Week+5+Journal

Sunday November 22 - Saturday December 5


 * Thursday - Today I went on the moodle and read all about wordles. I was instantly curious about what a wordle was. I had heard of it before, but wasn't familiar as to what it actually was. So I did a search and created a bunch of wordles. I saved them on my moms computer, but for some reason I can't log in to my wiki there. So then I went home and logged into my wiki, but then the wordle page wouldn't work. Next, I went to school and logged into my wiki, created a wordle, and then couldn't get the wordle to copy to my wiki. By this point I was pretty frustrated, so I just saved the wordles on the wordle site and linked from the wiki to the site. I'm still thinking of how I could use this in class. [|"The Outsiders" Wordle]
 * I read the readings a few days ago, but I kind of forgot what they were about so I had to reread them. I don't know if I'm missing something here or what. I'm not really seeing where this is going. The grad credit question this week wanted to know the barriers for creating a school of 21st century learners and then the solutions to those barriers. Didn't we already answer this during week 1? I went back and looked. We answered what are the what are the barriers to implementing in our classrooms. Well, aren't the barriers for the school and the classroom pretty close. (A little too close in my case.) I felt that this was just busy work. I'm tired of reading articles and I'm ready to start actually doing something.
 * After viewing the Needs Assessments I'm not impressed. First of all, I don't think we should all have to reply to the other needs assessments. There are only three. If you have something to add then great, otherwise you shouldn't be required to reply. Maybe you can't think of any way to do it better. And, that one school did theirs for the teachers. I thought it was supposed to be for the students. Haven't they done teacher needs assessments for years. I think ours are saved somewhere in order for people to access later. How could you completely miss the main directions. I though maybe I was wrong, so I went back and looked again, and then talked with my team about it. They said no, and that I was thinking correct.
 * I did enjoy reading the article Cell Phones: 21st Century Learning Tools. We have a pretty tight "no cell phone" policy. And I know it's already been brought up to the superintendent about relaxing the policies on cell phone usage and he seemed agreeable to this. I would like to learn more about how to use the cell phones in class. I would be more interested in reading articles about how specifically I could use it, rather than just a general article that could apply to teachers or parents. I have an iphone and I'm aware of all the great uses it has. I often feel bad when pulling it out to look at my computer passwords (saved in an app), making notes to myself, or using it as a timer.