Wikis, Blogs, Podcasts and Chapter 6

Taaaa-daaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!! I made my very first Podcast (and surprise it is about podcasting) tonight. We used a software called audacity to make our podcasts. It is a FREE software that is fairly simple to use once you get the hang of it. I am exited to put this to use in my classroom to "publish" the results of our experiment...what a great way to be real scientists. I also have teacher friend doing the same content and staying on a similar module schedule and I think sharing our podcasts (that is assuming he is interested in doing this with me) would be a great way to rev up the competition and the quality of our work!

Why didn’t anybody tell me about Furl as an undergrad?!?!?! I can’t believe there is a way to bookmark pages, save them in categories, and best yet export them in MLA. I had my own complicated system of emailing myself links that I thought I might use for research paper or sometime I would loose links and have to start my searches over using a search engine. I might just get evangelical about this tool and share it with all my friends still in college.

As stated earlier, this is a tool I can buy into, because it actually makes your use of technology more efficient rather than suggesting you use it more often and in other forms ( i.e. RSS podcasts). I am currently not on my computer in location without internet access (this post will be saved in Word prior to its publishing), but if I were I would already have an account. I can certainly see this as a valuable tool for my classroom and my professional life. (I personally like the format of Furl better than del.icio.us.)

In My Classroom
(Blush-this is how old-fashioned I am) I am currently having a couple of the students in my literacy class explore good literacy websites and write down the Title of the site and a brief description of what it was about and why they did or did not like it. I was planning to compile a list and use them next year in class to make literacy more fun for my middle schoolers who hate reading- from books. Using Furl it looks like I will be able to streamline this process. I also plan to have similar folders for supplementary links to each of our lessons-sometimes for webquest purposes and other times just for student who complete their assignments and need enrichment material.

In My Professional Life
Richardson, the author, mentions how great Furl can be as a PD tool. I mentioned in an earlier post-I believe in response to Chapter 1-that I think it would be amazing for the teachers in JCPS (or around the country) that are using a particular module to create a library of enrichment links that supplement each of the investigations. I know in my brief searches I have found neat games, applets, and short videos online that go along perfectly with investigations- but to collect and make a library of these links as a group would be awesome. It would be a great way to find quality material and to save time! Why have hundreds of science teachers doing the same work when you can streamline the process?

I am hooked on Furl, as you can see but my final thought on the chapter is how interesting a reversion the idea of “Folksonomies” are. He says that “back in the old days we relied on librarians and others to sort and classify information for us” (pg.92) but actually in the older days in terms of taxonomy at least lots of people were classifying information in lots of ways and we purposely went to set standards of classification in order to clarify and make a universal system. I studied science in college and took a graduate level taxonomy course so our classic example was what if three people were calling three different plants “snakeroot” one was highly toxic, another harmless, and the other somewhere in between. The consequences of mix ups when using this plant for medicine, food, etc. are endless. The moral of the story is that it could be very dangerous to not have one set system of classification.