Twitter

I believe that Twitter can benefit my personal life to help me catch up with old friends and colleagues. I also think that it would help me professionally as I can follow educational researchers, current colleagues, and other professionals.

Working with 2nd graders, I don't think that I could use microblogging sites such as Twitter, but I could see how it could be used with older students. I think that you could you use this tool with class discussions, research, or posting summaries of students' assigned reading.

I did look at classmates information on their tool that they researched but I have found many of them hard to use with such young children that I teach. I still think that the collaborative drawing tools that I researched would be the most easily used tool with my students. I have so many ideas for my students to add to my curriculum including drawing tools!

21st Century Skills

When reading through Alan November's Four things every student should learng....but not every school is teaching, I do agree with the things he is saying in that children are ignorant to the fact that they are can be hurt very badly by the Internet. I don't think that children realize the severe consequences that can come of their actions on the Internet. Children need to be educated at an earlier age about the safety precautions they must take. It shocked me this year when my 7 year old student told me they have a FACEBOOK page. I couldn't believe it. I think that next year, I will make sure to start educating my young, little 2nd graders to prepare them for the Internet, if they are not already out there sharing information. And, if they do have important information out there, I will hope to teach them about taking care of themselves from now on while "playing" online.

David Warlick talks about fueling the questions. I think that my students are very well engaged in this skill because they ask questions about EVERYTHING. Sometimes, I feel that it can be quite overwhelming to me, but then I need to take a step back and just answer one question at a time. To me, the computer lab is the most stressful teaching situation that I encounter during the week. What I need to do, and remember is that the children are learning all of these things for the first time and all their questions are helping them become more educated everyday. So, I do feel that students are fueling their minds in our computer labs and classrooms everyday.

Social Bookmarking

I think that social bookmarking is quite interesting. I never realized that there were sites that would make it possible for you to bookmark on one computer and then view them on any other.

I think the main difference between Dingo and delicious is that Dingo has the ability for many people to add bookmarks to the same page as delicious shares bookmarks from a number of people but not necessarily on the same homepage. I hope that I am understanding and stating this correctly.

BuddyMarks seems to me like the Dingo site where a bunch of people can add to one "common" ground. I think that I could use this in my teaching career by all of my co-workers of my grade tag websites of interest and that relate to our curriculum. This way we don't have to worry about saving this information in our "own storage" of our school accounts and running out of space.

Personally, I think that delicious is a great website, however, I think that I would use Dingo and BuddyMarks because it seems to be easier to collaborate with my colleagues.

Using WIKI in my professional career

I believe there are so many ways to use WIKI in your classroom. I would be able to use WIKI with my students in many different ways as in brainstorming ideas for a project or sharing information they're learning on a research project or any book they are reading.

I have found many different WIKIs that are informational about behavioral management and that fits perfectly with my PDP(professional development plan) that I am currently working on, so that will help me our greatly toward my overall goals. I would also be able to use WIKIs to communicate with other professionals about any educational/professional questions/concerns that I might have.

I think that WIKIs are different from blogs and RSS feeds because it allows you to add or change things that are already written. I don't know if this is neccessarily a good thing in every circumstance only because I have seen some WIKIs such as Wikipedia that you can tell have been written by opinion and not fact.