I can't believe the semester is drawing to a close and it's time to write my final course reflections!
I have really enjoyed this course immensely. I've had so much fun exploring each of these new technologies and implementing them in various ways. In particular, I've really appreciated the time spent honing my blogging skills. It has been incredibly helpful to kind of be forced to update my blog and comment on my classmates' blogs regularly. It can be tough to make the time to focus on community engagement, but it really is such a wonderful and important part of blogging. I've also found myself focusing more on things like incorporating videos, pictures and links into my posts. I've started making more deliberate choices in labels. I've worked to develop a clear voice. I think my blogging has improved because of this course.
Another part of this course that I particularly appreciated was learning how to create digital stories. I had such a great time creating my digital story and learning how to use imovie. (I'm now more desperate than ever for a MacBook Pro!) This is something that I would have been intimidated to try in the past. I amazed myself with the level of enthusiasm that I had for this project. I happily spent hours reworking my digital story until I was completely happy with it. I'm already planning a few more projects that I'd like to make with imovie. I can't wait to keep exploring with this tool.
I managed to accept the loss of Google Reader, and even happily embraced a new reader, and taught our class a little about using Feedly.
I created and implemented a literacy project - with students in Ohio!
We've covered a lot of technologies in this course, and I have enjoyed them all.
In addition, this course has really made me take stock of just how much passion I have for blogging and social media. I have been blogging personally for several years now, but it's something I have always regarded as a hobby. The first page of my iphone is filled with various blogging and social media applications. I check Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest a hundred several times per day. I follow dozens of blogs which I read regularly. I'm a member of several different message boards. I write a book review blog, and I'm toying with starting a Disney fan blog or a personal blog (or both!). I spend a huge amount of my free time glued to my computer. I am always looking for the new great thing out there on the internet, but for some reason I have never really thought in terms of making my love of these various technologies anything more than a hobby.
This course has allowed me to spend a great deal of time further exploring these technologies. It has made me realize that I would like to make a career in blogging and social media. I have recently begun applying for jobs in this field and I couldn't be happier about it. I am looking forward to putting the skills that I have honed in this course to good use both personally and professionally!
For my second web 2.0 tool, I decided to experiment with Voki. It seems to be a tool that a lot of my classmates have experimented with, so I thought it was time that I try it out for myself.
I spent a little time figuring out the site, and then I threw together this sample Voki:
All in all, I thought Voki was pretty easy to use. Students would probably have fun experimenting with creating different characters and choosing from the various voices. I did like that while you have the option to record your own voice, you can also choose from various "type to text" options. I think that provides a great option for students who may be shy about recording their voices.
If you're in a classroom, have you tried Voki with your students? What did they think of it?
As soon as I read Diana's post about Popplet, I knew that Popplet was something I was going to love. I immediately decided to explore this tool as one of my web 2.0 experiments.
Popplet is essentially a customizable tool for creating graphic organizers. You can make up to five different Popplets with a free account, and then if you want to create more there are a couple different pricing tiers available. It's pretty inexpensive - you can get unlimited Popplets for $30/year.
How can I put this? I'm so immediately obsessed with this tool that I don't even have a classroom and yet I find myself contemplating the yearly subscription!
This is a great tool for anyone who gets just a little too excited about orgizational tools.
If the books on your shelves are sorted first by genre and then alphabetical order...
If you obsessively collect baskets and containers to sort things into...
If there is a drawer in your desk that is dedicated only to various types and sizes of notebooks...
...then you need Popplet, immediately. (Or possibly some type of intervention.)
This tool is fun and easy to use, it's free (well, it can be) and it's easy to share your completed project in a variety of ways. I enjoyed playing with it and I'm betting lots of students would too.
I also really like that you can import pictures into the boxes! That really opens up a ton of possibilities for implementing this tool in meaningful ways.
I made a simple Popplet organizing the major sub-genres of Young Adult literature (of course I did!) and I easily made this in maybe 30 minutes (at least ten of which was spent deciding which colors to assign to which genre and rearranging the boxes in exactly the right visual arrangement).
Feel free to explore my Popplet! And if you haven't tried this tool yet, I highly recommend it.
For my literacy project, I worked with Mr. Boylen's 7th and 8th grade students. You may remember that we have commented on his students' KidBlogs in the past. If you have a few moments, his students are always happy to have teachers stop by and comment on their blog posts! You can view their KidBlogs here and here.
Mr. Boylen was kind enough to ask his students to view the digital story that I created about Young Adult literature:
Then, he asked the students to complete the Google Forms survery that I created for them based on my digital story, which you can view here.
