Week 8

First: here is my lesson plan and I've added you as a user to view my PBworks wiki. Let me know if you can't login or you didn't get the invite.

Second: the coolest thing I've ever read in my Google reader so far. It's called Drop.io. Now that our society is turning to technology and email to do homework assignments, a teacher's inbox can get full very quickly. Or, sometimes its hard to separate work and personal emails--or even fellow faculty versus student emails. The last thing we need is to lose a student's paper. This is a widget you can add into your website or blog that is almost like a digital dropbox on Blackboard. It keeps homework separate from other emails, but allows digital copies of homework and essays to be turned in. And its free. Or at least it says it is. :)

Week 7

All right so as mentioned in my last post, I have decided to use PBworks for my Personal Technology Project. Now for the problems, I did have initial problems adding users, but I think that was because I was trying to log in from the same computer. It kept automatically logging me in with the original email address, so I wouldn't let me sign out and set up another account. But, I figured out the bugs by just starting up with a new email browser, so my students--even if using the same comptuer at school--shouldn't have problems I had. Now PBworks is surprisingly easy! Wow. I was impressed. Basically its edit, write, save. That's it. It's perfect for working a group project because up to 100 users can have access to the same wiki. Its really easy to create new pages for different sections of the project, it as a comment button so people not only can edit what is being written but comment on ideas or suggestions in a separate place. I am really excited about creating a lesson plan. I will definitely encourage my students to use this for group projects. It's a thousand times easier than email. In fact, I have a group project coming up for one of my classes here at BYU and I suggested we use a wiki because its so much easier, especially since we're all so busy to find time to meet together. Its kind of like a working meeting. I love it.

Week 6

For my personal technology project I have decided to figure out PBWorks. I have decided to use the free version, but if I fall in love with the program and need expansion as a teacher, I can subsribe to it on a yearly basis. While it is similar to the website, with PB works I can add up to 100 users who can also add and edit on the wikipage. Also, I can set it to private and only allow those 100 users to be able to access the page. I actually have a professor that uses this website to allow us as teacher to upload different examples of grammar in texts that we read. I thought maybe I could use this to create a class dicussion of a book or as a source to upload information for group projects. Since it is private, it gives me more freedom to have students upload comments and projects without worrying about outside sources stumbling on it.

Week 5

The blog Free Technology for Teachers has a really good video about how to create quizzes using Google Docs. Especially as education keeps moving toward technology, I believe online quizzes like BYU students take on Blackboard will become more common in high schools. This is a great way to give a quiz and have it graded for you. Grading can be very tedious, especially as an English teacher with so many written assignments. This is time saving and an excellent way to give a quiz. While, I will probably not use this within my first years of teaching because I know some students still do not have access to the internet in their homes, it is exciting to move forward towards this or even try to use it when we have a computer lab reserved for the class to write or research essays.