LiterateLife

I followed a link today explaining web 2.0 technology being used in Australia. It looks great. I need training on how to take a unit of study and create web 2.0 activities to move the students through the unit. My 7th graders are reading Where the Red Fern Grows. What do I want them to bet from this book? Mostly I want them to engage in the story of Billy and his love for his dogs. I want them to relate to Billy.

We are reading this book together because it is above the independent reading abilities of my students; it is also part of my district’s 7th grade curriculum. There are maybe 2-3 of my students who could handle this text alone.

I could set up a page on my blog that outlines activities for the students to do. The primary one would be responding to the text in a forum, to engage in discussion that requires writing. Possibly personal response posts in their own blogs would work, with a requirement to respond to a specified number of blogs.

I would love to see examples of classroom applications of web 2.0 technologies on the web.

I have spent the last 3 hours surfing, beginning with the Edublogs home page and getting into Second Life and WikiEducator.

I am pretty overwhelmed! I do have lots of questions which I will record here, as I would ask my students to do the same when delving in to new information.

How do I get my voki into my sidebar?

What is up with RSS? I now have some RSS feeds in myyahoo, and some in explorer. I don’t understand why RSS feeds are different (interface?)

I can’t seem to log into SecondLife…I have had an account for over a year, just downloaded SL onto my laptop…wonder why I can’t play?

I want to follow and be followed on Twitter, but how do I get contacts??? And I have to be an edublags supporter to get Twitter on my blog, huh?

I want to create and avatar for my username and blog…the voki would be ok, but I can’t get it to work. Do I go to an avatar creation site?

 I don’t think my district will allow me to use student blogging.  I think, though, I can create pages with student writing published on it. Might be an option to get started, once I figure out how this all works.

It’s almost midnight and I’m pretty tired, but excited about what I am learning here.