As I review my blog posts as a record of what I have learned throughout this course, I am struck by the portfolio and toolbox created here.  It inspires me to use blogging in new ways in my class as more than a journal, but as an actual way to assess and verify student learning.

These two St. Vincent kids running down the pier express how I feel at this moment of course completion. Image by Pensiero.  I am exhilarated and about to collapse.  I am ready to jump off the proverbial pier with them in celebration.

Here are a listing of my next steps:

(1) Be thoughtful about the use of Web 2.0 tools in my classroom.  They need to be relevant to what learners need, and they need to support the content of British Literature and Composition.

(2) Keep up with the Google reader.

(3) Manage my delicious account.

(4) Investigate using a wiki on one unit I will teach this semester.

(5) Have students do one podcast as a part of a paper revision.

Elizabeth O’Neill’s post entitled “What Millennial Students Need to Know… Before They Get to College” in the Successful Teaching blog inspired me to have a renewed sense of purpose in two areas of my teaching:

(1) Helping students get beyond grades–our culture of independent school education nurtures and challenges students to achieve and expect success; however, we often measure success in terms of grades only.  I want to try and build a cultural norm in my classroom of valuing what we learn and how it relates to the world and our place in it.  It’s the old “helping students become good citizens of the world argument,” but it really means something in this global, Web 2.0 world.

(2) Helping students understand context–one way to quickly lose student respect is by putting down their slang or forbidding its use in the classroom.  Student colloquial language can be valued and also placed in the context of life outside their present world.  An English class is the perfect place to teach the many versions of English that we all speak for different audiences, occasions. O’Neill adds, “Students need to recognize how screen reading differs from book reading, how emails differ from essays, and how Wikipedia differs from the Wall Street Journal.”

I think it’s the name “podcast” that makes us tremble before the idea of making one.  Now that I have produced a podcast, I am struck by how simple this exercise is and how easy it would be to get students making them.

One idea for classroom use is to have students read an introduction or a conclusion of a paper they are working on and then let the podcast play a role in the revision stage of the writing process.  Not only can students hear what they are writing and catch problems in style, grammar, content, but their classmates can listen to their peers’ work and be charged with the same task.

The amount of content on the Classroom 2.0 site is overwhelming at first glance, but the quality matched the quantity as I explored it further.

I enjoyed one discussion about Twitter and hearing people weigh in on its validity and academic use.  Andrew Marcinek in his posting “Wherefore art thou Twitter?” suggested a great classroom project whereby two fictional or historical characters would carry on an invented Twitter conversation to study and reveal traits of those characters.

The “Books That Matter” and “Educators Using Facebook” groups also sparked my interest.

The English tag provided great articles and discussion about whose teaching what novels.

As for personal and professional use goes, I know Woodward began a Ning network, but I didn’t join initially and haven’t checked its status.  At the time, I wished we just started a Facebook group instead of having another networking site to keep up with.  I think now I do see the value of differentiated networking sites, but I’m still considering the idea.  In regards to networking sites in the classroom, I would like to abandon edublogs and use Facebook for blogging.  I don’t want my students to be my FBF’s; however, the time saved by working within a network that students are already on  for hours of the day would be advantageous.

My husband has an iGoogle page, and I’ve been interested in customizing a similar page of my own. Now Pageflakes gives me the easy tools to create such a personal, utilitarian page. Utilitarian is how I would describe Pageflakes. I like the instant visual display of the key parts of my day all in one place. From the teaching schedule, calendar, email, and RSS feeds, it is exhilarating to think of all this content coming to me on one screen/page as opposed to being in a half dozen tabs across my browser. I can also scan quickly through the day for interesting articles that might support my teaching.

I also like the idea of a themed Pageflakes page to track a specific news item. Most of what I teach is last century and before, so I cannot think of an immediate application for such a page, but I will keep the tool in mind as the semester continues. Well, one idea would be in the teaching of Frankenstein and searching for the latest developments in biotechnology.

