Presentation+Abstracts


 * Post your first name, a title, and an abstract (about 500 words) for your presentation **

Frank Centeno The purpose of my project was to use Moodle as a web support environment for students in which they can have additional access to instructional resources and collaborate. I selected to create my course project using Moodle for its many features that can facilitate collaboration with ease, and for its high usage among the academic world. I researched Word press and Edu2.0 for my initial web 2.0 application to use for my course project. I found both of these web 2.0 apps to be very useful; my concern was with security. When planning social networks, we must always keep in mind that safety over the internet must be our first priority. In addition, I some of the free social network software comes attached with host advertisement; since the user has no control over the content of these paid advertisement, the content could change and your social network might be giving out the wrong impression. Using Moodle you have high security and no unsolicited advertisement. On the front page of my project I incorporated links to resource that are of the community. The links guide the student to resources such as: Counseling center, student transfer info, and to the campus library. I added a calendar which points to upcoming events around campus; library workshops and writing workshops and other posting alerting students to take advantage. I wanted the front page of my site to be inviting, a video of the campus writing center was embedded. The video not only engages the curiosity but it also provides information about the writing center.( //More can be added, such as schedules of labs that provide student support around campus)// I wanted to create a social site that students can learn from each other and also find resources that can help them along the learning process. Once inside Moodle you will find forums, chat, wiki, and links that make for a collaborative environment. The forums establish a form of communication between students. I ask students to share their learning experiences overcoming learning obstacles in hope that this process might assist a fellow student in a similar situation; or students can inspire each other by way of their post in the forums. The chat feature is a way for groups of student to communicate with each other regarding school issue and it also provides an instructor to communicate with students who need additional assistance. The wiki is word builder, I ask students to add unrecognized words in their vocabulary that the encounter into the wiki or add definitions to existing words found in the wiki. I think this helps with group assignments found in the classroom. The links on the inside compared to the front page are more specific to student needs, videos on math, reading, or grammar help. What I wanted to create is a model for web support social network; more can be added to this model: second life (Sloodle), podcasting, and live conferencing to make it suit the needs of students and instructors to facilitate learning. Moodle can be combined with Google Doc’s which allow for more collaborative environment.
 * Moodle: //Web support// **

Bobby's BestBlog Math Practices I am creating a blog site of best practices for math using WordPress. Whether I am communicating to my students, their parents, or my colleagues/teachers, my main concern intention is to highlight effective teaching. This theme is displayed in three sections: 1) a Student Page; 2) a Parent Page; 3) a Teacher Page; and a Welcome/Home Page. The Welcome Page introduces the viewer to Bobby’s BestBlog Math Practices. Each page presents some photos of my classroom or student work samples. The Welcome Page shows the print-rich class environment by showing a bulletin board of charted student work, vocabulary, and artifacts, which show what students produce in class. The variety of activities is evident by a photo of a fraction game to illustrate that math is fun. Furthermore, a picture of math literature demonstrates cross-curricular practices of using literature to teach math. A video of Michael Wesch is posted to awaken curiosity about how students learn in this modern web age, which fits with my theme of using a variety of activities to demonstrate best practices. From the home page, the blog presents options for students to interact with the teacher and each other. The right column widgets categorize blogs by assignments, portfolio, fractions, functions, etc. Tags also organize the blog by student first name. If a tag name is larger, it simply means that it has more posts than the other tags grouping. Blogs allow students as well as teachers and parents to interact and share their learning experiences with this math teacher. The photos for this page show a student sample of test corrections so that students understand how test mistakes should be redone. If students can learn from the mistakes of their past, then they stand a good chance of not repeating them in the future, especially in math. This is one of the most important ideas to communicate to students in achieving best practice. A photo of model student notes is also given for all to learn from. A link to a Dreamweaver application I made for functions is also given. Functions ties together so many different key strands in Algebra and I created this site using Dreamweaver and Flash to give an interactive lesson online for students to access. For parents, I have provided a list of tips for them to help their child improve their Algebra skills. These tips do not require an understanding of Algebra, but allow parents to be significantly involved in their child’s math education. It’s the main question that parents ask math teachers, “How can I help my child’s math education?” Links of helpful products are given as are sites that from the publisher of their child’s math textbook, providing practice quizzes. And again, photos are displayed, but this time of hands-on activities used to help students understand functions. These activities help students construct their own learning in concrete and visual ways; another best practice. Another right-column widget of RSS feeds provides up-to-date content of educational news. Teachers also benefit by seeing photos of bulletin boards displaying Geometry using visuals. This enables students to acquire vocabulary easier. Most math walls are void and plain; why not use the wall space to chart difficult to understand content so that it’s easier to access. A blog roll widget is shown to direct teachers to helpful algebra links to benefit their practices. Social networking site Delicious.com bookmark feeds provide other helpful blogging sites to integrate with technology. Lastly, another podcast of Michael Wesch is given, but this time it’s a class lecture of his showing possibilities of how to use Web 2.0 technologies to enhance class learning in creative and collaborative ways.


