More From Flickr, Does it Ever End?? Using Big Huge Labs

Big Huge Labs offers a great deal of potential to get students interested in the subject matter within Social Studies. Pictures are worth a thousand words and if that is true, Big Huge Labs has more words in it than anything out there. The site offers numerous ways on how to incorporate visuals into any type of lesson or project.

I would use Big Huge Labs as part of a final assessment for my students. I would have them create a magazine cover or a movie poster that would incorporate pictures and themes about the information they just learned about in the previous unit plan. By doing it this way, students have created their own piece of work that allows them to explain the information they just learned into their own words. This will better help them understand and process the information so they can retain it for future use.

Big Huge Labs also allows the students to sort through thousands of pictures on Flickr, something they may not be able to do with conventional means. It enhances the learning process and eases the stress on the students by being able to find pictures all in one place.

by Juan Rubiano

Flickr...Creative Common Licensing

Creative common licensing allows the owner of a picture to decide on the extent of which their picture can be used by the general public. On Flickr, there are four different types of licensing that are offered to the owners' of the pictures.

1. Attribution: You allow others to display and distribute your copyrighted works as long as you are given credit.

2. Noncommercial: You allow users to display your works and derivative works based upon it, but for noncommercial use only.

3. No Derivative Works: You allow users to copy and paste your items as they are,, no derivative works may be done to them.

4. Share Alike: You allow others to display derivative works, but only under the same license as your picture is under.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bexwalton/ / CC BY 2.0

BlogLine! Very Cool

While looking through the blogs for my BlogLine, I came across a very interesting blog on the Free Technology for Teachers Blog called the 10 Resources for Teaching and Learning About WWII. It has links to interactive maps and virtual tours that would stimulate students and enhance their learning process. They blog also provides websites that provides lessons plans for teachers who are looking to improve upon their WWII lessons.It is a very interesting blog overall that gives any Social Studies teacher an opportunity to use technology within the classroom and help their students better learn and understand the important lessons that come from a major event in history.

Podcast as an Educational Tool

Podcast can be a very useful tool within the field of education for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons that I like to use podcasts, is that a majority of the time you can get them for free off the internet, which leaves more resources available to use elsewhere within your classroom. They are also made available to everyone, so if a student was to miss the podcast within the classroom, they would be able to watch it at home on their computer or download it onto their ipod or some other type of personal recording device and watch it anywhere the wish to. Podcast also allow students access to different cultures and ideas that they may not come into contact with on a regular basis, they help students become more of a global citizen. The podcast I would love to use within my own classroom was one created by PBS. It is based on a series entitled The War, that they created about WWII and the lives of some of the soldiers that survived the war. I feel this is a great learning tool for students because it is first hand accounts of the war captured on video. This information about the war is becoming rarer and harder to find as that generation of people die off. It also allows the students to make a personal connection to the event because they are able to see and feel what these soldiers were going through during one of the most important time periods of American and world history. It is also created by PBS, which is a very reliable source of information, and not done by one individual or small group of people who may present a biased view of the war. Overall I feel podcast have great potential to be valuable learning and teaching tools.

Global Collaboration and Cooperation

SKYPE!

I feel that Skype can be one of the most effective and useful tools to help promote global cooperation and collaboration in today's global community, plus as an added bonus it is free when used over the internet. Skype offers students the opportunity to talk to other students, experts, professors, or teachers, from across the globe. This gives them first hand knowledge and experiences that they would not be able to obtain from your ordinary classroom. It gives teachers more flexibility when they want to provide a guest speaker for their classroom, because the speaker doesn't have to physically be there to pass on their experiences and knowledge. It enriches the classroom and learning experience because the students are gaining valuable information that the teacher themselves may not have. Skype can be a very useful learning tool for our students who are entering into the global community as global citizens.

EPALS!

As a teacher, especially a Social Studies teacher, I try to encourage my students to be not just citizens of the United States, but to be global citizens. With the world becoming a more interconnected place, that responsibility of being a global citizen takes on a greater meaning and responsibility. To help students understand and achieve this goal, ePals can become a very useful tool.

The forums that exist on ePals is a great place to start students down the path of becoming global citizens. There they are able to interact with other students worldwide on topics that they find interesting. There they are allowed to experience and gain valuable information about other cultures and ideas that they may not come into contact with while living within their own community. The student forums are a great beginning for any student.

The Classroom Matching and ePals Projects are other great tools that will allow students to cooperate with other students from across the globe on projects that may not have existed without the help of ePals. All the tools found on ePals help create a more interconnected global community and at the same time allows our students to explore beyond their own horizon.

I would use the tools found on ePals for a wide variety of activities and reasons. The focus area located on ePals has numerous different activities that can be used with the field of Social Studies, an example would be Black History. By using ePals, students in my own classroom would be able to learn about different cultures and ideas concerning Black History through other students and teachers from across the globe. This would allow them to experience different cultures through first hand experience. The site has many other useful tools that can link directly back to Social Studies and it also allows the students to explore new cultures on their own on a secure website.

