ePal!

After viewing the ePals website, I can think of many ways I would use this site in my classroom. Many school districts have a problem with allowing teachers and students access social networking site such as Facebook, Twitter, and even site like YouTube. While I understand the dangers that the administration sees in allowing access to these sites, I think there is a huge disadvantage as well. With a site like ePal, teachers would be able to do many of the things they want to do but can't.

For example, the ePal Learning Space is, "a virtual workspace optimized for creating, sharing, managing, and collaborating on educational content". This portion of the website allows teachers to safely email students, set up blogs, wikis, and other media tools while being able to monitor the content their students are subjected to. In addition, teachers can upload files (i.e. Word or PDF's) so that they will never hear the excuse of "I lost the original copy of my assignment so I couldn't do it," and also the most famous, "I didn't know that was due." Parents can also utilize this learning space by joining different communities or just checking to see what their children are doing in a specific class. With many built in language and content filters, the ePal Learning Space provides a safe environment for students to collaborate with their peers and teachers.

I can definitely see myself using the Learning Space to keep in contact with parents, to create wikis for my students, and also to set up blogs. With wikis and blogs, I could give my kids extra out of class help or step by step directions for assignments they are having problems with. The good thing about this program is everything is structured and the school district has the option to monitor the collaboration between students, teachers, and parents. I would definitely use this program in the classroom.

Wonderful World of Flickr

I can't say enough about how I would use FlickR in the English classroom! Sites like these excite me because they can be used in a multitude of ways. One way would be in the form of digital storytelling. After collecting my photos from flickr, I would use websites such as animoto to compile my pictures so that they would be able to tell my story. For example, instead of using PowerPoint to create a picture slideshow, I could use animoto instead, and set all my flickr pictures to music (with transitions included) easily to tell whatever story I wanted. Here is a one I made about pie eating just for fun!

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

In addition to using flickr for digital storytelling, I could use flickr as a final project for my English students. For example, bighugelabs takes photos from flickr and allows the user to create movie posters, magazine covers, cd covers, or even a comic book! After reading a novel, one of my final projects could be to create one of the previously mentioned objects in order to summarize the essence of the book. Here is a movie poster I made using flickr for the novel Catcher in the Rye:

Would you go see it?

I find that students are very enthusiastic when they use technology they are familiar with for final projects. I have used imovie before and their products turned out well so I have no doubt in my mind using flickr for a final project would turn out awesome products!

Creative Common What?

Because we live in a digital age where information is readily accessible, there has to be certain laws that protect information. There is a ton of information out in cyber space including social security numbers, passwords, banks records, and loads of other things considered sensitive. But what about other forms of information that people don't necessarily what other to have access to? In this context, I am referring to art-ranging from music, to books, to paintings. Because we live in a digital age, artists constantly have to deal with their copyrighted artwork put online (sometimes leaked against their will) without them having a say.
Fortunately however, Creative Commons, a United States non profit,developed a system of copyright licenses that allow these work to be distributed legally.


Currently, there are 4 types of creative commons licenses:


1. Attribution: the author or artists allows you to use their work and derivatives to distribute, display, and perform their work as long as you give them credit. 

This picture taken from Flickr is an example of an attribution creative
common license. Notice the credit is given to the artist Domino and
it is stamped directly on to the picture. 

2. Noncommercial: the author or artist allows you to use their work and derivatives as stated above as long as you are not seeking some sort of gain for commercial purposes, hence the term "noncommercial"

3. No derivatives works: the author or artist allows you to use their work as stated above but you are not allowed to use any 
derivatives associated with the work. 


4. Share alike:the author or artist allows derivates to be distributed only under a license that is identical to their work. 


(In these cases, the term derivative simply refers to any transformation, adaptation, or reproduction done to a previous piece of work). 


Although this isn't the end all be all to protecting copyrighted material online, it definitely helps the artist out and can be an even bigger help in the future!