 * Hector Verduzco**


 * WordPress (Blogs & Digital Portfolios)**

The purpose of this project was to use a web 2.0 tool to create an easy and reliable source for students to use on a daily basis both in class and outside of class for homework or peer collaboration. The tool I chose was WordPress because it seemed to combine two elements I usually integrate in my classes in an online platform that would be accessible outside of a student's individual workstation. WordPress is both a content management system and a blogging tool. This tool would be used daily as a blog page for students and also as a platform for the students Digital Portfolio where students would upload all their work. Digital portfolios are students work stored in a digital format which can be used for showcasing work, an assessment or a way of communicating student learning with parents. Digital portfolios "can help students create a "richer picture" of their skills and accomplishments than traditional transcripts allow...by providing a more thorough documentation of how students are reaching goals, it can give a school better information on how to help individual students and the school as a whole." (Bob Pearlman)

Digital portfolios can be created in many ways but with the new emerging web 2.0 tools I felt it would be nice to have digital portfolios integrated into a blog in a blogging tool such as WordPress. I previously used Iweb to complete both these task. But creating these in Iweb did not allow for collaboration or viewing from others. With WordPress it is both free and very easy to use students also have the opportunity to use many widgets and integrate many other emerging technologies will make this space a reflection of them as a person. Using WordPress students would learn how to use basic WYSIWG (What You See Is What You Get) functions to create a website that showcases all their work for the year. This way students can have others see and give feedback on their work. This added pressure of publishing for their peers and parents will create better end results in projects since they know they will be published.

In my classes students would create a WordPress account and create their basic layout the first week of school where they will be responsible for setting all the required pages and adding a few widgets of their choice. From then on students will daily create a blog as a warm-up in the beginning of class. Weekly students will comment on their peers blogs. Along with this students will upload there projects for peer evaluation and grading which will be handled through a form on Google docs. After students have gotten feedback they will be able to revise and upload before I give them a final grade. This process will take place for all projects and students will have a catalog of tall their best work and daily blogs to use as wither a portfolio for work or to show to their friends and family.


 * Crystal Bobadilla**

Social Networking in Counseling

The purpose of creating a social networking site in counseling is to use it as a tool to communicate with my future students regarding college and career information. Today counselors are kept busy with an average of a 400 student caseload, with this amount of students it makes it difficult to see and talk to every single student. With that in mind I decided to create a social networking site that would help increase the communication between a counselor and their students when it comes to career and college counseling. For the purpose of this project I decided to choose ning to create my networking site because it is a private site that has many features that allows me to post videos, events, forums, and blogs. These functions are great tools for students to communicate with their counselor and their peers.

When you visit the site the first thing you will notice is the name of the site “Futures” I decided to call the page futures because the entire page contains information that will affect the futures of these students. On the site you will find different areas of information. The first is the event section; this section allows me to remind students of any deadlines that are approaching for example, SAT, ACT, financial aid application, and college application deadlines. This is a great way to keep students updated so they will not miss any deadlines. The next section in my networking site allows me to post any career and college videos. Currently I have three short videos that I believe students will find interesting the first, is an overview of the job description of a physical therapist. Second is a college video of Columbia University in New York, and finally another college video that discusses the academics at the University of Southern California. These videos are great for students to learn about different colleges and careers. My goal is to post new videos every two weeks.

On the site students as well as the counselor are able to post blogs. For the first blog I welcomed my students and gave them an overview of the page. Another function that you can find on my page is being able to post forums, this is another tool to share information and have people comment on your discussion. The site also allows for chatting, which I find great because this allows students to communicate with each other or to communicate with the counselor. I will be online everyday from 7pm-8pm for students to chat and ask any questions regarding careers and colleges. On this site students will also be able to find links to important websites such as SAT and ACT registration, UC’s and Calstate applications, and financial aid. Finally students can find different information on the notes section of the page. Currently there is information on the A-G requirements, which are the requirements high school students need to complete in order to be eligible to apply to a four year university.

