Getting Organized

  This week we are organizing our information and also our ideas. It is  like when you are changing season and you reorganize your wardrobe to have everything prepared for the new season.

We are stepping stones to our final project writing parts of it every week and during this week we had the opportunity to read previous students' projects. I have always wanted to SEE how teachers expected my work to be like and I have never had the chance before so for me, this is a great advantage! Not only because we have the possibility to read how the different parts of the project were written by other students but also have  because we can read what others are facing in their countries, the different characteristics of students, their needs and how teachers managed to help them.

I think there are some issues that are international. Everywhere there are teachers with no resources, mixed ability classes and students who need help in a certain area.

The creativity teachers have is what makes the difference and being enrolled in this course means that we do care, we want to help our students and we want them to succeed. 

We have also organized information. We have created Delicious stacks where we can add bookmarks to have them handy. We can write information about the web page and a picture of the page is shown next to the description. Really useful because you know you will never loose the sites you want to remember and you can access them from different computers. 

But I want to talk about a similar web page where you can also add bookmarks and organize them like a board of tiles. Symbaloo is the name of the site.

Click this photo to see a colleague's webmix. Her name is Elodie Largeron and she saved really great web pages. 

This is one I am trying to create.

As I am a visual learner I love the way you can see how they are organized and the colours help to categorize them
Try it, you won´t regreat!

What a fruitful week! 

I think this course deserves more time to get the most of it. I had a very busy week at work and I feel sad because I think I did't do my best.

Anyway, I've learned there are more search engines than I could imagine and that some of them are really good. Google would be great for general purposes but when you want something specific there are other ways to find it. 

We have used other search engines provided by NoodleTools and some of them were really useful.

  is the one I liked the most. As it is said in their main page: It is a targeted search engine for students, teachers, administrators and caregivers. Try it, you won't regret!

We have also worked on a task were I had to use my dear Bloom's Taxonomy.

I found this picture really helpful:

I mention in the Discussion thread that I am working with SIOP model- If you want to know more about it, go here. 

I also want to share something about my country, some of you were amazed by the fact that in my country there is a project that gives One Laptop Per Child. 

This video is explaining something about the project.

Week 1 - Welcome!

 

What a great experience starting this new project. I have always wanted to start a blog, I  have tried before but I wasn´t consistent enough to maintain it. The course is giving me the chance to get to know the art of blogging.



Things I've leant while doing it:

• how to add a favicon
• how to link a word to a site
• what widgets are
• the difference between widgets and gadgets

Now I´m trying to customize it. I´ve learnt how to change the template of the blog and I´m looking for "THE" one for my blog. Let´s hope to find it.

Reflecting upon using a blog for class I think that motivating students to read regularly a class blog is the key issue. We can create great blogs but if students don´t see them, they are useless. Robert said "we do need a purpose to write a blog" and I would add, students also do need a purpose to read it.

Thanks for reading and come back soon!