Thing 11 - Getting "Flickr-fied"

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/9804670@N06/870426187/in/pool-365415@N25, jramb)

I've been exposed to Flickr before but did learn a few things about its many uses in the classroom!

The picture above was posted on Flickr by my son as part of a history course at NGCSU in 2007. It is of my dad, a 22-year Army officer, in the mid-1960s, training for deployment to Vietnam.

The picture is part of a photo-journaling project in which students were required to find 4-5 family photos that symbolized an historic era, post and tag them, then explain the historic significance of each. My son's era was the Cold War, since my own childhood reflected the moves of an Air Defense Artillery officer.

You can view the class set of pictures/projects HERE!

I truly wanted to do this project with my own history students last year but was unable to get our technology department to allow me to use my scanner in the classroom -- what a bummer! I may try again (begging may work???).

Thing 10 - Getting Creative, Commonly!

Well, Creative Commons was a totally new experience for me.

1. I have NOT seen (or else have not paid attention to) the CC logo on websites I've visited.
2. I DO believe CC will impact student project creation -- with the vast array of resources and license to share/edit/append, collaboration becomes that much broader and significant!
3. I constantly use digital images and audio/video clips from the web to teach my students!
4. I don't intentionally share information on the web -- but would love to participate in this with other social studies educators (especially those who deal with online learning).
5. Who owns my teaching materials??? Well, it depends -- I'm fairly certain when it comes to textbooks and ancillary materials purchased for educational purposes but when it comes to all the stuff I snag off the web... I dunno!
6. One obvious negative is relinquishing your complete rights to a personal creation. I imagine, though, that anyone willing to post work here would consider this drawback first.

I found some great stuff in OER:

• this awesome American Government course
• a really cool learning module about the first sustained American-European contacts (1492-1600)
• a powerful web-supported lesson plan called Girls Speak Out -- teaches about the feminization of global poverty with amazing video clips

Thing 8 - World of Wikis

Wikis have been a part of my classroom environment for about a year now. I have found them to be tremendously useful and suprisingly flexible in their application to teaching and learning about the social studies in our non-traditional environment.

The primary purpose of those I've created to date has been as a course platform; a place for students to come for course content, project information and suggested links. I'd like very much to broaden their use to include student-created pages and collaborative learning environments.

I did examine many of the wikis shared on the K12Learning2.0 site, and gleaned many great ideas for the future of my own as well as my students' use of wikis in our courses. Here are a few:

• The Holocaust Wiki Project is a wonderful example of students collaborating on a project to describe experiences and decision-making in an often misunderstood period of world history. Groups of students begin by creating an historically accurate family unit in a country or region significantly impacted by this tragic era, then follow their course through a series of decisions, even intersecting with the lives of other groups' created family units. It is beautifully done (though not as colorful as I'd like) relatively easy to follow, and neat in its presentation.
• Welker's Wikinomics is similar to my own wiki in that it serves as a course platform but he has opened it up, wikistyle, to collaboration and addition by students and teachers outside his own school. The benefit, I believe, is that the site becomes a better resource, reflecting and serving the needs of a broader audience.
• My favorite is Great Debate of 2008, a student-created wiki, open to learners beyond the walls of the creator's own school, allowing students in grades 8-12 the opportunity to explore and discuss the candidates' positions on key issues affecting our country as we approach this year's presidential election. I was especially impressed by the thoroughness of several contributions and plan to share this with my own American Government students!

Thing 7 - All I Can Say is "WOW!!!"

I've been scanning articles in my reader now for days -- finding a few interesting tidbits and knowing I'd have to finally pick one to blog about in order to move on through this course.

Well, this morning something FANTASTIC happened! I was about to write about several sites I found for younger children (though I teach high school social studies) in the Infinite Thinking Machine blog post about the Freedom to Read. I discovered several great sites that actually read books to kids and offer a variety of pretty cool activities -- I'll pass them to my brother for my precocious nieces and nephews (you can look at these on your own -- I found something for ME!!!).

It's often difficult to "take kids back" when I find gaps in their social studies knowledge. Now, in terms of American Government, I have a few new tools!

My favorite is What Are The Parts of Government?

(pictured above)

Others include:

• How Do We Elect Our Leaders
• What is a Constitution
• What are Citizens' Basic Rights
  

If you can't tell already, I'm SO excited about being able to link these to our course wiki so my students have another resource with which to remediate, increasing their knowledge and, ultimately, their ability to make connections (my goal as a social studies teacher).