The basic idea was to show the students the video as sort of a brief introduction to Young Adult literature, and then
Overall, I really enjoyed using Google Forms for this project. The survey was simple to create, and one of the design templates had a book theme, which was perfect. I posted the form in a blog post, and it was easy for the students to reply to it there. The process was very smooth and it was great to be able to use this technology to give a survey to students in another state!
The only thing that I found somewhat frustrating is that it ended up being difficult for me to create visual representations of the data that I chose to collect. I was looking forward to creating charts and graphs of the data I collected, but most of the questions I asked had open-ended responses, which in most cases really did not lend themselves well to charts and graphs. In hindsight, perhaps I should have included a few more questions with a given set of responses to choose from. On the other hand, the open-ended questions yielded some really fantastic responses from the students, who gave very thoughtful responses. I really appreciate the obvious effort that the students put into this!
Below, I have shared some of the data that I collected, from 60 7th and 8th grade students:
This pie chart represents the students' responses to the question that
asked them to choose their favorite type of Young Adult literature.
Since I used so many open-ended responses, pasting all of the replies here would make for an overwhelming post! Instead, I have chosen select parts of the survey to share here. I did choose to include every response to the question, "What is your favorite Young Adult book", however. So many of my classmates are currently classroom teachers, I thought this particular information might be helpful for them to have!
Do you enjoy reading Yound Adult literature?
54 students said some variation of yes
4 students said maybe or it depends
2 students said no
What is your favorite Young Adult book?
The Rebounder
Identity Theft
Perfect
The Hunger Games (12)
Wrestling Sturbridge
Falling In
Trapped
I Heart You, You Haunt Me (2)
Caddy Ever After
Runaway
Stolen
Fever
Double Identity
Cradle and All
The Lying Game
Eat, Pray, Love
Eragon
Life as We Knew It
Squashed
Invisible
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Into No Man's Land
Freaky Green Eyes
Chicken Stripes
Friday Night Lights
Elsewhere
Twilight (2)
Safe Haven
Before I Fall
Wild Life (2)
Flawless
The Fault in Our Stars
This is Not a Test
Peak
Campfire Weenies
The Hobbit
(Undecided) (2)
Comfort
Jane Yolen
Summer Ball (2)
Thirteen Reasons Why
Soldier Boys
Slam
Boot Camp
The Running Dream
The Hardy Boys
Snitch
The Host
Lord of the Kill
Harry Potter
What are two books you read recently and enjoyed? What did you like about them? Room & Firefly Lane: "written from an interesting perspective and led me to think about situations in a different light" White Fang & Wild Life: "involved the outdoors and made you want to keep reading them" Among the Imposters & Slob: "something new happens in every chapter" Reached & Crossed: "based on the future of what America could become" Harry Potter & The Hunger Games: "action, fast-paced" Devil's Arithmetic & The Boy in the Striped Pajamas: "something exciting or thrilling on almost every page" Double Identity & Troy High: "very interesting...realistic" Air Raid Pearl Harbor & Baseball Great: "felt like I was in the book" The Hunger Games & The Lost Hero: "very addictive... once I read it I couldn't stop" Eldest & Firestar: "dragons" Into No Man's Land & Never Stop Pushing: "influential, inspiring and historical" The Diary of Anne Frank & Perfect: "talked about real people and their lives and things that can go wrong" The Hunger Games & The Bomb: "keeps you on your toes... when you think things will slow down they speed up" Radiance & Freaky Green Eyes: unpredictable... relate to many decisions in your life" The Devil's Arithmetic & Backfield Package: "full of suspense" Sarah's Key & Lush: "like you are there watching"
What makes a Young Adult book great?
"shows real life problems and stories"
"about kids our age most of the time and situations we could be in"
"stories you can relate to"
"a fast-paced plot, interesting characters and surprise twists"
"love, or drama"
"make you feel like something of the sort could actually happen to you"
"lots of action"
"adventure"
"keep you guessing until the end" *An overwhelming majority of the students surveyed mentioned here that they like books about characters and situations they can relate to.
If anyone is interested in viewing the full results of my survey, just leave me a comment here and I would be happy to share the Google Form.
I hope you all found the results of this survey as interesting as I did! I think it's very significant that out of 60 students surveyed, only 2 students reported disliking Young Adult literature. Clearly, if we want to get students interested in reading we have an enormous genre to explore.
Once again, I would like to say thank you to Mr. Boylen for asking his students to participate in this project for me. Thank you also to all of the students who took the time to respond! I greatly appreciate your feedback.
I really enjoyed experimenting with Google Sites and creating my own site. I was pleasantly surprised by how intuitive this process was.
I'm not a classroom teacher, so in approaching what kind of site to make I just chose a topic that interests me and ran with it.
