Weekly Reflection - Module 5

My Taxonomy Table

This week focused on organizing my thoughts for the final project. My online course is a course for teachers and staff that could be adapted for any high school student. I am focusing on Web 2.0 tools that can be used in the classroom. I am also highlighting some web tools that are for personal productivity. I am planning on presenting the course content with various Web 2.0 tools. This would be a hands-on introduction to the tool itself. I will be starting the class with Moodle, followed by del.icio.us (tagging, networks, clouds) then flickr (focusing on photos used for classroom use) and creative commons. Next, we will use and discuss blogger.com, Rss feeds and making your own avatar. PBWiki will follow with Google Apps ending the course (docs, igoogle). I have almost completed the learning objectives and their ranking in Bloom's Taxonomy. No decision has been made as per the final format.

I reviewed the plagiarism software, turnitin.com. Just a few months ago, I thought that Turnitin.com might lose a lawsuit that would put them out of business. They were sued for copyright..by students who had submitted papers to the database. These students said that Turnitin. com did not have the right to keep these papers in their database. The students lost and we will all keep our subscriptions to this anti-plagiarism software. We do not have a big user group for the program but those teachers who do use it, are faithful users.

My favorite use for turnitin.com is when students themselves submit their papers in rough draft form. They will receive their papers back from turnitin, which will give them an opportunity to correct any types of plagiarism. It gives the teacher an opportunity to demonstrate, first hand, how plagairism is detected, which then can lead to further discussion on plagiarism itself.

The discussion and Bloom's Taxonomy Table created for the Carey article was rich with ideas. I found the lessons to be very adaptable. This is always to the benefit of the learner. There were so many useful and creative ideas posted on our discussion board. I was excited to see the new Snagfish program. This could open up a whole new arena for the classroom teacher and video.