Toluu : Reflection 2.0

Reflection 2.0

Education, technology, and other geeky things

Well, the title says it all!

This is the last post on Reflection 2.0 and I’m moving to my new home at Kate Says - my brand new site powered by self-hosted Wordpress 2.5. I have loved being on edublogs, but as I’m getting more and more involved with Wordpress in other professional projects I decided that it would be best to have my personal blog on the same platform so I can use it as my sandbox……….as Mike Bogle said perfectly this morning on twitter, “If we can’t get our heads around our own blogs, what hope do we have for other people’s?” I believe in learning by doing, and working on edublogs has been the best experience for helping other teachers get set up here. I still have my class blog on edublogs as well as some student blogs, so I’m not completely leaving this awesome service for educators - I just need a site to “play” in so I don’t break any of my paid projects I still have a TON of design work to do at the new site, so bear with me while I move everything over and dig into the CSS - I’d love input as well, so head on over and let me know what you think!

If you currently subscribe to Reflection 2.0, I’d love if you could take a few seconds and update your feed information - I tried making it a little easier by including the link here

Results from Blocked Web Apps Survey PublishedApril 8

You can see the published google spreadsheet from this survey here - Education Blocked Web Applications. The response wasn’t as high as I expected it would be, but it did give a small-scale picture of the situation. Rather than immediately throw my beliefs and theories at you, I ask this:

What are the educational implications of a filtered internet?

I’m leaving this open-ended and broad purposely, interpret it as you’d like.

UPDATE: My blog has moved! I’m now over at Kate Says and you can comment on this post there!

Authored by Kate Olson. Hosted by Edublogs.

Wiki Project - Fresh StartApril 4

As I wrote in my post a few days ago, I am starting over on my attempt to teach basic wiki (web editing/content creation) concepts (replacing Powerpoint - my choice) to my 6th graders. I rotate groups every 10 days (50 min. each day, 30 of which need to be spent typing), so I’ve been struggling to do this project in a way that fits in the time schedule and actually still achieves my objectives. As I created the lesson/project, I kept reviewing in my head the skills that I use on a daily basis when working on wikis and other web projects - blogs, websites, moodle, etc - to ensure that I cover the basics.

One of the things that has been both a blessing and a curse is the fact that I have no overall project that this is fitting into - it’s not part of a history project or a literature circle or anything of that sort. As this is a technology (ok fine, it’s a keyboarding class) class, the objectives are the actual skills involved in editing a wiki (which translate to other web applications) which will then be used in other (core) classes (in an ideal world). The fact that there’s no overall project is nice because the kids get to choose their topic, but they’re having a hard time understanding that they get to choose what their pages are about (wonder why?).
Here are the steps of the project:

Learn basic Apple keyboard shortcuts (this makes copying and pasting much easie

Finland RevisitedApril 3

In the last few months I wrote 3 posts relating to the quality of education in Finland. I was pleasantly surprised last week when I was listening to Wisconsin Public Radio’s Here on Earth (with Jean Feraca) and heard the tail end of a program about this very topic. I was even more excited to find the podcast is now posted so I can listen to the entire program! The podcast and related resources are all posted on the Here on Earth archives - “What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart“.

Here on Earth describes the show:

“High school students in Finland rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night, and yet Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world, earning some of the top scores of students tested in 57 countries. American educators are trying to figure out what m

Purposeful NetworkingMarch 28

This post was co-authored with Stephanie Sandifer and is cross-posted on her blog Change Agency.

In another infamous “Twitter learning moment”, we were directed by @durff to an engaging Ustream presentation broadcasting live from the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs and Executives (unfortunately, this hasn’t been archived, but we’ll post it when it becomes available). The focus of the panel discussion was on the use of Social Networks in the business world, and the discussion generally addressed the idea that professionals should be “fluent” in the use of social networks (like Facebook and Linkedin, Twitter (increasingly important), Ning — but not MySpace) for professional networking. The term “purposeful networking” was brought up in the Ustream presentation, and tweeted by @durff and replied to by Stephanie (@ssandifer):

Durff @ssandifer purposeful netwo