Technology Frustration!

My group has recently figured out how to add an RSS feed to our wikispace questions, but for some reason our feeds are gone. All of the feeds we had entered into the page are either not there or showing some sort of error. Kim (one of my group members) and myself have both tried to fix this but can not seem to get anything to work. If anyone has any ideas please send them our way!!!! Thanks Thanks Thanks!

With this frustration I began thinking about technology and its different frustrations and disadvantages. At some point I feel like there is always something that goes wrong with technology. Everything seems to be going great and working fine and then all of sudden something breaks/malfunctions/or just all together stops working. This annoys me because technology is being pushed at us so much from every direction, but when something breaks or doesn’t work there is nothing there to compensate for it. Usually the blame is put on the operator themselves or the manufacturer both of which blame the other party. Don’t get me wrong I think technology is a great tool and can do wonders for us, but can there be a point of to much technology? I know some of my classmates and myself have been struggling with doing over lapping projects in most of our classes. All of this technology is being thrown at us and we are being forced to incorporate it into our everyday lives to the point it is becoming overwhelming. I had a group presentation last week in one of my education classes. Our assignment was to teach a 40 minute lesson using various reading and writing activities. In order to give the class an understanding of the text we chose to use during our lesson we played the movie trailer as part of our introduction. Everything was going good until we went to press play on the clip. BAM no sound was playing through the projector! Everyone being flustered and frantic we quickly tried to figure out this problem. Finally after a few minutes we were able to get the sound problem fixed and continue on with our lesson. If this was a real 40 minute class we would have run out of time and not be able to complete our activities. Fortunately for us we had the extra time to allow this problem. It is instances that make technology annoying. It can be so useful and beneficial to us, but at the same time be completely unpredictable.

Teaching with technology is a great idea and I think it is an excellent resource to have in the classroom. Students can learn so much from the technology we have available today! I wish we had some of incredible things schools have available now were around when I was in school. A classmate of mine, Diane, just recently posted a blog about smart board technology. It has some really good information regarding this new classroom tool. It makes the classroom so much more interactive and gives the teacher so many more options, but what happens when your smart board is down for a day, week, or month? I’m sure we all know school maintenance is not the fastest working system so some teachers could go a long period of time without their equipment and there for have to change their plans around. Being teachers we always know to have a plan B and be ready for the unexpected, so having things break or not work is not a total hardship for us. At the same time though, one would think if we have the equipment it would work properly and efficiently!

I don’t think I have any real answer or point to this problem. I feel like it is something we will always deal with and have to overcome, but with my recent encounters with different technologies I had to vent a little. I enjoy using technology and I look forward to using it in my classroom, I am just not looking forward to the battles it may cause.

Ning, Ning, Ning!

Over the last two weeks I’ve worked on expanding my English Companion Ning. I am really surprised as to how successful I’ve actually been and how much I have learned from my fellow educators. I started out by responding to a few discussions and just looking at different forums and pages that I came across. After I figured the site out I started to explore more and learn a great deal about the site. I joined many groups and found a lot of my classmates on the network. I responded to more discussions and updated myself on the ones I had been following. I then got the idea to start my own discussion using the reading groups wikispace questions. I took two questions that we had not found answers to yet and posted them onto the discussion page. Within hours my first question had multiple responses. At first I did not think that anyone was really going to answer me let alone get the response I did. A few debates and conversations were even started through the comments and feedback I was getting from people. It was amazing! I was so surprised to see that my questions were really getting answered and that so many people took interest in them. A few days later I posted my second question and it had the same response. I could not believe it. I even had people tell me they were excited to see the Wikispace!!

This whole “ning” thing really interests me. It is so helpful and has so many great connections. There are so many people offering advise and their opinion that almost any question can be answered. It is a great connection to the English teacher world and is so easy to use! I think this is one of the most beneficial components of my PLN and I am excited to take it even farther. I am already learning so much from just the two questions I’ve posted and the few discussions I have read. I can only image how much more there is on this site to learn from. It is great to hear other people’s personal experiences and expectations. It really helps me know what to expect and how to go about certain things once I enter a classroom. This could be a very useful site for students like me and the rest of my class that are about to enter the teaching field. Having the support and guidance of older experienced teachers is always a plus and can be very helpful to us. There are many questions we have unsolved about this field and a site like this provides answers to those questions. Every teacher was in our place at one point so it’s good to know there are people out there that want to help those of us that are still learning. Teaching is all about sharing your knowledge and helping those who need it. I think this ning network is a great site for English teachers and an excellent way to get connected into the field. I encourage anyone who has not checked it out to visit the site and see for yourself!!

Google Search!!

So I just googled myself to see what would come up since I’ve been doing so much with the different networks I joined, and my pages are all over the search!!! I was amazed at the fact that I could type in my name and boom the top 6 results were my blog, classroom 2.0, English Companion Ning, The Future of Education, LinkedIn, and a few other sites I have joined. It’s crazy to think that in such little time I can already be searched. I encourage everyone to type their name or user names to these sites into a google search and see what comes up…it really is exciting!!!

After getting over the initial thrill of being google searchable and seeing all of my sites in the top results I began to think about what I had just discovered. Now that I have all of these sites and networks established I can be found on the internet. As these sites progress and mature, and the more I network they will only become more accessible, and offer many more topics ultimately leading to appear in a broader search. This kind of freaks me out in a way. I know these are all professional sites and highly trustworthy, but there is still doubt in my mind. On most of the pages my picture is posted along with some personal information. Should we be worried when we post/publish such things? Is it a good idea to use our full names and pictures on internet pages? These are just a few of the questions I asked myself as I scrolled through the list of results.

