5314 Week 2

This week I was given a new perspective of wikipedia, but I was not yet convinced to use it as a reliable source in itself. If my students are going to do research on a research project, I'm going to make them use sources that have been reliable for years. If they want to start with Wikipedia and then check those facts from more assuredly reliable sites and sources, fine. But they're not going to use Wikipedia for their entire project.

I think that photosharing could be the most useful tool of anything on the web. There is nothing that students love to do more than look at pictures. The only problem I have is that I teach history. The best way to do this for class might be to share pictures of historical places that I've gone and invite students to share pictures of themselves when they have gone to a historical place, then offer extra credit for them if they put together a presentation about the history of the place they visited.

The fateful day has come for me. I finally have a Twitter account after always saying that I would refuse to get one. I don't like it. I just don't like the idea of it. I understand that it can be useful for sharing links about professional development and hobbies and everything else that is important in life, but that's why we have friends, and why we make new friends when we start going out and doing the things we like. I know that Twitter is really just an online form of this, but it still bothers me. I think maybe it's just part of my personality, and part of it is that I'm not in a real good mood doing this work right now, but Twitter just gets on my nerves. I suppose that I might be able to figure out how to do a project with it if students pretend to be a historical figure and then have to tweet their way through an important part of that person's life.