Steve’s Blog K12 Learning2.0

Uh oh…

The Mediocre Multi-Tasker

“Last week, researchers at Stanford University published a study showing that the most persistent multitaskers perform badly in a variety of tasks. They don’t focus as well as non-multitaskers. They’re more distractible. They’re weaker at shifting from one task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact, worse at multitasking than people who don’t ordinarily multitask.”

Learned about the use of Pageflakes which are ways of aggregating, organizing & sharing large amounts of information, files, articles, blogs, videos, podcasts, RSS feeds, almost anything.  Very similar to one of the tools I learned about earlier in the course called SimpleBox.  I have been using this to assemble links, feeds & other useful information, organized  into containers (or flakes).  Great way to maintain classroom schedule, assignments, articles, relevant current events, videos and so forth.

Google Docs is a great way for creating, sharing, & collaborating documents, spreadsheets, presentations, & forms for free on the internet.  Some class-room applications could be:

1. Students working on group papers and/or presentations
2. Collecting, managing, & monitoring student progress via update spreadsheets (a la 23 things doc)
3. Submitting rough drafts and subsequent edits via shared docs instead of wasting paper printouts

What happens if two people have the same document open & make changes to differnt parts?  which save wins? How would both person’s changes be incorporated to a master doc including both revisions to the differnt parts of the document?

I’ve always had an interest to learn how to play the piano.  Little did I know that even this could be initiated on youtube!

Learn How To Play the Piano – The Basics (lesson 1)

There ar many great educational video postings that can be easily searched and utilized for anything from solving differential equations to ancient roman architecture virtual tours.  Classroom application is limitless and can save hours of time presenting material an interesting, relevant and engaging way to students & teachers.

Recorded a brief anecdote and distributed on GCAST.  Can be utilized for publishing lecture recordings so students can concnetrate on listening, analysis, & contributing through discusstion rather than racing through note-taking to capture lecture specifics.

Click here for GCAST podcast

I have been using Itunes & podcasts for sometime now.  Great for downloading to your mp3 player for listening to during long runs!

This thing introduced a tool used for cataloging & sharing thoughts & informational posts about books and book collections.  The user group & zeitgeist areas were most thought provoking in terms of classroom application & general discussion.

This exercise practiced using Delicious a social bookmarking tool.

First bookmarks

Great for creating materials & gathering info for group projects…

I found this very interesting article on Google Reader RSS feed of Larry Ferlazzo’s edublog.  He has a created a list of most useful sites (check it out):

The Best Collections Of Web 2.0 Tools For Education

I chose to explore the following AMAZING sites (so glad I did…)

BeFunky -
“Turn your photos into incredible artwork with one click.”

SimplyBox -
Clip and share portions of web pages in an easy-to-use visual format. Great for collecting, organizing and sharing resources on specific topics.

I could spend hours exploring these tools (ooops, I already did with just these 2)

The first site allowed me to create really interesting sketches & drawing version of photos.  The second site i am in love with and see so many personal & professional applications for.  I look at it like an extension of the Google Reader.  You tell Google Reader what’s important to you & it goes after it…  What you want to save can be collected, organized, commented on, and SHARED so easily in SimplyBox.  I would highly recommend this site to everyone.  Seems so intuitive & worthwhile… pick out pictures, articles, websites, and have an easy way to capture them by you and anyone else who you want to share the box with.  Check it out!