Lucier_Telitha_iGoogle

These are the screenshots of my iGoogle homepage. The first picture depicts the ETC homepage. The second shot depicts the AR/CBL homepage. The last shot depicts MY homepage.

Looking at Blogs?!

Yep I'm looking at blogs. It's pretty cool actually. I didn't know that there was so much interesting information out there concerning things that I use every day - like Edutopia. This is something that I already have a subscription to anyways. I get regular emails and the print magazine, it was neat to find out that I could subscribe to it. I found some really neat blogs and then subscribed to a few of my favorites. Literacy is Priceless is a blog that discusses how to keep students current and how to keep them interested. I thought "Wow - I could totally use this, my Action Research is on assistive technology and literacy." I found two really cool blogs about science, the first is Steve Spangler's Blog and the second is The Art of Teaching Science. I'm hoping to pull some really neat and fun ideas from these two for my classes. I know the boys love it when we do different sorts of activities and labs in class, problem is Mrs. Lucier runs out of ideas every once in a while. It's nice to pull ideas from other sources. The last blog that I subscribed to today is titled Teh Dyslexic Storyteller. The vast majority of my students are dyslexic. I work at a school which was founded to help the classic dyslexic, this one was a no brainer for me. It's written by a dyslexic and it deals with issues that they face in school and in the real world. I think I'm most excited to be reading this last one because of the implications that it has for how I relate to my students. This has been an experience which as left me saying "Yay Blogs!"

Blogs for Education

This is my first blog posting. Blogs can be used educationally - here I am using it for my current class, month 5 folks! It's gone so fast. I was reading my most recent textbook - Web 2.0 for Schools by Julia Davies and Guy Merchant today and they presented some really fantastic ideas for using blogs in a classroom. It made me want to run to my classroom right now and get started. I can totally envision the use of blogs in my classes - probably just my freshman class though. There are only 6 of them, totally more manageable than if I tried to get all of the students to create blogs.

According to one site that I saw, titled Blogging Across the Curriculum, blogging has become huge. Many scholars are studying it and students are using it to communicate ideas. Pretty cool considering that 10 years ago computers weren't that widespread in schools. It's almost like we've come out of the dark ages as far as technological devices are concerned. An online newspaper, The Brown and White, had an article stating that the College of Education has opened a free forum blog for all of its instructors, students and alumni. This is so neat. When I was in college the first time, bloggers were not people you knew. It has gone so mainstream. I get teased by my family for how much I use technology now, all I tell them is "Aren't you glad you know someone who can help when you have computer problems?"

I'm still cruising the internet. Did you know that Wikispaces has given away 100,000 free wikis. I didn't. We all learn something new every day. Guess that's my something new.