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.