Thoughts from 7/10

We began our meeting with a discussion of Bloom's Taxonomy. The chart we reviewed is available on the resource page of our myLesley course site. This related site is another great way of finding verbs to help you write lesson plan goals that work on higher order thinking skills and of targeting specific student skills.

From that discussion we began to review the State's introduction to the Social Studies Frameworks. Many of you found the piece to have quite an air about it. We found many references to the great democracy that we are and how that understanding that can help us to see the need for teaching democracy to others. One item of a more positive note was the importance in social studies for creating the next group of citizenry. In order for our country to work according to our democratic principals we need our citizens to be well-educated and knowledgeable about their role in government. This notion was also evident in our look at the NCSS introduction to its standards. There we saw a focus on the need for social studies across the curriculum. There is a focus on the common good and educating the whole child. If we work to teach our students to become good problem solvers then they will be able to deal with an ever increasing amount of information.

The Web 2.0 groups met to review their assigned readings and then share with the group on what a podcast is, what a wiki is and what makes up a blog. Throughout this course we are practicing our work on blogging and learning first hand how it feels to blog and communicate with classmates virtually. We will also be creating an initial audio and a video podcast. We did discover that a true podcast happens with regularity and allows the user to subscribe to the feed. From there we examined RSS feeds and how that can make new information from blogs, wikis, podcasts and websites come to us, eliminating the need for us to go searching to multiple locations to find out new information.