Growing+with+the+course

Think back on all the Web 2.0 tools that you explored and investigated throughout this course. Which one really stood out? Describe the tool and how you would like to engage your students with this technology. In order to write this paper, I must look retrospectively and try to locate my initial position and compare it to my actual one. The first questions I need to address: did I move forward? How much did I learn? I will visit the road markers and then answer the questions. When I started the class, I jumped on the book and browsed to it in two days. As the page numbers were increasing, I started to realize that I only had snippets of knowledge about almost every concept listed in the book. Thus, I did not have any skill as far as being able to use any of the Web 2.0 tools (new terminology, back then!) for any purpose. For some technical reason, Amazon charged me twice and sent me two books. It is cheaper to keep both books than to pay the return fee to Amazon from India. A month and half later, one of the books walked off my classroom and completely left me. My name and highlighting were everywhere. The second book saved the day and the course for me. Of course, I never took it out of the apartment: there is no education in the second kick of the mule. Time to get back on task! Once I started the assignments, I decided to take time to enjoy the new knowledge I was acquiring and to seek ways to use it with the purpose of enhancing my students ‘work. My preferred tool is the weblog. After reading the chapter on blog, I created my first blog. I realized immediately that I only can incorporate my 9th grade Integrated Science sections, not my 11th and 12th grade IB physics because of serious time constraints. I started working with the blog; adding stuff to the site and personalizing more and more. It has become a virtual link among my three 9th grade sections. Together, the students and I we developed a blogging procedure and protocol: no full name, pick-up a thread instead of creating a new one whenever possible and so on. It was a success. The students get to talk about what we study in class and to reflect on their classmates posts. The post must end with a hanging thread in order to keep the comments going. Once a week, we schedule class time to converse about each other comments. Now the blog is part of the class. I created a wiki and I presented to the class. I see a wiki as a more structured tool than a blog. I uploaded a text that the students needed to use to prepare for a quiz. They had no problem going there and downloaded it. I plan to use the wiki extensively when I start Chemistry next week. I will set up the wiki so students can have the opportunity to edit their classmates’ texts.