October 15, 2013 - Hangouts, Open Content, Twitter

In today's class we did our Google hangout with Professor Ross.  It's a lot like Skype except with a group.  Each hangout was about a half hour and my group included Sarah and Alex.  While the other groups did their hangout, we worked on a few items as a group and a few individual items.

One of the things our group put together was a website that details Open Content.  We provided some links and You Tube videos that give a nice amount of information and give a good overview of it.  Here is a link to our Open Content web page: Open Content Website

One of the items we worked on individually was a task list Professor Ross put together for working with Twitter.  Some of these tasks included tweeting a picture, following 5 educators, and tweeting an educational quote.  This was good for me personally because I don't "do Twitter" but since I'm more familiar with it now, I might make it part of my social media repertoire.

October 9, 2013 - Social Media

In today's class we presented different social media sites with our groups that could be incorporated into teaching.  Our presentation was on Pinterest and the other groups presented Scoop it, Symbaloo, and Livebinders.

I'm familiar with Pinterest because I use it personally, but of the other 3 that were presented I think I really like Scoop it!  I liked how it was a newspaper style pinboard and the articles were posted directly to the page, as opposed to a link to an outside site.

After our presentations, we covered Edmodo, which was great because the 8th grade ELL class I'm currently observing uses Edmodo daily and I had no idea what it was.  Professor Ross put several tasks on Edmodo and showed us how to turn in assignments thru the site.  Our assignments showed us how Gamification can be used in the classroom.  It was a lot of fun and definitely something that would keep students interested and engaged.

October 1, 2013 - Hangouts and Forms

For our Tuesday, October 1 class we really covered a lot! We covered Google forms and created surveys which I thought was so fun and useful! One nice feature was that the results of the survey were automatically put into a spreadsheet that could be easily viewed.

Another fun thing we did, the whole class got into a Google Hangout.  It was really great, and I can see this being useful in the future when I'm working with groups and maybe meeting in person isn't a possibility.  I used to work for an engineering company and we would have meetings with people from all over the United States.  Our company would either fly there and have people fly in - this would be so much more economical and can achieve almost the same effect as meeting in person.