Personal Professional Development in Web 2.0 and Learning

This week our assignment was to reflect on and create a detailed plan for how we will attempt to stay up with advances and changes related to teaching and learning with Web 2.0 tools across our career.  I most certainly see my career to be one that will always be in the field of education.  I really do enjoy teaching young children, but I would love to one day teach other teachers ways in which they can use technology in their classrooms to enhance their teaching for their students benefit.  I have a goal or dream of one day obtaining a position as some type of technology integrator for elementary and early childhood education. 

I know that it is important to stay current with research about the available Web 2.0 tools that do benefit early education and ways in which they can be implemented into the classroom.  Following some of the groups in the social media sites we have learned about in this course, like Twitter, Pinterest, and my favorite being Facebook, are ways to read shared articles with information about the latest Web 2.0 technologies. 

 

Another way to stay up to date would be to follow discovery education blogs related to Web 2.0 and education.  Just a simple Google search for, "Web 2.0 tools for Early Childhood Education" brought up many informative blog sites.  I also found some pretty useful sites on Discovery Education, which is a site our school district allows us to access. 

As an educator I have been fortunate enough to have to opportunities to attend trainings for professional development at the Region 8 Service Center.  About three year ago, I had to opportunity to attend the TCEA convention in Austin.  I know that having being able to continue to attend these professional development opportunities related to technology is one way to stay up to date with the latest web 2.0 technologies.

I look forward to continuing my professional development with Web 2.0 tools and the overall field of educational technology as I further achieve my goals toward my degree in this field.

Adventure in Social Bookmarking

This week our assignment was to complete the, "Adventure in Social Bookmarking."  I signed up for Diigo, a free social bookmarking tool which is designed as a platform to take notes with the opportunity to share information.  This tools allows the ability to highlight text from websites as you would traditionally highlight information in a book.  There is the availability to bookmark and save the information for later use.  I like the option of adding a type of digital sticky note to information.  There have been many times I have had to read lengthy and challenging scholarly articles for assignments, and I can see how this feature would come in handy for these situations.  The search feature on diigo seems to be useful as well.  I enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate through groups on this site, and I joined the ETEC 527 and Diigo in Education groups.  I like that Diigo sends me e-mail notifications when people post in the groups.  I do not think Diigo in Education will be as useful to me as a Pre K teacher as it would for a higher grade level.  Diigo is a tool I will explore more with throughout my educational technology journey.

Adventure in Aggregating Pages

    

http://www.protopage.com/lucindalove#Home

 This week our assignment was to explore aggregating pages.  This assignment made me laugh, because when I hear the word, "aggregating" I automatically think about aggregating data, which is no fun.  But my adventure with aggregating pages was a little more enjoyable.  I chose to work with protopage.  I learned from their website that protopage is a personal page created by users so that they can have quick access to things on the web. 

     One thing I liked about my protopage was the availability to put the weather forecast on there.  I can see how this would be useful to me, with using my smart board, during circle time with my class and reviewing the daily calendar.   This could be a way to help my students become aware of temperature and how it associates to numbers.  We already select either cold, cool, warm, or hot as the daily temperature, but I can see how this would be a good tool to go ahead and expose my students to how the number of degrees correspond to the temperature and how it feels outside.

Protopage does seem like it could be a useful tool to kind of keep everything together.  I am pretty much an organized person, but I see that this tool could be a beneficial way to stay organized with my on-line visits and tools.  I plan to explore more with this site to learn ways it can be of personal use for me.

Continuing Twitter and YouTube Adventure

     

This week, our assignment was to continue exploring Twitter and begin the YouTube Adventure.  As far as Twitter goes, I will be honest that I do not feel much of an interest to log on.  As I mentioned in my previous blog, it is convenient to log on through my iPhone.  I have not once last week logged on through my desktop or laptop.  I find the ease of access better through the iPhone app.  I will say that I have been more noticing of the twitter logo.  Twitter was pretty live during the Super Bowl.  As I worked on my group project, I noticed that Prezi has a button to click to tweet the link to a presentation.  To be completely honest, if Twitter was not a requirement for this class, I probably would log on a whole lot less frequently, just because it hasn't drawn me in and captured my attention so much.
   

  As for YouTube, as I mentioned in the class discussion, I use YouTube on a daily basis every morning in my classroom.  One requirement for the Head Start program is to have 30 minutes everyday of structured, "I am Moving, I am Learning" time.  We like to find kids aerobics and other videos on YouTube, where our students can move along to the music and video of the children or participant on the screen.  They love to watch the videos of the game, "Just Dance."  Although this is a console game, and our students are really having absolutely no control of the game, they are able to move along with the avatar on screen.  There favorite video is one posted by an elementary PE teacher who made up a work out to, "Watch me Whip, What me Nae Nae."  Through the use of YouTube, our group was able to include links to demonstration videos on our Google doc.  Just the way that videos have become so readily available has changed so many parts of education and life in general.


     My favorite thing this week was using Google docs with my group members.  This is the first time I have ever used an on-line tool that allows this type of collaboration.  I was actually editing my portion of the document and could see one of my group members was logged on at the same time editing her portion.  I was just a really cool way to be able to collaborate and work on a document with others simultaneously without having to be geographically or physically close.  All we needed to accomplish this task was an internet connect.  It blows my mind to see how far we have come since the original word processor software.