Podcast: Radio Show
 * Connie So**

In education today, it seems that the traditional lecture type of forum of classes no meets the needs of students. Students require a multifaceted variety of activities to engage them: multitasking, manipulatives, and technology. As educators, we need to come up with creative ways to engage our students and interest them in the subject they are learning. As a social science teacher, the task I find most difficult at hand is connection. Many students ask, “Why are we studying this? It’s the past. What does this have to do with me?” I think there are many different web 2.0 tools that can be utilized to assist in relating the content with the students. The research project I have chosen are podcasts. Because I do not have a class to work with, I will provide an outline of the lesson I would deliver to a class. The students are not only using podcasts, but several other web 2.0 tools as well. The assignment the students will complete is a “radio show” that they will produce and publish as a podcasts to be uploaded onto the school website. The radio show will depict a recreation of the time period 1944 in America, amidst the involvement of World War II. The students are to begin the project by first researching the culture of the time period: the music, the attire, and sentiment of the American people. The project will take about 7-10 days to complete. They will listen to different commercials, advertisements, presidential addresses, propaganda pieces, and war bonds ads from 1944. They can find these on different sites such as National Archives and YouTube. This will take about two days. They will then collaborate as groups to create a script that will be pieced together to create the 15 minute radio show. Each group will be responsible for about 2-3 minutes. The groups will brainstorm and create a different component than the other groups to contribute to the show. They will write out their scripts and practice it. After, they will record the show using Audacity and edit the show. They will be given a day of instruction on how to use audacity, including adding distortion to the recording to give it the authenticity of a recording from 1944, and sound effects they may choose to include. The groups will then be given time to fine tune their portions and finally submit their sound files to a class website or forum (such as Wikispaces or Ning). They students will then listen to all the groups recording and decide as a class how to combine the different groups into one show. Then as a class, the students will learn how to convert their file to .mp3 and include an RSS feed so we can continue creating radio shows throughout the school year from different time periods. The final show will be uploaded to either the school website or the class website, accessible by other students and the general public.



**Mary Ann**
Sciprojects livejournal community

[] In the present digital world, it is a necessity for educators to address the question of how students born in this digital era view their reality, construct knowledge and learn. It is also important to consider what tools and skills our students will need after they graduate in order to remain competitive in the global market. Beyond their technological capacity, educators should also address the development of scientifically literate and socially responsible citizens who will be able to collaborate with each other to further humanity’s goals. Therefore, it is important that students experience learning and become consciously aware of their participation and responsibility in the way they construct their realities. This project, a livejournal community, showcases the process of collaborative learning in a science class through mini-projects. The community serves as a hub that connects the class to other individual student blogs and external learning links. Specifically, the objectives of this blog include administrative, instruction, student engagement, Web 2.0 literacy development and metacognitive purposes. It also functions as a central point connecting to other Web 2.0 tools and sites that have different roles in the learning process.

Livejournal communities serve as social sites where people can post and create online communities together based on their common interests and purposes. On sciprojects, the purpose is to create an online community based on actual classroom communities. Sciprojects is a space on the internet where project assignments will be posted. Members of the community include the moderator-teacher, infurabon, and her students. Each student or group of students will be linked to each other via the community through a web of individual blog or wiki sites. The moderator also envisions the community as a hub that will link various sites that have different roles within her classroom. LJ blog 1, infurabon@livejournal.com, will be the moderator’s site for operations. LJ blog 2, technclassroom@livejournal.com, will be used for educator networking and educational technology issues. Technclassroomdeux.blogspot.com, will be used for lesson planning and posting lessons. The teacher’s myspace will serve as a space where students and parents can communicate with the teacher. The wiki on wetpaint, sciprojects.wetpaint.com, will be used by students for other group projects. The RSS feed and del.icio.us links will be used for reference purposes. The sidebar of the ljcommunity also includes tags and page summaries for easy access to particular posts. Moreover, it includes a webcounter that shows and records the number of visitors to the community along with their countries of origin.

In terms of content, sciprojects@lj will follow the following sequence of posts: 1. //Warm-up Reflection// Responses of each student will be posted in the comments section. For reflections that require longer responses, students will post reflections on their own blogs. But they have to post the links to their responses in the comments section. Responses must include text; but it may also include links to other media. 2. //Learning or Creating Procedures// Depending on the project, the teacher, will either post the procedure or ask groups to come up with their own procedure. For the first few projects, the teacher will provide the procedures in order to familiarize students with this kind of activity. 3. //Raw Data Posts// Data can be presented in many ways. Some common ways of presenting : tables, figures, charts, pictures, videos. Students can also opt to record their data in audio form through audacity or other tools. 4. //Interpretation and Discussion// Students post their own discussion and allow other groups to take part in it. The goal is to be able to share their learning experiences with others. 5. //Post-activity reflection// Individual reflections will cover cognitive, meta-cognitive and social issues.

