Mr. Higgins’ Blog

As part of my continuing involvement in the K12 Online Conference, I checked out RSS for Educators (Advanced) presentation.  The presentation was very thorough and contained a great of information about rss readers, rss feeders, and anything else that involves rss; however, the most impressive part of it was the pdf file that is included as a link titled 100 Web 2.0 Ideas for Educators.  This pdf goes through everything that you can think of that involves rss.  There are screenshots that show how to signup on website like bloglines as well as the list of 100 ideas.  One of the quotes that really got me thinking about my school website and organization was…

Everyone has different perceptions of what they are reading. In this case, services that create folksonomies that appeal to a particular group of people, would be more successful in tagging material similarly. An example would be K12 educators tagging resources using the same service ScuttlEdu (http://blogs.zanestate.edu/mybookmarks/).
Ideas:

1. Categorize lesson plans and learning objects at the province/state, school board, or school levels.
2. Categorize documents at a school or school district level in order to create a searchable structures that use descriptions based on those who use those documents.
3. Connect educators together who share similar interests through tags.
4. Unintended learning through the discovery of resources and information shared by others.
5. Create a unique shared tag where anyone can add to a specific set of resources by knowing the unique tag word, which could then be aggregated through RSS feeds.

This quote gave me a great perspective on how I could use tagging in the classroom.  Once I setup a school wiki, I could create feeds on the frontpage that link to each of my classes; therefore, when I create homework for a specific class, the feed will simply take care of the link on the wiki. 

The hard part about all of this Web 2.0 technology is that you have to test many different technologies and it is always changing.  People that like to always be on top of things would not be happy in the Web 2.0 academia; however, they would benefit many times by USING the technology.  There is a big difference between someone like myself who is interesting in the theory, practice, and implementation of this technology rather than simply using it.  I need to keep my head on straight about the Web 2.0 universe, because no one will ever know it all.  Listen to people like Vicki Davis, Will Richardson, and David Warlick puts this into perspective.

As a young math and computer science teacher, I am going to attempt to implement these types of technologies for my own interests but more importantly, my students learning capabilities.