Monday's Muse by Brenda Branson

Podcasting for student reading incentive program

Brenda Branson — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 18:09:44 +0000

This is the phone podcast created with GCast. Check it out!

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Week 3 - Third Muse

Brenda Branson — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 22:20:45 +0000

Muse 3: Photos & Images

Explore Flickr and learn how you can save your photos without having to worry about a computer crash or damaged CD. Start by taking the tour.
Play around with Picnik - try cropping, adding a frame and text to your favorite photo.
Create a blog post about anything technology related that interests you this week.

First, watch this video:

Photo sharing websites have been around since the 90s, but it took a small startup site called Flickr to catapult the idea of “sharing” into a full blown online community. Flickr has become the fastest growing photo sharing site on the web and is known as one of the first websites to use keyword “tags” to create associations and connections between photos and users of the site. For this discovery exercise, you are asked to take a good look at Flickr and discover what this site has to offer. Find out how tags work, what groups are, and all the neat things that people and other libraries are using Flickr for.Discovery Resources:

Flickr Learn More tour (6 steps)
Mediamazine Flickr Tutorials
Flickr: Popular tags Interesting- Last 7 days
Steve Campion’s “Learn More” series: Flickr
Flickr & Libraries at TTW

Click on this diagram to see the full size image or click here to go to the image at Flickr.

Discovery Exercise:

In this discovery exercise, you have two options…

a. Take a good look around Flickr and discover an interesting image that you want to blog about. Be sure to include either a link to the image or, if you create a Flickr account, you can use Flickr’s blogging tool to add the image in your post. Another option you have for including images in your post is to use by using the Wordpress photo upload tool built into your blogs.

– OR –

b. If you’re up to an easy challenge … create a Free account in Flickr and use a digital camera (or a camera phone) to capture a few pictures of something in your classroom or in your life. Upload these to your Flickr account and tag at least one of the images “CCMS#3“ and mark it public. Then create a post in your blog about your photo and experience. Be sure to include the image in your post. Once you have a Flickr account, you have two options for doing this: through Flickr’s blogging tool or by using the Wordpress photo upload tool built into your blogs.

So go ahead, explore the site and have some Flickr photo fun.

PS: A quick word about photo posting etiquette - When posting identifiable photos of other people (especially minors) is it advisable to get the person’s permission before posting their photo in a publicly accessible place like Flickr. Never upload pictures that weren’t taken by you (unless you have the photographer’s consent) and always give credit when you include photos taken by someone else in your blog.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Week 2 - Second Muse

Brenda Branson — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:17:26 +0000

RSS and newsfeeds

3. Learn about RSS feeds and setup your own Google reader account.
4. Locate a few useful education related blogs and/or news feeds.

This week’s activity is all about learning what an RSS news feed is and how to set up a Google Reader account which is free, and will allow you to stay of top of all those blogs you want to read.

Before we start, watch this video:

Have you even heard of RSS? Once you discover all that it’ll do for you, you’ll be glad for the time you spend on this activity. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it is a special file format that collects news and information as it is updated and sends it automatically to computer users on a regular schedule. How many websites, blogs, news sites, etc. do you visit everyday? How much time do you spend searching for the sites, the specific articles, following link after link to get to the source? Well… RSS or news feeders will collect all those sources and put them together on one page for you - no need to find the bookmark, search the web. Once you find a site or news page you want to read frequently, you can subscribe to its RSS feed and it will now appear right in your own feed site. It sounds confusing and there is still a lot that I’m not sure about but to set up a Google newsfeed is pretty simple and you’ll love it once you get started.This week’s activity:1. Take a look at Simple Mom’s blog post, Subscribing to Blogs 101 - this a simple and straight forward explanation of RSS feeds.2. Set up an account with Google Reader. There are many others you can choose from but my favorite and the one I’m most familiar with is Google Reader. Go to the Google Reader Getting Started page and you’ll speed right through this.

3. Subscribe to this blog.

4. Subscribe to several of the blogs that I’ve listed in my Blog Roll on our CCMS Book Bag Blog.

5. Subscribe to a few blogs of a personal interest to you. You can find lots of great blogs by searching for “blog lists.” Try Technorati Popular: Top 100 blogs, ODb Top 100 Education Blogs, or just take a look at Edublog’s Bloggers and Awards.
7. Add a blog post about your experience. Do you like the idea of RSS feeds? How can you utilize the feed for school or classroom use?

Blogging

Brenda Branson — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 11:55:11 +0000

Hopefully, you’ve had a chance to read all the posts related to this activity and understand your Itinerary. To begin with, you’ll need to set up your very own personal blog so you can begin to journal your experiences, discoveries, and ideas. For this program, I recommend that you use Edublogs, a popular free online blog hosting service that is extremely easy to use and designed especially for education.

