Going Deeper

It was nice to sleep in a little today, do a little shoveling and then have a quite long lunch.  But the best part of the day was being able to spend some time going through the links from the mili site on going deeper.  I clicked on the link for Science and started poking around in some of the databases that popped up.  Its amazing how much time you can spend following one link to another.  Anyway I did find a few sites that I had stubbled across a few years ago but haven't been able to find since.   I'm thinking that this would be a good spot to use delicious since I use so many computers I'm never sure where I put what.  Although having this Mac sure has helped keep things organized, at least for me.  

Anyway, I've got to get back to my searching.  I've started digging in at the Internet Public library site and have found some places for my engineering students to check out on inventions.  I hope you all enjoy your break, see you at our next meeting as long as its not snowing;)

wikis or website?

I've been looking at the wiki information trying to figure out how/why I would or could use it in my classroom. I've used the curriki site for a few years as a supplement to my class when I didn't have a textbook. I used this site http://www.curriki.org. It was developed by a guy who wanted to help schools have up to date information in the form of labs, experiments, demos and coursework. Much of the original stuff was not to good but there were some professional parts that, thought buggy, my students really liked. I used the NROC stuff for AP physics. It was great that it would read and show you the lesson and then have check questions that you had to answer correctly before you could go farther. It was hard but even my ELL students found it nice that you could go back through it as many times as you needed.

I have a class web page that has on it everything that I see people putting on their class wikis and I'm not sure why one would be any better than the other. I like the control I have on our class website to post what I want and take things down when needed. I guess I'll have to look into wikis a little deeper to see what I'm missing.

public libraries who knew

Twenty years ago it seemed like I lived at the public library, now I don't think I've been in almost 10 years! We used to go there three times a week or more when my kids were young. As my kids grew up and the internet came into our lives we spent less and less time going to the library. Now that my youngest is 21 I guess he can go on his own.

Seeing that Thing 5 was about libraries I thought I'd better get going and take a look to see how much things have changed. After getting into Thing 5 I started finding all kinds of paths, searches, and links I never knew were there. I did find out real quick that my 10 year old library card needed updating. So I started looking on a Sunday to see if I could find one open and sure enough they are now open on Sundays. I jumped in the car and headed right down there, the place was packed. When I told the librarian that I thought I needed a new card, one I couldn't find my old one, and two, it was over 10 years old, she just smiled and said yea their only good for two years.

So now I have my new card and I am able to get into all kinds of places on my local libraries home page. I've been looking at getting some books sent out to my local library from those at other libraries and its really cool to be able to look online, find it and then "get it" sent to the library just down the block.

I've also introduced my engineering students to the find art of deep searching. Some of them looked puzzled when I told them that when they do a google search that it didn't find everything that was out there. Some were under the impression that if google couldn't or didn't find it, it wasn't worth looking at. They found out real quick that if they wanted to get at some of the latest research and papers from universities and trade journals that google wasn't going to do it for them. They too found that for some of their searches they needed an updated library card. They jumped right in, but I can see that it is going to take some of them some time to figure out the best way to search this new environment. As always I'm looking forward to what they find and can show me!

igoogle

I just got done setting up an igoogle homepage. Very easy to do, but lots of choice on what to have on it. I found that some of the gadgets, like YahooMail, didn't work, so I guess I'll have to switch to gMail. I had set up a Ta-Da list a week or two ago and thought it was pretty cool, I'd been using sticky notes until then. Now that I have the igoogle page I found a "to do list" that works as a gadget, so I switched over to that one. If I could find a calendar gadget that would sync with my iphone that would be cool, but as yet I haven't found one.

On another note, my engineering students have been imersed in using google docs and today started looking at google patent searches. Tons of great info there very helpful in their research.

Research 101

I used the Research 101 site with my engineering students today.  They have a project that will require them to do some in-depth research and they were having some trouble understanding what the differences are between popular and scholarly publications.  It seemed to help especially when they got to the part where they did a side by side comparison.  

RSS readers

I've set up a couple of the RSS accounts and find that I really can get a lot of information very quickly. Sometimes to much info. If I don't check it often I get dozens of new articles which is great but I find myself getting lost in them for hours sometimes. It would be wonderful if we had time built into our day to read all the great things that are out there. I am learning to get more selective in the articles that I read. I guess I'm just learning to budget my time better.

I have found some things that are very timely and useful for my classes, which is why we are spending the time setting up and learning how to use this technology. I'm glad I took that time and look forward to learning more about how to use it with my classes in a more effective way.

Science blogging Thing 2

After watching the videos and doing a blog search, I'm starting to discover ways that could be very helpful for many of my students. I'm not sure yet how I'll set it up but the idea of having students use blogging to continue discussions that we've had in class or as a follow-up to ask other questions seems like a good way to pull in some of my ELL students. They always have lots of questions, many just for clarification, but others that go into great depth they just need more time to process the language before they ask the question. I'll be checking into it some more and let you know what I find.

Switching over

To see my original post go to http://jrozeboom.edublogs.org/

That's where I have my first posting for the first of the 23 things.