podcasts and streaming, oh my!

So there was a lot to view, and watch, and listen to this week! There are a lot of great podcasts out there! My favorite site was Learn Out Loud. I was really impressed w/ the audiobook podcasts available for free! I'm glad I canceled my subscription to an audiobook site, because there's a lot out there for free that I could listen to for online or download through ITunes. I listened to Beowulf...not that I understood a lot of it (The site says it was meant to be listened to, but I need the footnotes!)

My delicious account is now filled with podcast related sites. There's just so much out there.

Snow Days!

Went up to Mammoth this weekend and saw my first snowfall! Had a blast visiting, but I don't know how people could LIVE in the snow for months at a time! Scraping ice off your ENTIRE car, watching for black ice, icicles and snow falling off rooftops, dressing in multiple layers, shoveling snow, laying out salt, slipping and sliding around....seems like I'd be late anywhere I had to go during the winter months! But it sure was beautiful!

Fall colors:



The view from our motel:





My one catch of the trip:

Wikis

This week we learned about what a powerful tool for collaboration wikis provide. In many ways, I see blogs and wikis as similar, and even interchangeable. I think it just depends on what you want your students to do: merely comment on the content or actively build, add to, change and actually interact with the content.

My classmates and I have reflected over the last few weeks on the ways blogs can be used in our classrooms. We've come up with ideas as journaling, responding to prompts, and showing different ways of solving the same math problem. I think that wikis can be used for these same activities. The one thing that makes wikis unique is that they allow for an active participation in the creating and forming of the content. Students not only state their ideas, they edit the ideas of others, they remove things they see as unnecessary.

One final reflection, if wikis have been around since '94, why when I type the word is it underlined in red??? Granted, I only recently learned about wikis, but the word hasn't even made it ino the dictionary yet???