I created a site that is meant to serve as a brief introduction to the world of Young Adult literature. It's obviously not finished, because the purpose of this exercise was simply to experiment with creating a website using Google Sites... but if you'd like to check it out, you can click here.
I basically created a home page, on which I would include a brief definition of Young Adult literature, and some basic information like:
a list of book blogs that review Young Adult literature
information about GoodReads, a site that lets users log the books they have read or want to read
twitter accounts which discuss Young Adult literature
Then I created sub-pages, one for each sub-genre of Young Adult literature. I included on each page a few examples of books that fall into that sub-genre. I imported pictures of some of my own books for each category to make the site more visually appealing.
What was your experience with this project like? I thought Google Sites was pretty easy to navigate, and I was impressed with how much flexibility a free service offered. This is definitely something I could see myself using in the future!
Now that we've all had some time to process the fact that our beloved Google Reader will soon be closing its doors forever, I thought I'd put together a post that introduces bloggers to one of the alternative aggregate readers: Feedly.
In my opinion, Feedly is the best replacement available for Google Reader. Everyone should use the aggregate reader that best fits their own personal needs, and fortunately there are plenty of options out there if Feedly doesn't seem to be the best fit for you. But let's go over some of the features that Feedly offers, so that you can learn a little about Feedly and begin to decide if it might work for you.
To get started learning about Feedly, you can visit their site directly via the link above. There is a wealth of information available on the Feedly blog. You can also follow Feedly on Twitter.
Now, let's talk about some of the things I love about Feedly.
Perhaps the single most compelling reason to make the switch from Google Reader to Feedly? You can import all of the blogs you already follow into Feedly - and it's beyond easy to do.
After you install Feedly, when you open it the first time it will give you the option to connect to Google Reader. Click on "Login" and log into your Google account. Next, Feedly will ask you to allow access to your data in Google Reader. If you select "allow access", Feedly will immediately transfer all of your subscriptions from Google Reader into Feedly. It will also keep all of your subscriptions sorted into their existing categories!
Another compelling feature of Feedly is the (free!) mobile application which syncs across your computer, phone and tablet.
Below are some screenshots from my Feedly app. Notice that the app cleanly displays your blog categories, with easy click through to first a specific category and then a particular blog.
The Type A personality in me loves how clean and organized this is.
The app is simple and fun to use, with minimal tapping and swiping to navigate to the areas you need. It's inherently intuitive: open it up and spend just a few minutes playing with it and you'll quickly learn a lot. When you start using the app, it will give you simple instructions and shortcuts like this:
Let's talk about some of the simple things you can do within the Feedly application. You can easily "share" content via Faceboook, Twitter, Google+, or email by clicking on the arrow seen at the top right of the following picture:
After you click on the arrow, various social media icons will appear, as seen below. Simply click on the icon for the media platform with which you mean to share the content.
When viewing a particular post, you may wish to bookmark it to return to later. Click the bookmark icon at the top right (shown below in green) and Feedly will mark the post as saved and add it to your saved posts. Bookmarked in error? Simply click the bookmark again, and Feedly will remove the bookmark.
You can search for new blogs to follow, by browsing one of the following categories or simply entering a key word or phrase into the search bar. I've found great new book review blogs to follow by entering terms like "book review", "book blogger", and "Young Adult books" into the search bar. Play around with it! Enter some of your interests and hobbies and see what comes up. You may stumble upon something really great.
Sometimes after a time you will find that you are no longer interested in following certain blogs. If you decide you want to stop following a particular blog, you can go into "Settings" (located at the bottom of your list of categories) and easily delete feeds to stop following them. First, go into Settings. Tap "Edit Content", and you will see "Remove" and "Cancel" buttons pop up under your list of categories. From here, you can click on a particular category and see all of the content listed under that category (as seen in the third picture). Check the box for the feed(s) you want to stop following, and click "remove".
Looking to change something besides which content you follow? Go to "Settings", and then "Advanced Settings". From here you can easily customize the look and feel of your Feedly application.
Overall I personally find Feedly to be a great substitute for Google Reader. In fact, once I moved past my initial disappointment over losing my tried and true Google Reader, I discovered that in many ways I actually prefer Feedly. It has a clean, modern look that I think many people with an interest in blogging and social media will appreciate. It is incredibly easy to navigate, and has plenty of options for customization. I love that the computer, app and tablet versions all sync so that no matter which device I am using, my content is there. All in all I would consider my transition from Google Reader to Feedly to be complete at this point, and I'm very happy with the change.
Dying to know even more about Feedly? The following posts contain
great information surrounding Feedly's various features:
