November 3, 2009
This week we met with Sandra Roby the Director of Instructional Technology/Library Media. The purpose of this meeting was to get the program back on track. As I have talked about in previous posts, it has been a bit of a struggle getting this program up and running. A lot of the problems come from poor teacher participation and an unclear definition of what Bentley University Service Learning Students are at the Middle School for. One of the resources that we talked about at this meeting is the
Cluster Challenge Wiki.This wiki services a repository of information about web 2.0 tools for both teachers and students. Since a wiki is never really ever “finished” it is hard to say when this wiki is nearing completion. However, now that people have started inputting information into the wiki it is starting to become an excellent source of information about Web 2.0. In the following weeks we will assign each of our students a web 2.0 tool and have them add to the wiki. A key factor to web 2.0 is collaboration and by getting the Bentley students in my program to participate in the wiki, it will give them a better understanding of what web 2.0 is. My students have also created their own
Blog and posted some of the tutorials and work that they have done to it. These will serve as presentations for the students at the middle school. Another one of me students created a short
presentation to give to the class he works with because the teachers want Bentley students to inform the middle school students about web 2.0 tools to use for their Ancient Rome course projects.
The tutorial i have been working on is a step by step walk through of how to create a blog using blogger. You can view this
Here. Another class is using a home building program. Through this program the students create a house from the ground up and then try to sell it. For their final "auction," we are suggesting they use
Voicethread. By using this tool, students can upload pictures of their home along with information and then other students can leave their bids for the home around the picture. This is both interactive and fun for the students.