Sharing is Caring

This week I signed up for several online services that will help me collaborate with other teachers.

edWeb
I explored several personal learning networks for teachers and ended up choosing edWeb because of its many useful features, its simplicity and user-friendliness, and its professional appearance. edWeb is an easy way to share educational resources such as lesson ideas, articles, blog posts, and videos. The site is very easy to use and comes with several helpful features including a blog and a discussion forum. I think the most beneficial feature is the communities. I joined a community entitled, "Building Understanding in Mathematics." Not only can I share and find great resources for teaching math, but the community hosts a free monthly webinar. The community has over 6000 members and there are new posts regularly. Below is a video that illustrates the features of edWeb.

Diigo

Diigo is a far more efficient and user-friendly way to store bookmarks than using a browser’s bookmarking service. Browser bookmarks can be organized by user created categories, but the Diigo tags allow for more fined-tuned sorting. I can quickly find all my bookmarks that relate to math or to algebra or to graphing or to graphing quadratics without having to fumble through countless subfolders. The tags also allow the bookmarks to be sorted in multiple categories. This is very helpful as a webpage can often apply to several different categories. Teachers can sign up for an educator account, which allows for extra free features. It takes a couple days for an application for a educator account to approved. 

For the most part Diigo is very easy to use. I did have trouble adding sticky notes. Sticky notes are comments that can be added to a bookmarked webpage. Adding "floating" sticky notes was no problem at all. These are comments that apply to the page as a whole. I had a lot of trouble, though, in adding "anchored" comments. These are comments that apply to a particular place on the webpage. Theoretically it is easy to add these comments. With the Diigolet tool open in the bookmark bar, simply highlight the text. A small menu should popup with the choice to "Highlight and Sticky Note." Unfortunately, at least 90% of the time nothing would happen when I clicked there. I will keep working on this issue to see if I can figure it out.

Twitter

This week I signed up for Twitter and sent my first tweet! I explored several ways Twitter can be used by teachers to collaborate, but I was not impressed. I found a couple hashtags that seemed promising: #ksedchat and #edtechmath. Both of them have scheduled weekly Twitter sessions in which teachers can converse live via tweet. Looking back at the tweet history, however, revealed that very few tweets are sent during these scheduled times. I also searched for math teachers to follow. Most of them post math-related items only occasionally, with most of their tweets being comments about random topics. I am not interested in that. 

However, even if I could find active and applicable hashtags or users to follow, I still wouldn't want to use Twitter for sharing ideas because there is no organization to the tweets.. I would much rather use other online tools to search for posts about a specific topic than sift through hundreds of tweets to find what I am looking for. I think Twitter is for teachers who like to file away new ideas that they might use sometime. I work differently, preferring to look for resources when I feel like I need them for a specific purpose.

Math and Education Blog Discoveries

This is my first blog post, not only on this particular blog but on any blog!

During the first week of class, I discovered and explored several new tools that I can use as a math educator. First, I found several education blogs that I think will be helpful for me to grow as a teacher. One is the blog of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. It contains articles over a variety of topics of interest to high school math teachers, including lesson ideas, research reports, and essays on educational philosophy and policy. Another blog I found is Best of the Ed Blogs, which provides the most interesting blog posts from around the web that relate to educational policy and reform. Keeping up on the latest educational ideas and policies is important for any teacher who wants to stay fresh and relevant. A third blog I discovered, Stories from School, contains stories written by teachers about their experiences in the classroom. This helps bring all the other articles on philosophy and policy into sharper focus by seeing what these ideas look like when actually used by real teachers. Again, all teachers who want to develop into better educators can be inspired by these stories. 

Another resource I found that I plan to use with my students is Veritasium. This is a YouTube channel with short videos exploring various topics in science and engineering. The videos are entertaining and thought-provoking, and I think my engineering students will really be challenged and inspired by these videos. 

To keep track of all these blogs, I signed up for a Feedly account. This blog reader allows me to keep up with all these blogs (and the YouTube channel) without having to go to a bunch of different websites. I have even added a couple new blogs to my feed already!

Up to this point in my educational career, I have not used any Web 2.0 technology in my classroom. However, in just the first week of this class, I have already learned about (and signed up for) several new ways to keep informed, get new ideas, and collaborate with other teachers.