We’ve had fairly good success here with Pageflakes. (I know Vicky A. used it with her classes as she mentioned, as did another of our business teachers.)

I also created a Pageflakes page for the vision committee that this blog is a part of and although it’s gone down maybe once, I haven’t had problems with it.

(One of our teachers did tell me that she was having difficulty with it from home. I believe she may have had to adjust her security settings in Internet Explorer to medium in order to allow the RSS feed or the cookies to work.)

But my experience has been that it’s usually available when I call up the pageflake we have created for our committee. It’s been so useful for our committee, because we have a common site with news feeds, blogs, podcasts, etc.

I learned about it at a workshop with Will Richardson and he was suggesting using in a situation where you have each student create a blog, because you could then “subscribe” to all their blogs and it would be an easy way to read through all the blogs students were creating.

I think using it for a library literacy class would be an excellent idea. I’m also a librarian and was thinking of teaching students to use it for some more advanced research projects they are doing. It’s very user friendly, once you understand how to pull the feeds in.

Let us know how it goes! Carolyn

http://weblogg-ed.com/2007/2481/

One of the responses to his post was this reminder by Jim Coe–

” If your daughter is starting her amateur film career at her young age, imagine what she will be producing as a teen and young adult. You think the consumer-generated ads and shorts we see today are witty?”

All of which reminds me that part of the exponential changes we are going to see is that as children start producing their content for more authentic (and larger) audiences around the world, by the time they reach high school, their expectations of what school needs to provide them will be very very different.

Here is the link to the article:
http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/technology/02/17/
17delljobs.html

Janice

At our last meeting, I believe we discussed the Technology Initiative to be presented to the Campus Leadership Team this Thursday. Our current working “mission statement” is “Connect, Collaborate, Create.” It is modeled after the three R’s, “Rigor, Relevance, Relationships.”

However, it’s not quite so catchy, I think, as it could be. I like how we’ve named our initiative “WHS 2.1″ - it’s a hip name, because it plays off a current phenomenon that has everyone talking. I hope our slogan can be like that - memorable!

I often find that it’s true that its assumed students have  real literacy because they are gadget literate. Some do, but a lot of students aren’t necessarily information literate just because they can use the gadgets.

What we’re really talking about here is information literacy and critical thinking skills, which have always been a need for students. But it does seem to me with so much information available from everywhere, that it is very important that students graduate being discerning users of information and technology tools.

I predict the situation will only get more muddled–when anyone can make a website, wiki, google video, etc, how do we know who are the experts? Can an amateur researcher be an expert? (like on Wikipedia–maybe so….?) How can you tell what is real from what is fake? When you can merge two videos, or make Katie Couric look thinner by editing her photo, how do we know what represents what’s real? We do need to be teaching students strategies for determining the difference, since we have no idea what technologies they will be encountering in the future.

I think that skill of applied use of technology is what we are talking about-not just the ability to use it, but the ability to use it wisely and use it in different types of situations to solve problems.

Thanks for the interesting comments! Carolyn