Task 12: Share What You Have Learned

I’m doing this course during the summer, so my opportunities for sharing are limited. While I could send my thoughts by email, I think it is much better to do it in person. So I’m going to write about what I will do.
First, I’m going to show Tiffany about RSS feeds to search for things I should know about. For a few days I reviewed the Alltop education feed (http://education.alltop.com/) but it ended up being too much irrelevant stuff. When I looked at my reader and saw dozens of articles in the education folder, I wanted to avoid looking at them. Even though it takes only 10 minutes or so to scan through the descriptions to find one or two articles that might be interesting, I did not “feel” like doing it. It is interesting how my feeling about use of time affects my willingness to use the web. This must be even more true for students. They will spend lots of time on Facebook because it does something for them, but they often “feel” much less like using a blog. So our task as teachers is to figure out how to make the blogs more interesting and important to learning. That leads to the second sharing I’m going to do. I will work with my partner for the Ethics course to choose ways to use our blog to make it more intrinsic to the course (some steps outlined in my blog about Task 11). The final action I will take next year involves using del.icio.us. There are many times during the year when a teacher or a parent asks me for information. In the past I’ve told them about books, web sites, or other resources that will help answer their questions. Now I can also show them how to find resources using del.icio.us.