I then felt a little hypocritical because I started to think about Facebook, my space, and all of the other social networking sites I have had over the years. I post and my friends post all kinds of things on these sites that probably should not be out on the internet. I wondered why I felt so comfortable with information being out on Facebook, but not on an education website. My guess is that I am so comfortable with Facebook and I know exactly how to work it so only certain things are visible to others and who can view my page. Something that was shocking to me was that my Facebook link did not show up in the results when I searched my name. I have had that site for more than 3 years now, yet it was not nowhere to be found, but when I searched my roommates name her Facebook link was one of the first results. I started going through all of my privacy settings and realized I had disabled the link/application that allowed your site to be searchable. This was very interesting to me. Not only can we control who sees our pages and information, we can block them from search engines without even knowing. I never knew I had that setting let alone that I had disabled it. Going back through my education network sites I could not find such a tool as of now. Is Facebook really that much more developed then these other sites? Or is it just the creators of Facebook know there are people who don’t want there lives spread all over the internet? Either way this really got my attention.

With learning all of this today and figuring this whole “name search” thing out, I am curious as to how I really feel about having information on the internet. Don’t get me wrong I have had a great success with the Ning’s so far and they are teaching me so much, and I don’t know if I could survive without my Facebook page (as sad as that sounds), but I guess this experience has just opened my eyes to how public the internet really is. Will there ever come a time when things like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are shut down for the sake of privacy settings? Will websites start taking the picture application off their sites so posts and blogs become more anonymous? Or will the internet head in the complete opposite direction and start incorporating live video chats and feeds on such websites..I know Facebook has touched on such ideas, but how crazy are things going to get before we start going backwards in the timeline of internet?!

Enjoy searching yourself on the wonderful world wide web =]!

The Beginning of my PLN!

After taking a trip down memory lane (back to middle school xanga and webpage days) of trying to figure out how to set up web pages and customize them I have finally got my blog looking like I want it to….for now that is!!!

To begin with I have finally got my Google Reader up and I am amazed by it! I never knew such a thing existed and now I use it all the time. That’s one thing I really like about this process I am continuously learning so much! Through my Google Reader I am able to track all my of classmates blogs and posts. It’s great that it’s all in one place and I don’t have to remember a million URL’S or go five different places to find a page I am looking for. I also like how it lets your group things using folders. I am an extremely organized person so this tool was great for me! I am still not a professional at it though I must say. I think every time I go exploring with it I find something new and useful. It’s really an easy organized way to stay connected. I think something like this could be very useful in the classroom or for a teacher. It would be a great way for students to stay connected with each other as well as teachers to monitor their progress on specific blogs/postings. I am still very new to RSS feeds in general but the more I use them the more I find how helpful they can be!

Another organizational network I began and have enjoyed is the Delicious bookmarking. I think this is a great tool and it’s really helped me keep all of my PLN connections in one place. I am able to have my entire network on this page again not having to worry about remember site names and different links. I’m still working on joining and getting connected with the Delicious network but I am starting to make progress so I am interested to see where that takes me!

On to Wiki spaces! Overall I’ve enjoyed working with the wiki’s. It’s made working in groups and on group projects a little less stressful. Not only can everyone contribute to the task at hand anyone can submit/post their part. I think this is a great tool for classroom use. Everyone knows how hard it is to try to find time to get a group together and work on a project especially when you can not drive yet. Wiki spaces is a great way for the groups to collaborate on their work and come to an end result. Through working on my groups wiki space we all have been able to post what we wanted when we wanted..seeing that it pertains to our topic’s of course. We did not have to worry about fitting yet something else into our already packed schedules. Everyone can see what each member of the wiki is producing so the problem of a slacker group members can noticed. I think that students would really benefit from using wiki spaces in school. It would be a great way to integrate technology into the classroom as well. Wiki spaces of course has it’s down sides, but everything with the internet and technology does. If not set up properly the site can be hard to navigate through and find material easily. Members also have to be careful not to be adding new information at the same time as other group members. This can cause information to be lost because only one person can be editing and saving at the same time. In my personal experience with the wiki’s so far this problem has not come up, but I see where it can be annoying.

It’s taken me awhile to get this PLN going and I sure have a long way to go, but I think this is going to be a great learning experience and through the research I have already started I can see it’s really going to be helpful in the future. Now that I have an idea of the direction I would like to take this in I think it will be much easier for me to expand and connect to the networking world. I am hoping to further my knowledge of the internet and its working as well as enhance my skills the connections I am establishing. There are so many resources out there and I hope through this PLN I can use them to my full potential!

Starting to BLOG!

For one of my education classes at Penn State we are required to create a blog and join different teaching/education websites, as well as, different social networking sites.  I am extremely lost when it comes to things like this and do not have much experience with them at all.  I am interested to see where this takes me and how much I can learn from it!

So after searching the internet and attempting to figure all of this blog stuff out, I think I am beginning to understand it all.  Don’t get me wrong I am still extremely lost, but I have started to find my way through it all.  Learning about the different websites, networking sites, and everything else has really opened my eyes to the world of the internet and how much we can really do with it.  I had no idea there were so many connections and ways to stay connected in the Education world simply through the internet.  I am interested to see where these different sites I have joined take me as I get better at working through them and with them.

I will be sure to keep you posted through all of my success with the blogging/networking world!