Web2 Tools

  1. Web2 Tools
    1. Book clubs and reading groups
    2. Slam poetry

 

After you check out this video about wikis, let's give it a try. Just answer this simple question.....

What is one of your favorite online activities? Just click on edit and type in what you want to say. You can even paste in a link if you want.

 

Steve Spaeth: I am designing a course Technology in the classroom that I want to coordinate with other faculty members so that students can use tools they learn in my course to help enhance learning and assessment in other courses. I found today that I could move a document from one medium to our UNE Teachers wiki. I hope it will be as straightforward as planning a camping trip!

 

Book clubs and reading groups

 

Lisa Hogan: I belong to a pretty informal book club. Our book club has been around with various members for a while. We had read many books and talked about them. Some new memebers joined our book club. We set up a del.icio.us account (a social tagging site) where we listed the books we had read, tagged them,and now our new readers can see what we have already read. Everyone can add suggestions for new books for future reading. We have found this quite useful. It makes me wonder how del.icio.us could be used with students in english classes.

 

This informal use of del.icio.us illustrates how some kinds of tools are flexible and can be used in a wide range of ways. But some enterprising developers have already recognized book groups as natural social networks and are developing tools to support them and facilitate similar communication and collaboration. My current favorite in this category is LibraryThing at http://www.librarything.com. It is a booklovers' social network developed in Portland, Maine. I wonder whether students could browse groups to find networks of interest to them. The networks then could augment services that we provide in school.

 

GoodReads at http://www.goodreads.com offers a related service. Lisa Ruefenacht, a reviewer at PC online compares and contrasts LibraryThing and GoodReads:

 

 Goodreads focuses more on user ratings than it does on cataloguing and formatting. If you're looking more for a way to keep your endless collection organized, LibraryThing is probably a better fit. If you're looking mainly for people-generated (versus database-driven) recommendations, then Goodreads is for you.

 

Noelle Richard, a student intern in the Department of Education at UNE, used GoodReads with eighth-grade reading classes at Saco Middle School. Her students, mentor, and she learned and enjoyed the experience. Read more about it at Reading/Writing Workshop and GoodReads. GoodReads recognizes school groups as a potential source of users and promotes support for them in their newsletter:

School Groups Rock: Teachers, take advantage of your students' obsession with all things online and create a Goodreads group for your class. Challenge your class to a read-a-thon, post discussion questions on the site, and stir up conversation with your students in the virtual world. Students, bring together the friends who always have something interesting to say about that great book they just finished. You'll never lust for a good book again. We already more than 200 school groups.

 

Slam poetry

 

Chris Nulle:  I have introduced my Alterntaive Ed.  students to slam poetry and have found that a great place to start is at http://www.mayhempoets.com Check out the podcasts. Even though it is audio, the students stay focused as they listen to it. Jeff Davison and I also took a YouTube video by George Carlin entitled "Modern Man" and had the students compare and contrast the content, style, and format with slam poetry.

 

For those readers who are not as familiar with Slam Poetry, look at "A brief history of slam" given most appropriately as slam.


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    SC Spaeth:I had to make one small edit to the link. When links fall at the end of a sentence, it is sometimes difficult to construct a properly punctuated English sentence (with a period and no space) AND a functional link. If you add the period to the link, then the Internet address system "sees" the period and thinks that is part of the address (which it typically is not). I often will add the period after the space, add another space and the remove the space between the link and the terminal period. You know you've got it when the period is not underlined.
    nulle:Jeff Davison and I worked this morning with the concept of using pbwiki and explored its possible uses.
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