Microblogging

Using Twitter as a tool for education? It sounds like it has a great deal of potential within the classroom and it could increase the students interest in almost any topic. I read the articles Can we use Twitter for Educational Activities and Forget E-Mail:New Messaging Service Has Students and Professors Atwitter . From the field of Social Studies, I would love to use twitter within the classroom to keep the students up to date on current events, it has great potential to keep students together on group projects because they will be able to collaborate outside of the classroom, as a teacher I would be able to follow there progress through a project, and it is fun for the students. Students today are vet comfortable with twittering and adding to the classroom as a learning tool would only increase their interest. They are growing up with the technology and to actively engage them in the classroom, we have to introduce new forms of technology and Twitter shows great potential.

Social Networking

Classroom 2.0- I found that this site could be very useful and holds a great deal of potential for any teacher. I liked that there was a forum on the site that allowed teachers to ask for help from others on the site about projects that they want to do or about technology that is out there and how it can improve a lesson. It was very easy for me to navigate my way through the site. I was able to search the site by either a subject area or by a certain tool that I may want to use within the classroom. The site also provided the users with other links to sites that would allow the user to learn about different types of technology that is out there.

The site could be a great place to build up any educators social network, they have a large number of people as members who all seem to be willing to help out one another. I would enjoy using the forum to ask about how to properly use technology in a lesson.

The site also allows you to join numerous other groups that are related to education and technology. Once again it is a great place to begin social networking. I would start off with the "Beginner Group" but hopefully shortly after that I would be on my way to join numerous others.

The Learner's of Today

Today's learners are very complex and very adaptive. They have grown up in a world that is full of technology that is ever changing and evolving, so I am going to stay with the technology theme and say today's learners are like small search engines. They are their own google. Students today will obtain important information or knowledge from a wide variety of learning experiences, whether they are informal or formal learning experiences. Then when they need some type of information, they will search back through their learning experiences to find the most relevant piece of knowledge or information to help them out. Search engines are similar in that they will search through thousands of websites that contain a vast amount of information and will present the user with the most relevant sites for their search.
The information that is retained within the learner and the search engines also in a constant state of change. Information that is regularly used and correct is kept and easily remembered, as with a search engine that information is presented first. While knowledge and information that is not used regularly or is not relevant to a situation, is harder to retain or forgotten by a learner. With a search engine this type of information is presented last or not at all. The learner's of today, like search engines, have "The ability to draw distinctions between important and unimportant information..." and learner's, and to a smaller extent search engines, should also have "The ability to recognize when new information alters the landscape based on decisions made yesterday is also critical"
Today's learners are similar to search engines because they both are able to look for new knowledge from a wide variety of sources and determine what is important and what is unimportant, then determine how to use it properly.

Students and technology in the classroom, or lack there of

The video that really caught my attention was A Vision of K-12 Students Today. It was the only video that I have not already seen and I felt it was a very interesting video that really got to the heart of the matter. Students today are digital learners, they have grown up with technology in their homes and in school, they have matured along with it. Students are accustomed to using all different forms of media and technology outside of the classroom, but while they are in the classroom, so many teachers don't use technology or don't know how to use technology properly. The section of the video that really caught my attention was when they showed the statistics of how many teachers don't use technology within the classroom to allow their students to create their own work because the teachers themselves have never used the technology. Students know how to use the technology and are being stifled within the classroom because the teachers are not using it, so how is this helping students better prepare for the future?

Blog Safety

With the rapid advancement with technology today and the high number of students who use the internet and all the tools that can be found there, we need to ensure that students know how to protect themselves will they are online.

1. Do not put any personal information about yourself online or put any personal images of yourself within your online works.

2. Make sure that when you are blogging, the privacy settings are properly set so you can control who sees your posts, allow parents and teachers to view them, do not make them open to the public.

3. Have your studenst stay away from commercial sites that prompt them to input personal information. As teachers, we need to prescreen websites that we are sending our students to and discourage them from inputing any personal information when they are prompted too.

4. Inform the parents and the administration that the students will be blogging and using the website for classroom activities so they can also keep an eye on what the students are doing to help keep them safe while online.

Three Ways to Use Blogs in Class

1. One of the first ways I would use blogs within my own classroom would be as some form of assessment. This type of assessment would allow the students to express themselves in a more creative fashion than they normally would be able to with just writing an essay. Students would be able to import pictures, videos, audio clips, and hyperlinks within there blog to explain and support the information that they are providing within the blog. Blogs are also something that most students are familar with today, so it could be easier and less stressful for them to create a blog on an historic topic than to write a paper or to take a test.

2. I would use a classroom blog where students could find out information about due dates for certain assignments, post rubrics for the assignments, and create a forum where the students are able to answer questions or pose questions about different types of activities that will be posted on the classroom blog. By providing links on the classroom blog about the topics we are learning about, it will allow the students to learn in a less stressfull environment and at their own rate.

3. The classroom blog would also be a way for the parents of the students to keep track of what their students are learning within the classroom. It could get the parents more involved in the students learning process, something that most teachers would love to have.