Susanna Kan Wiki I have used wikispaces to create a wiki - http://mbes.wikispaces.com. My wiki is currently on the Plus plan, which is free, compliments of Wikispaces for educators. It has no expiration date. I have chosen to use wikispaces because it allows unlimited users to join the wiki. Although the total file storage is limited to 2 GB, there is no limit on how many pages and messages that can be created within the wiki. The user interface is very easy to learn and to use. The visual page editor is as easy to use as a word processor. It also comes with many standard features - easy widget and media embedding. Moreover, it is advertising-free for educators.

Teachers may utilize this space to show students' work and accomplishment. They may also display pictures or video of special classroom activities. There is also a place for teachers to share valuable resources. [|Wikipedia for Schools] offers the equivalent of a 20-volume printed encyclopedia, and can be downloaded for free onto a DVD or browsed online. [|SchoolTube] is the educator-moderated video sharing site where every video is screened by a classroom teacher before it goes live. I have also used Camtasia Studio to create a screencast. The Camtasia Recorder records how I interact with the information on the computer screen and captures my image and voice narration at the same time through a webcam.

I have also used Flash to create a basic grammar lesson. The lesson are divided into four sections - present simple, present continuous, past simple, past continuous. Examples and pictures are presented along with the definitions. User may continue to take a quiz to test his understanding of the lesson. User will be asked to type in his name before he starts to take the quiz. User will receive five points if he answers a question correctly. However, the user will lose one point if he answers the question incorrectly. During the quiz, I have set the program to provide immediate feedback to the user so that he will know if he has chosen a correct answer for that particular question. The program will also present the results of the quiz after the user finishes answering all the questions.

Please know that creating this wiki continues to be a work in progress. It's a project that is ongoing and one that I hope to make a collaborative endeavor for all those who are a part of my school. For those reasons, I welcome all suggestions, ideas and information that anyone can contribute! I will add more upcoming events and specific dates of those events later because I do not have the information about the events for this coming school year.

I hope to use this wiki to create a platform for our school's joint-campus virtual community. I would like to persuade all teachers and support staff to utilize this ground-breaking space to communicate, promote events and resources, and share their specialties. I have added language arts information in each grade level's page to show all teachers and support staff that the features of the wiki are very user-friendly. The teachers at each grade level will be the authors of their grade level's page. I will encourage them to hop on in, to add pages for their area/s of interest, and /or to begin to make contributions to existing areas.

James Centeno WordPress Blog Based on research into course management systems & research at the school site where I work, I felt an urgency to create a social network to help build collaboration among the staff at my school.. The language arts data on academic reading achievement for our students indicated that we need to look at new pathways to succeed in our delivery of reading instruction.. Thus, I found the purpose for the social network I created. The Social Networking project platform I chose was a WordPress Blog. I selected this platform because of the easy format and opportunity to build collaboration.. I incorporated several Web 2.0 tools to achieve even greater results. Some of the Web 2.0 tools include: RSS feeds, Blogs. Streaming video, online polls, Resource links. RSS Feed – It was important, like in any scholarly field, to incorporate literature that shares the latest research into best practices when teaching reading. So, I incorporated a RSS feed to get the latest online articles on literacy delivered directly to the blog page for quick teacher access. Blog – I knew that a good way to get teachers to collaborate was to get them to talk. That is why blogs are useful platforms for teachers to talk about concerns, or important issues in education. Streaming video – Visuals are very powerful in teaching new concepts. I include professional development videos in order to provide teachers with training in reading instruction, while away from school. Having access to training videos 24/7, makes it possible for teachers to learn from the comfort of home. Polls – The use of a poll to gage teacher interest on various content and resources will help me refine the blog as it evolves. The poll provides instant collaboration, as it will help me shape the content to match the needs of our community of educators. Links – I added many useful resource links that connects teachers with websites that base their practices on the latest research into the field of education. Other links will directly link the teacher with downloadable documents that they can apply in class immediately. Teachers can access templates to incorporate in to guided lessons and independent work. Conclusion: I have learned so much! The power Web 2.0 tools have to build teacher capacity is limitless. Collaboration can thrive as users work together to build a social networking community that meets the needs of its members, by allowing them to work together to enhance their knowledge of education.



= =