Friday, November 6, 2009

Week 10: Curriculum Wiki Page and Wanting to Kick One's self. Grr!!

I am not typically a procrastinator, but this has been a week of procrastination for me!! :( I'm not sure if the November funk has taken grasp of my work ethic, but this is also going on in my classroom as well. In the last several hours I have been regretting not starting this week's assignment sooner, but there is nothing I can do about it now. I don't think I would have waited this long if I had not been working 4-6 hours each night on my Wiki presentation that I'm presenting Saturday morning in Dr. G.'s EME5053 class. I've never presented for two hours, so I've been stressing about that instead. Go figure. :(

Anyways, here's my reflection about this week's assignment.

I really enjoyed perusing the links on Building Curriculum Pages and Digital Storytelling. I think I must have added delicious bookmarks on each one and will probably recall the sites often as I look for inspiration, ideas, and resources for future use. I really liked the Jamestown link and even shared it with my mother who is a fifth grade teacher and my friend who is an 8th Grade American History teacher. I will be going back to to take a second look at TrackStar, Filamentality, TeacherWeb, and  zWebQuest over the weekend.

I have Diigo installed on my Firefox Explorer and really enjoy making use of it and seeing how other people add sticky notes to various webpages. I was not aware of Diigo Web Slides and made the mistake of pulling that one of the webslide examples up on my teacher computer during class. There were several interesting not entirely appropriate slides, so I had to quickly shut that down. When I have more time, I'm going to reexplore that page. It looked "quite" interesting. LOL!

Typically, I do not create "zipped" files, but have wondered how to do so. 9 out of 10 times I am unzipping files to use with powerpoint presentations or access someone else's work. At school I love to unzip new powerpoint backgrounds because we are still stuck with Office 2003 and the templates there STINK! So I regularly access indezine.com and find creative backgrounds that require a quick unzip and I'm off to the races. It's quick and easy to download a zipped file and usually very quick to unzip them.

Curriculum Page Specs


Here it is: 

http://vacationresearchproject.pbworks.com/

I am quite proud of myself for what I have created in the last five hours. I'm just glad my children are not home because dinner has not happened this evening, nor have my dogs been watered or my jacket removed.

Here's some background on my curriculum page. For the last 4 years, I have been using a Vacation Research Project rather than teaching an old-fashioned Research Paper on a topic that my students will have a hard time writing about. So.....I found something near and dear to them. Planning out a Summer Vacation Project that is integrated with every academic content area.

I have never created an entire webquest from start to finish. I've used handouts with this project and a few web activities, but never something like this. Since I am only recently a Wiki Believer, I can 100% guarantee that I will be using this curriculum page with my students this year. I have to say that I am quite proud of it, but it still needs a few things. I have left out one of the most important things at this point (OBJECTIVES), but will quickly add them over the weekend for a late grade if necessary. Overall, when it is 100% completed, it is an easy vacation project wiki that any teacher could use without recreating the wheel at all. Except perhaps for the Google maps user and password. It is a generic user/pw created specifically for this project, so I don't expect any issues with this account at this time.

I think given the time that I actually allotted for this week for this class, I think I've created a pretty thorough and well thought out Wiki Curriculum Page that I will use this year with my students. :) I'm off for dinner and it's not even 10 p.m. yet! Yay!

Have a fantastic weekend!

~Katie

1 comment:

  1. Darn it....Now that I've had a chance to stand up and stretch, I see I still have a few other things to add like my Project Final Rubric, Gas Expense Worksheet, and a few other doodads. Not going to happen tonight. :(

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