Google Hunt

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

There are a variety of search engines out there with what seems to be an endless supply of information. The most popular search engine seems to be Google in which you can search; images, documents, satellite images (google earth), ect. Pick just about anything you want to know and one search will lead you to another, and if those don't seem to be what you are looking for, move on to the next link. I know that I'm not the first person to think of it but I think that it would be fun to create an online scavenger hunt. You could create something more for fun or if you wanted students to learn an research a specific topic this would be a great way to have them do so, while possibly making it a little more tolerable. Have them answer specific questions, list the websites that got them to the answer, what they put into the search engine, and how many tries it took them. You could even have them use the image search to find a specific picture.

PowerPoint with audio!

States of Matter

View more presentations from hayhay221.

I apologize for the poor quality of sound!

PLN so far

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I still do not think that I am gaining the full benefit from my Personal Learning Network. I feel as if I were able to devote more of my time searching an learning from the different blogs that I am following I would be gaining a lot more from this. I seem to be benefiting most from my rss feeds along with the different sites I have tagged on my delicious site rather than Twitter. I am still having a harder time adapting to how this fits into my PLN. I am interested in trying out one of the "webinar's?" I think that this would be interesting and a new experience for me to check out and see what I would be able to gain from something like this. As a whole I think that there is a lot more to gain from a PLN than I have recently been able to do. I think that it is a great way to communicate with others who are interested in the same things and be able to pick up and throw around various ideas.

States of Matter slideshow

Slideshow presentation made with Google Docs.

Do Teachers/Professors have an obligation to be interesting?

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I found this question on one of McLeod's blog postings  and thought that this was almost a "dumb" question to ask. Yet at the same time, how often have we all had teachers that just bore you to death causing your head to nod. Though this question seems to be easy to answer, I feel as if many of these professors and teachers really have this as a top priority. Personally I have a hard time engaging myself into something that I do not find intrest in. I know that there are things that certain people may just not have any desire to learn about, however, if it is not presenting in such a way many students may not even give it a chance.

Google Docs

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This is the first time that I have been introduced to Google Docs, and I am wishing that this wasn't the case. Last semester I was assigned a group research project, and we had to write a collaborative paper. For one, I am not a fan of the idea of having a group of four people write one paper. Everyone has different writing styles and it becomes nearly impossible sometimes to be able to work around everyones schedules to meet. However; I think that had I been introduced to this sooner, or had the professor recomend a tool such as this, that it could have solved some of those difficulties.
Since I am now more aware of this collaborative tool, I can see how different group papers and projects and papers would be a better idea. This would especially be nice for high schoolers and possibly even middle school students to be able to work as a group outside of the classroom. Many times students at this age would have a hard time meeting for transportation reasons. Also, since group work such as this could be a newer introduction, this would give the teacher the opportunity to give feedback throughout the assignment and the ability to guide them in the right direction.
Google Docs gives the students another opportunity to work with technology in the classroom, and expand their options when doing projects such as this.

Etherpad experience

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The day after finding and looking more into etherpad, I personally came acrossed an oportunity to use it myself in a classroom. We were put into groups and had a two paragraph response to some questions that we needed to come up with, which then needed to be posted on our wiki site. Instead of just coming up with our ideas and having one person type them up, I suggested that we try using the Etherpad website, this way we could all see what was being typed and not just one person would be responsible. It worked great! Many of the students in my group enjoyed using this tool and made a point in bookmarking themselves for future use.