Summing up week 2

It is amazing to me that I have only been in class three weeks- I have learned so much. It does tend to swirl in my mind but I will tease it out to make some sense of it.
Widgets- I did finally learn to add a widget. I check the weather often, now I have it on my page.
PLN- I am still twittering but as of yet I have only found relevant material from those in class which is ok. My son said that I should be using my phone to send updates! no thanks. I am using my electronics more than I really care to now. I do need to drop some of my twitter groups- nothing but ads and car loan information under the guise of science.
I have found some students in another online course that I have been emailing with good information. I tend to like the deeper relationships that you don't get with 140 characters. Goggle reader is helping me stay on top of most things digital.
Images- I have enjoyed the image tools I learned to use this week. I have shared Picnik with everyone who comes within 5 feet of my computer. I also was very impressed with Creative Common. That people would want to share and have their work used by others is amazing to me. I certainly made me want to participate on some level. As I did more searching I really looked at Flickr and liked what I saw. Soooo I did it, I registered (I have now registered more in the past 3 weeks than I have in the past 3 years!). I even went one step farther, I joined the educators group. I uploaded my photos and put them into sets.
Copyrights-In really examining copyrights and the material I used in class, I am nervous. We have all found a graphic illustrates a point best and now I read we can't "copy the same works for more than one semester, class, or course". I did find that our textbooks in class have great graphics but to add these to a power point or just in a large format so the whole class can see them is difficult. I did have a disk of the entire textbook in a different school and it was great. All the diagrams and photos, already paid for by the school, could be used. The textbooks i had this past year were older, had no dvd. A scanner would help but is time consuming. I am already checking into the HS book I will use. The Hangarter video (17 year cicada) I posted is also offered on the University of Indiana website so I was safe but the youtube video allowed me to show it on the whole screen. There is a whole cupboard full of home taped videos from a previous teacher. I think they will have to be tossed in the circular file! Our school will tape if we give them notice of a show with educational material to use for class but I never want to show an entire video, only short clips and sorting through is time consuming. I did use Thinkbright for video clips. They don't have as many for science but our social studies teacher uses it all the time. It lets you search for only topic specific clips from a video collection and download them.
Applications for students- So much of what I learned this week I want to teach my students. As I move to the HS, I am assuming (which could get me into trouble) that they will be more active in the learning process. I think that the tools I learned this week will allow students to "shift from consuming media to being a media creator. Giving students powerful media-authoring tools means relinquishing a degree of control, but doing so also makes it possible to help them learn in more effective ways (and tighter time frames) than ever before." (from edutopia) We are to be moving to a more student-centered classroom. I wan to give control to students to interpret what they learn or ask questions in a non-linguistic format. Glogster for education is really fascinating. I do see students using this for science to reorganize facts, interpret what they have learned or express what they are having trouble grasping. My problem will be coming up with specifics instead of overwhelming them (like I feel most days). This is where I am already looking ahead to the three projects for this class that I will use this coming school year. Now on to simulations..........