contributors add their websites to the blog so I could use them as a resource, but how do you add links? Any help?

ning

I am really not excited about my ning. I don't really like all the updates and the advertisements that are on the page. It clutters the page and I can't understand the real content on the page. I am slowly adding to it, but finding it difficult to add items, I don't know if I am in the correct area for editing or what the problem is, but I just don't like using it. Soon I will add a badge to my ning, and you can look at it and give any comments or suggestions on how to use and enjoy my ning!

long weekend

It has been a long weekend dedicated to other responsibilities not including school. I had the opportunity to see yet another one of my dearest friends exchange wedding vows. It was one of the most intimate ceremonies I have been to and it really made me realize that marriage/weddings should not be about the party, but about the love. I am almost sickened when I think of some weddings and the show that they put on, where is the love??

Anyways, I finished my SRA class on Friday and was whisked away to western MN for the wedding. I am currently in the process of trying to put my finalized SRA video media project on youtube and then embed it into my blog, give me time I hopefully will have this complete before the week is over. The class taught me how to create a video project and now I want to buy myself editing software, I seem to get myself into trouble attending classes becuase I end up finding things I want to buy and realize I don't have money for them. I am know spending my time catching up in my class that ends this Wednesday, nothing like bogging yourself down with a week long class, working at night, spending the weekend in the boondocks, and then having to complete another grad class. I have yet to fail a class for incomplete work, and I don't plan on starting with CEDU 534!!

Sally Ride Academy

I am half way through my first experience with a Sally Ride academy class. Today we went on a field trip that took us out into the community so we could experience jobs that some day our students may be doing and that the parents of our kids may be doing. Sometimes as a teacher in the educational setting you lose sight of the "real" world. As a teacher you tend to immerse yourself in education, it was good to see other parts of the world. My field trip was to the Waukesha Recycling facility and it was fascinating. I started planning how I want utilize the information that I gained from this workshop. My school is not up to par for recycling and I would love to help change this. Since I am one of the student council advisors for my school I think that is a great place to start my new recycling initiative. I have also created a new wiki at wetpaint for our student council events. Check it out ol student council

reflection to creating podcast

I created an account at Gcast and made my first podcast. It was incredibly easy. It is a little rough around the edges, I started recording and didn't stop and then I just uploaded the first version. Few questions I have, can someone link right to the podcast or do I have to have it embedded somewhere, can I add music to it after I have done my speaking part, and is there a way to break one podcast into separate recordings and then combine them all into one large recording? I really like this way of creating a podcast, but is there a way where a podcast can be created with just a microphone hooked up to the computer? I'm sure there is I just need to investigate other podcast sites. Any help/comments would be greatly appreciated!

Long reasoning for why I chose the topic of my first podcast

So I created my first podcast today. As you entered this page you were probably hearing it. I chose to dedicate my first cast to restaurant etiquettte. This summer I have been working as a restaurant manager, something I was doing before I began teaching last year. The reason I became a manager was because I hadn't finished my teaching degree and the opportunity arose. I moved to Milwaukee to manage, finished my degree, and then continued managing. I thought that I didn't want to teach because I was so scared of failing and I didn't want to disappoint the students. I thought that I would just manage restaurants the rest of my life. I began my managing career with a positive attitude about people. Slowly this attitude began to wither away. I started losing faith in mankind. People are extrememly rude when they go out to eat. I was sworn at more times than I can recall and I even cried at a table on Mother's day becuase the guest was being so horrible, he was in front of his wife, mother, and children! Needless to say I realized that I could not be in that type of profession the rest of my life so I decided to face my fears and teach. After finishing my first year I realized that the students did learn things, I didn't fail 100%, some things didn't go the way I planned but that's how I have learned. I loved what I was doing and couldn't believe I was afraid! Ok, back to why I chose to discuss restaurant etiquette in my first podcast. Now that the school year is over I am back at managing and I realized that people just need to learn about how to act in a restaurant, it isn't a skill taught at school and therefore I don't believe the general public know how to act appropriately. Hopefully if you listen to the podcast you will learn a little and maybe make the world of dining out a better place.

This week

I began working on week 3 information and created different accounts soon after our online meeting. Soon I was wrapped up in my summer job, then 4th of July came, then my birthday came, and now it is Monday and I am trying to remember what it was I have already accomplished for this weeks meeting and what I still need to do. It seems if you get away from the tech world for even a week it all begins to sound Greek again. I started by re-reading the chapters and familiarizing myself with google reader again. Then I created my bloglines account, last week it was under construction or something so I was unable to create the account, now I am trying to incorporate RSS into my blog, wish me luck................

wikis

I have been adding to my wiki page (see profile page to check it out) and am getting excited to start the school year and have the students begin working on it. The only problem I foresee is the time issue to spend teaching students how to use the site. With so much content to cover and such little time I worry that I won't have the time to explain how to use the site and teach content for the students to understand what I am talking about. Only time will tell.................

blogging

I always think of things I want to blog about while searching sites online, then when I begin writing my blog I blank. I think that I need to open a word document and jot down any thoughts that are going through my head so when I begin typing I have something to write about. Right now the thoughts I have are: wow I need to file, oh my do I remember what I listened to during the podcast so I can answer questions, do I really know what a wiki is, what am I wearing to work tomorrow, did I shower today?, my goodness I would not want sextuplets (watching Jon and Kate plus eight), is being "green" trendy? (thanks Target and MTV), those are just a few. Anyways back to class and blogging about class. I was saddened that I couldn't read the article comparing wikipedia to Britannica, I was discussing with a library friend of mine wikipedia. We both had discussed earlier in the year about how we didn't want the students to use wikipedia as a research site for their research papers on the Holocaust. After searching through Wikipedia and looking at more and more pages I wondered why I was so close minded to the idea of letting the students use that site as a resource. I fell into the trap of, "oh my goodness, anyone can edit it, it must not be true information". It makes me think that in general we ("the people") don't have a good view of people in the world if our first thought is others are going to sabotage, not do good. Makes me wonder.......

Day after class

Leaving class yesterday I had a chance to digest the information that was handed out during the previous 4 hours. One question I have continued to ask myself is where are all the people, columnists, bloggers, etc., that are protesting the advancement of technology as a teaching tool. We have read articles that keep telling us to include new technological advances into our teaching practices, but have yet to come across articles that are telling us to stay away. I guess my question is when are the masses going to cease the article writing of, we should use it we should use it and start writing articles like, okay it is now accepted let's start using various techniques and this is how we should implement. I think the masses need to clear the hurdle of telling others it is a good thing and realize that it has been accepted and begin showing novices (as myself) how to utilize this power of technology in our classroom. I realize that this was only the 2nd class and that is why were spent time discussing why it is important, I am now looking forward to continuing classes to learn how to implement the information into my classroom and use it effectively.

First Blog/discussing class

I wasn't much of a diary writer as a child, I found my old diary from the 90's and each day I had a one sentence entry "we are still at war", actually quite fitting for the times. This post I want to discuss what was done last week in class. I wasn't in class last week since my 6th grade students were completing their moving on ceremony. Since I missed class I have been playing catch up with the information. One of the big ideas is discussing how and why blogging can be appropriate and useful in schools. There are many sides to this controversy, my take on it is that as long as appropriate district policy's are followed, blogs should be appropriately involved in curriculum. It does not have to be included in each and every lesson or curriculum aspect, especially since it will be time consuming for me as the teacher while I learn, but I have attempted to use it in the classroom and with more time and effort I want to expand.