Social Bookmarking-BP3

Hello everyone. Today I am blogging about educational uses for social bookmarking. I am using Delicious to bookmark reference pages for my AR project and to locate pertinent information that I can utilize in my classroom. Today I located an article, while searching on the Delicious site, entitled "Understanding Multimedia Learning: Integrating multimedia in the K-12 classroom. The article was conducted by SEG Research. The research was supported by a grant from BrainPOP.

This article immediately caught my eye because I researched similar material in my Media Research class in July-August of this year! The article also ties in with the course we had in Aug-September on brain research. If I had know about Delicious then, I could have included this wonderful paper.

The paper referred to above describes the way in which the brain processes multimedia information and the principles behind effective multimedia instruction.

The second article I located is entitled "Mobile Digital Storytelling: An Article for the Tech Edge: The Journal of the Texas Computer Education." It was written by Wesley A Fryer and updated November 26, 2007. He has a web site also: www.speedofcreativity.org.

In this article, Mr. Fryer discusses the importance of digital storytelling in contributing to student achievement. I found it particularly interesting that he explains the use of cell phones as mobile recorders, and lists several web sites for students to access to record audio clips that can be integrated into projects the students are completing. One of these web sites that I have to check out is GabCast at www.gabcast.com. Teachers can set up accounts so that students can conduct interviews for special projects and record the information to be embedded into a digital story or keynote or ppt presentation.

Another site I visited is www.BrainPop.com. This is a site that creates animated, curriculum based content that supports educators and engages students. I see sites such as this one as being very important in developing media skills with our students. This site has lesson plans, teacher conferences pages, forums, blogs, and allows you to post their videos on your blogs once you are approved. I applied, but perhaps since our school district denies access at the present time, I did not get approved to post a video on my blog. Many of you will find that to be the case with your school districts. I was hoping to share my blog with my school district to demonstrate the enormous possibilities for increasing academic achievement with our students.

This next site is www.edutopia.org. I am embedding a video that I thought was very thought provoking in our field of media design and technology. Why, even fourth graders are producing movies! It is sites like this that are truly contributing to the development of 21st century skills with our students. Perhaps I will be able to share this with my district in my attempts to get them to release educational sites for access by our students. I have bookmarked this one and will be using it for research for my AR topic. I love all of the Web 2.0 tools to which I have been exposed. There is so much I want to share with my students. They have so much potential and their potential is being squashed because they can't have access to the tools that would place them in the forefront of educational excellence. I signed an agreement regarding the use of this video because it is copyrighted. I have permission to use the video for my blog and for educational uses. The name of this video is "What Works in Public Education" created by The George Lucas Educational Foundation.