Good Read!, June 8, 2011

If you are looking to add technology into your classroom, Will Richardson's book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, is a good place to start. The book takes the reader through a journey of possibilities to using web 2.0 tools in education. Each chapter was dedicated to a web 2.0 tool, from Weblogs to Social Networks (and many in-between)! Each chapter describes the web 2.0 tool and then gives examples of how others have used the tool in their classroom. On top of that Richardson also has examples you can actually go to on the Internet! I found that the real life examples reinforced the idea that teachers all over the world are incorporating technology into their classrooms. And it was nice to see how others were doing that.I like how Richardson wrote the book for educators and he understands that not everyone is an expert at using technology. He constantly is mentioning that before jumping into using this in the classroom, you must first become...

Reading this book you feel like your actually having a one-way conversation with someone who is teaching a lot of new and exciting stuff. Throughout the text the author is constantly giving tips and information to make the things he is telling you about easy to understand and even use. In chapter 6 the author talks about the advantages of using twitter and how it's possible to use twitter for troubleshooting as well as to hear about new and exciting ideas from other professionals. Diigo is also discussed and it is noted that because it allows you to bookmark websites and is a web application, you can use it from any computer anywhere because of your unique login. Delicious is a site that allows you to use specific tags that allow for your students to easily access and find the work. Chapter 7 is a discussion on Flickr and the possibilities that come with using it. Being able to annotate items within a picture allows individuals to see and discover what they are looking at. The idea...

In this book I really thought that it was helpful for teachers and parents alike. There are always those tough questions that we face as adults when it comes to parenting and educating and this was a helpful resource. One of the main chapters that I focused on was chapter 3. This chapter is about how all parents, students, and administrators are clear on why this technology is being used in the classroom. For parents the first thing that they can do to make sure their child is safe is give their student permission to use this technology for school. Most schools send home an acceptable use sheet to sign and parents should be aware of this and make sure that they get one. Parents also need to communicate with teachers about what the teacher is doing to make sure that student privacy is protected. Parents need to make sure they talk to their children about never putting personal information on the blogs and the parents also need to know the process for reporting problems with blog...