Google Documents

Today I am working on preparing my class blog as a hub for all the activities I intend for my students to participate in for the upcoming school year. For example, I want to have a running list of vocabulary words that my students can access at any time and search for their own definitions before I begin a lesson. I could certainly post each day's vocabulary words the old fashioned way, by writing them on a dry erase board or taping words to a wall, but the problem I see is that if a student is absent one or more days, I need an easy way for them to find the words they need to get caught up without cluttering my walls and boards with days and days of vocabulary words. So why not use a Google Document?

 I can use Google Documents several different ways. My vocabulary word pages can only be edited by me, but viewed by anyone. I've made it easy for my students to find their vocabulary words by creating a link to that specific Google Document (a spreadsheet, in this case) straight from my class blog. Other documents, such as my classroom's "Jobs in Science" page, will be a class collaborative project, where students can not only access, but can also edit the page as they learn about and think of jobs related to the  material we cover in class.

Ideally, I would change the Sharing settings on each document to be only accessible and editable by my students only. I have the option of setting up each document this way, but in order to do so, I must have the email addresses of each of my students. I have discovered over the past year that due to the use of texting, chatting tools and social networking sites, few of my students actually have email accounts. The easiest way for me to give them access to my class documents is just to open up the editing rights to "everyone," which I suppose gives perfect strangers the ability to participate in my class projects, but this is probably not a likely situation and if it were to happen, isn't that the point of a collaborative project anyway?

Embedding a Google Calendar into Your Blog

I have finally found a way to embed a calendar onto my blog so that my students can see a schedule of assignments and projects for my class! First, you need to have an account with Google, of course. When you login to google, you'll see a "Calendar" link at the top left of the Google homepage and you can add to your calendar from there.

Once you have a calendar started, go to Google Calendar Embedhelper , which will allow you to choose which calendar to want to embed (if you have more than one created) and the Embedhelper will give you an embed code that can be added as an HTML widget on your blog.

The best part is that you don't appear to have to get a whole new embed code every time you make changes to the calendar. They automatically appear on the embedded calendar, which saves a lot of trouble that you have to go through with other widgets that you want to update.

Finally!

Flickr Comments Experiment

Click on this picture to view comments on it and find questions to think about!

Classroom Use of Wikis - An Awards Page

Another use of a classroom wiki that I have come across is using one as an Awards Page or Hall of Fame. This classroom wiki has a Hall of Fame page for wikis and blogs from around the world, but I think you could also set up an awards page for student created projects just within your own classroom. I think is a good idea regarding positive reinforcement in a classroom through the use of technology.

For more ideas about using wikis in the classroom, check out this site: 50 Ways to Use Wikis for a More Collaborative and Interactive Classroom . Some of these ideas are the common ones you hear about in workshops or other websites, but others were new to me and I think there are a lot of good ideas here.

WIkis in the Classroom - Collaborative FAQ

I am slowly warming up to the idea of using a class wiki after seeing a few things I hadn't thought of that might really work in a high school classroom or campus. One wiki I found actually has a couple of things that I liked. One is using a wiki as a collaborative FAQ section that the students can put together for new students in a school or class. This wiki shows how an english class made a student created FAQ section, although the link to that section does not work at the time that I'm writing this. I am still looking for a classroom that is trying this and for now, this will have to do. Not a bad idea, though.

Science Night Announcement

This is just a quick example of how I could use Slideshare.net as a way to announce an upcoming event in my science program. Once I have the date finalized, I will probably embed this on my class webpage.

Sciencenight

View more presentations from Kim.

Using Blogs in the Classroom - Seeing Science in the Real World

This blog is one that I chose, not because it is necessarily made for the classroom, but because I could use it in the classroom. ScienceBlogs is a one stop shop for looking for blogs related to science (which I happen to teach) and I think it could be a really cool way to show kids how science is being used in the real world, by real scientists. These scientists are writing not only for experts in their own fields, which means that their material is much easier for my students to understand without it being watered down very much either. There are lots of new ideas being talked about in this blog and I like the flurry of activity that is happening hhere because it shows just how dynamic and changing the field of science really is. I think that using this blog in my classroom could be an awesome way for me to get kids thinking about science in the news and also see the creative side of science. National Geographic is a partner on this blog as well, so I trust the science included on it, even though some of it is pretty edgy for high school level students.