YouTube has certainly provided me with opportunities to exhibit self-control and discipline when it comes to time spent previewing videos.  The nature of the site sucks one into its vortex of fascinating videos, and many of the videos are educational and how-to informative and inspirational.  I found several authors I teach reading their works aloud, and I’d like to use these segments in class.  With a persuasive speech unit in mind, I also found excellent examples of speeches (MLK Jr., Pres. Kennedy, Pres. Obama, even Bono) to teach specific techniques.  Recently on my class blog, I asked students to respond to the prompt: What song must you hear?  This activity was a take-off of the NPR series “You Must Hear This” where artists reveal the songs that they think are important for all to hear.  As students responded to the question, they had to add a link to their song so that we could all have a listen.  Now I would love to teach them to embed a YouTube video to their blog.  I also found full movie features for films I like to show in class.  How convenient to use YouTube as a Netflix of sorts!

I was overall disappointed with the quality of the videos I viewed on TeacherTube and bothered by the racy comments posted.  It rings of students setting up user accounts and then posting random sexy talk.   I was expecting TeacherTube to be more professional and safer than YouTube, but I was mistaken.

Check out this video on Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka:

Podcasts are a great way to deliver content to students.  Once on their own time, students are one with their IPods; therefore, why not assign them a poem to listen to for homework or a book analysis to consider?

I was amazed at how easily I could subscribe to podcasts and listen to them in my Google reader.  One podcast I subscribed to was the Poem of the Day.  What a great way to pause at some point during my day and listen to a poem that I might keep to myself OR share with my classes as a warm-up activity! One poem that I listened to was Natasha Tretheway’s “Myth.”  If only I had this resource two years ago when she spoke on campus, I could have given my students a more interesting taste of her work before she addressed them.  By more interesting, I mean their hearing her read her own poem, as opposed to hearing me read one of her works aloud.

I also subscribed to the New Yorker Fiction Podcast and am begging for more hours in the day to listen to these writers read the works of their favorite writers and then discuss them.  Sections of these podcasts will be dynamic live interviews to read in class when discussing specific literary devices.

I am already a fan of NPR’s “Fresh Air” and “This I Believe” podcasts and know fellow WA English teachers that are having students write their own “This I Believe” essay.

Quizlet’s tagline is that it eats flashcards for breakfast, and it does.  This free, easy flashcard creator plus term quizzer is awesome, and I am excited to introduce my classes to it.  My students take a vocabulary quiz on ten new words each week, and Quizlet is a great way for them to share in the flashcard creation by assigning each student a lesson over the course of the semester.

The social features of Quizlet are a discussion board, so that students can chat about the class or night’s homework while they are working with the terms.  Students can also share resources with each other in the created groups.  The social value in this tool is productive and meaningful for vocabulary learning.

I attended Paula White’s session entitled

Parallel Play or Collaboration–Leveraging the Wiki Platform for High Quality Work.

Her main points were using wikis to appeal to student engagement in their own learning. To this end, she referenced Bloom’s taxonomy and other learning schedules to coordinate wikis with purposeful learning steps.  She began with the proven practice that wikis engage students, but she went deeper than that initial engagement and argued that for students to stay motivated then they need to see the need for the wiki.  They need to experience choice, novelty, variety and authenticity in their wikis.  She concluded that students experience true collaboration and engagement when they share the creation of something that serves a real purpose for their lives and learning.

The session was worthwhile as a motivational philosophy behind wiki use.  I was hoping for more practical uses; for the presenter to model activities that do in fact promote student collaboration.  I will take away the idea that wikis need to be designed with student collaboration in mind.  I want students to share in the learning and value the research and ideas of their peers.

I liked the medium of an online course as a way to get conference content.  I did miss the buzz of the networking that occurs at conferences, but as far as filling one’s tote bag with ideas and notes, it is even easier to do that online and much less expensive for schools.