Module 7

Another week, another blog. This module I was looking at online communities and using Delicious to share resources. This looks like a great site to use with other teachers, particularly within a faculty and subject setting, as a pool of online resources could be established. Sharing ideas and resources amongst each other is vitally important, particularly in this rapidly changing educational environment.

I guess one problem I encountered was that I was unable to install the toolbar for Delicious in my workplace, due to the access controls, limiting the strengths of the program. Still, if you can put up with having to go to the site every time, thats only a minimal problem. It was interesting to investigate the program as a tagging/bookmarking tool and with further exposure to this program from a number of people due to the web2.0 course, the online resources can only help but grow.

I then had a look at a number of other web2.0 bloggers sites and was very impressed by what I saw. Terrific use of all of the tools at hand and it's ispired me to continue putting the effort in to my own blogs. Some of my personal fav's are;

http://paulatpats.blogspot.com/ : humourous and hard hitting

http://jessicaursino.blogspot.com/ : insightful comments

http://beemsterslider.blogspot.com/ : cool graphics

Comment on another blog:

http://gillysweb2blog.blogspot.com/2010/03/module-1.html#comment-form

Module 6

A mind mapping tool, hmmm, very sceptical at first, but after I've gotten into it, it seems quite interesting and useful. I know that from various forms of research that male boys respond well to this type of visual stimulus and I know that from my own education, some of these types of mind maps were very effective for study and learning.

Unfortunately, do to security reasons at school, I was unable to export the mind map I made on Web2.0, to this blog. This is probably one major drawback I can see with using all of these different types of software, getting access to the full versions of them at school.

Next up was Glogster. I quite enjoyed using this program, with all of its nifty tools to produce glogs. I can't see why the blogger blogging program can't incorporate this into their blogging. I guess this will come in the future. I created a glog based on tesselations, something which I would use in Mathematics with my classes.

Paul O'Shea in his blog offered some good ideas for glogster, such using it for poster presentations. Maybe I could use this when teaching Geometry as a way to summarise learning outcomes for the boys.

Comment on Paul O'sheas post: Good use of Bubblr.us and agree with your comments on Glogs. Would be good if they could combine it with our current blogging program and put it all into one