Deleting Online Predetors Act (DOPA)

After reading many blog posts about the DOPA, I decided to follow Vicki Davis’ advise and use a template that another blog writer/ teacher has created and send it to my Senetors.
It took less than 5 minutes to tailor the template to my needs and find the appropriate mail form to send to the Senetor. Maybe enough teachers will read this and take these 5 minutes out of their pre-planing time to let their senators know how they feel.

Here is the link to the template for writing your letter to your Senators about DOPA from Doug Noon.
Here is the link to find your senator. Just click in the upper right corner and pick your state.

Filed in: langwitches DOPA

Del.icio.us Uses for Teachers and the Classroom

I have been using del.icio.us for over a month now and I keep finding new exciting ways to use it.

For the ones that do’t know what del.icio.us is yet:
“A social bookmarks manager. Using bookmarklets, you can add bookmarks to your list and categorize them.”
Social bookmarks are:
Social bookmarking sites generally organize their content using tags. Social bookmarking sites are an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging and inferences drawn from grouping and analysis of tags.

Those tags are the keywords that make it so much easier to categorize and file away any website that you found interesting and would like to keep for further reference. One you start getting into the habit of adding websites to your del.icio.us account and then tagging them with tags that best describe the article, you will have an easy time retrieving all the articles that have something to do with certain keywords.

This will be of great advantage when you are preparing to write a research paper or trying to get information about a certain topic together to prepare a lesson or unit plan. Another great way of using del.icio.us in the classroom would be to create a special tag just for your Spanish 101 class for example and name it very specific (there are many Spanish 101 classes out there… attach your school’s acronym for example: SJEDS_spanish101) You can then share your URL for that tag with your students for example and ask them (if they have a del.icio.us account to add to this page as well by tagging pages they are finding relevant to the class with that predetermined tag (ex. SJEDS_spanish101)

Today I found the delicious page from Will Richardson, the author of “Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and other web tools in the classroom“. He created a tag called “Quotable” in his delicious account. When he finds an article he posts it with the quote under the “notes” field, which automatically lets you read the quotes that made him save the post in the first place. Check his “Quotable Tag” page out.

Let me know if you have found other ideas on how to use del.icio.us as a teacher and with your students in the classroom.
Filed in: langwitches del.icio.us social_bookmarking teaching

Langwitches’ WIKI

I invite you to check out Langwitches’ new Wiki.
Since I learn best when playing around with the tools I am diving right in. I hope I will learn along the way and kind readers will point me in the right direction. I am hoping to find other Wikis geared towards the foreign language teacher to learn by example.

My goals for this Wiki are:

• learn about the site hierarchy of a wiki
• learn different ways to create links, navbars, insert images, video, etc.
• grasp the concept of what wikis can mean for student learning
• understand the risks involved for elementary school children with the responsability (privilege/freedom??) to contribute to their learning content
• come up with projects, lesson plans and guidelines of incorporating wikis into my school (school wide cross-curriculum project?)
• collaborate with other foreign language educators who are integrating technology into their classroom

Filed in: langwitches wikis foreign_language teaching technology

Link: http://langwitches.wikispaces.com/