Week 2

Wikis are an incredibly useful tool and I definitely will be using them with my classes next year. I could see setting one up for my library skills class to help organize all the different topics we will be covering. I also like the analogy of a wiki being a pot luck dinner on the web; everyone contributes something. I think one of the tougher decisions to make will be whether to use a wiki or a blog. I find it interesting that in my current school district they allow wikis to be used, but yet blogs are blocked. I guess the higher ups decided that wikis have more educational value, but I see them both being equally useful.

I have used both wikispaces and pbworks before but not wet paint. Wet paint seems similar and easy to use also. I also like the wikipedia activity we did for class this week along with the textbook discussing wikipedia's usefulness. I was impressed with the amount of accurate information on it and I feel more confident now about students using it for research purposes, as long as it is not their only source.

Week 1 for 534

Once again, I learned a lot of quality, valuable, technology information just from one class meeting. The "angel" seems like a very good web tool and I'm interested to see how it will compare to the ning we used for the last technology class. I definitely could see myself using "typewithme" in a class. Students could work on group assignments together either on school computers or at home. I like how it applies personal responsibility for what each person writes by highlighting it in a specific color. I as a teacher, could see each group members contribution to the assignment. It would help avoid one person doing all the work and then putting all the group members' names on it. I also could see myself using technorati to help find blogs on specific topics. RSS also seems like a tool I will be utilizing both professionally and personally in the future. Zoho also provides an endless amount of free online tools that I could use myself or for student use.