Mark's Blog/ Entry One

INTRODUCTION
A few weeks ago, I was given an assignment to join a teachers’ social site on the internet. Being an older student and not all that computer savvy, I was as expected reluctant to say the least. After procrastinating for long enough, I finally entered these social rooms and I now wonder what took me so long.
WEB SITES I HAVE JOINED
The web site I joined is called Teachers Net. From this site, I linked to Educational Cyber playground and EDTECH. Educational Cyber playground is a site that is an interdisciplinary blog about internet and technology news. It provides resources for Arts, Music, Linguistics and Literacy however, I found that the majority of news articles that are posted have little relevance to technology. News articles that have been posted have included Obama’s Half Brother is Jewish, Secret Copyright Leaked and Study Find an Increasing Number of Injuries From Hot Tubs.
EDTECH is a site with over 3500 subscribers and 8000 readers that also participate. There are news groups along with gopher and www sites as well. EDTECH’s mission is to play an influential role in determining the use of technology in education. This is accomplished by a sharing and exchange of ideas and resources that are available for teachers. Though the majority of conversations are about tech, others are not yet they are still relevant to teaching as a whole.
ISSUES THAT WERE DISCUSSED
Most of the posting on EDTECH concern where to find educational games on the web, the best projectors for the money, cyber security for schools and education software among many other issues.
There are not too many disagreements concerning the issues that I listed. There is always someone who thinks there resources are better than the other poster, but it is all very civil. It starts out with someone asking where they can find game software for free, and within moments several people post resources. The receiver of these resources is usually extremely grateful and those who give the advice are usually very humble as should be the case.
I have used one of the activities that I read about on this site. Someone had asked for free games that the students were already familiar with. The website that was suggested was a Jeopardy game for Smart Boards. I used this game on Friday for reviewing The Catcher in the Rye test which was given out on Monday. I have already graded the tests and my students have never done so well. I do believe my telling them to take notes on the questions and answers had a large impact on the scores seeing how students can get too carried away with games and forget about the content. I am planning on posting this advice for my next posting.
QUESTIONS I POSED
I did not pose any questions my first time around. The reason for this is because finding educational tech games was going to be my question. When I first joined, I looked over the older postings and found that was a common question. So I did actually get the answer for my question even though I never posed it.
I chose that question about educational games because when I taught at a Yeshiva, where we were not allowed to use technology, I realized games were the best way to review material. I always said it was a sneaky way to get the kids to learn.
I did, as mentioned before, learn about the Jeopardy game and have already used it once with great success.
RESPOND TO OTHER’S QUESTIONS
I did respond to one posting because I could so much relate to the issue. It was titled co-teacher trouble and concerned a student teacher who stated her co- teacher is a “nightmare”. The poster was asking advice how to handle her. The advice the poster got back included having a sit down with the teacher, one simply said this happens often so hang in there, while another one suggested bring this up to her supervisor. I posted to her that any communications with this co-teacher should be made through e-mails with all e-mails being printed out. I suggested this because the main problem was for example, the co-teacher tells her she does not need a daily lesson plan but when the principal asked for one, the co-teacher denied ever telling the student teacher that she did not need one. My advice to her was document, document and document.
I have not received any appreciation as of yet but in all fairness, the student teacher seems to be a bit overwhelmed to say the least.
MY ADVICE
I would suggest to others about joining these lists are first, get an e-mail address for each site. I had my first day joining over 78 e-mails from one site alone. Secondly, I would not get involved in conversations that are not relevant to teaching issues. It is not that there is not a place for lively debate over non-school issues, but these non-educational issues clog up the system and have to be weeded out by the user before they stumble upon an educational issue.
My experience exceeded my expectations in regards to the user friendliness of these sites. It is like going into a cold swimming pool; you have to jump right in.