Read some of these blogs:

Cool Cat Teacher Blog

Steve Dembo

The Write Weblog

Creating a blog using Edublogs, takes three steps:

Create an account
Name your blog
Select your template

Once you’ve created your blog here are two important things to know:

To add posts: The maintenance interface that you will use to add posts, edit or change the step-up your blog is accessed online at Be sure to write down your login and password.

To view your blog: Your blog address is http://(xxxx).edublogs.com, (xxxx)=the unique identifier you entered in Step 2. Write down your blog address.

If you run into problems or would like more information about blogs and using Edublogs here are some tutorials and video clips you can use.
Muse 1 Activity:

Setup a blog for yourself through Edublogs.
Select a theme from the choices available.
Add a test post or two.
Note: Use one of your test posts to create an entry about one of the blogs that you read in the first part of this post.
Consider writing a brief bio, sharing only what you want to - remember, our blogs are out for the world to see! Or share what you’d like to get out of this program.
Enter your blog address on this blog’s page CCMS Blogs.
Spend some time playing with your new blog: explore the options/features, try adding an image, or whatever strikes you.
Have fun!!!!

IMPORTANT NOTE: How you choose to identify yourself on your blog is your choice. You can blog under a screen name, anonymously, or as yourself.

Nine Muses - beginning our adventure

Brenda Branson — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 10:32:37 +0000

This venture is an online learning experience that is designed to encourage participants to learn more about Web 2.0 applications in the classroom. These are technologies that are free and available on the Internet - they are changing the way society is accessing information and communicating with each other.

Over the course of the next eight and a half weeks, this blog will focus on “Nine Muses” and activities to help help you become more familiar with blogging, RSS news feeds, wikis, podcasting, online applications, and image hosting sites.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me or stop by the media center. It’s time to get started, enjoy and remember to view this as an adventure, an Odyssey,if you will!

Inspiring the Arts

Brenda Branson — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:46:28 +0000

The 9 Muses: “a sisterhood of goddesses or spirits, their number set at nine by Classical times, who embody the arts and inspire the creation process with their graces through remembered and improvised song and stage, writing, traditional music, and dance.”

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

My vision of the educational uses of Web 2.0 is similar, in that, the many applications that are now available have “inspired the creation process” in reading, writing, science, social studies, economics, research, communication, and collaboration around the world. According to Wikipedia, Web 2.0 is “the trend in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users.”

As part of my professional goal for this year, I am setting up a semblance of a webquest to provide individualized exposure and experience with “9″ Web 2.0 applications that will enhance curriculum and learning in the classroom. Following the All Together Now and 23 Things models, this adventure will allow you to explore some of the most useful Web 2.0 features and discover ways to integrate them into your classroom learning experiences. This quest will take you on a ten week journey throughout “Worldwide Web” in search of wonderful new adventures.

Yes…look at this as an adventure… it’s more about “playing” and “learning” and “discovering” what’s new in the world of technology. You’ll find many ways to participate in these activities and will enjoy using many of them for personal and family purposes., as well as, educational practices. Again, the idea behind this little adventure is to allow the Worldwide Web, our number set at nine, to “embody” the curriculum and “inspire the creation process with” its support through the use of blogs, podcasts, flickr, RSS, wikis, games, tagging, TeacherTube, Google features.

Each Monday, I will post a new activity for your journey. You will need to record your experiences in a blog, which will be our first activity. We will begin the week of August 25, 2008.

Monday’s Muse

Brenda Branson — Mon, 05 May 2008 01:49:07 +0000

Our little sessions continue on Monday afternoon with plans to introduce Google Lit Trips and Community Walk. Many of our Social Studies classes integrate historical fiction into the SS standards and use maps with push pins to show areas discussed. They are all using DE videos and images to support their instruction so we’re going to learn how to put this all together and capitalize on all the benefits of the Web 2.0 applications enhanced by the Promethean boards and resources from DE. We’ll start with a video introduction to Google Earth. Next we’ll view a demo of a Google Lit Trip and what it is all about.

Learning Centers

Brenda Branson — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 15:41:15 +0000

Just got back from an OEC meeting to plan our library media conference for October 2008. We have lots of great sessions in the making and Debbie Jarrett will be one of our speakers. It really got me thinking about how to incorporate Web 2.0 with United Streaming. A few of our teachers are setting up learning centers simply because of the diverse levels within each classroom. I am planning a training session on using DEN to create learning centers and had originally planned to do a simple activity with a video clip, images or audio files. I’m thinking about other Web 2.0 ways for the students to complete assignments and projects for their center work. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

Blogging

Podcasts

Puzzlemaker

Time Line Maker