See you later Guys!

I hate to say goodbye as it makes me feel so sad , so since I hope to see you in a couple weeks I'll just say see you later!
However I must admit that It was a wonderful experience working with you all. I admire Stacy's sharpness in which she just says it as it seems. Margies politeness is adorable , She makes me feel good about my postings and what would I do without loud mouth Robin. Without her I would'nt know when my links dont work . Sometimes I wonder if she sleeps at nights or she just sits and waits for my posts . Thanks Robin you are my backup !
I had never blogged before , and never thought anything good could come out of it but it was indeed a wonderul experience.I enjoyed exploring those educational softwares , and telling others about them.
So here's my poem dedicated to you all:

Gloria's Blogging
maybe wobbling
But with conceptmapping
you will be popping
Dont forget filamentality
it is your instrumentality!

So until ...so long!

With Concept-Mapping and Filamentality softwares

Who should teach them?

Some people say the parents , others say the teachers but who would you say ? Lets check this out !
A 2003 study reported that an average sentence for a child molester is 7 years , and in most cases the offenders are released after serving three years . A certain sex offender was sentenced to 3 years in 1987 for sexually abusing a 7 year old boy . In 1988 he got another probation for 2nd degree sex abuse . In 1995 he earned a 3-9 years prison term for sexually abusing 2 boys . By 2005 he was on MYspace making friends.
I am really confused !What can the teacher do here ?

Promote Learning

Filamentality helps you integrate the Internet into your handouts, research, lessons, and activities. Students and other teachers can access your pages from any Internet connected computer (or from your network if you choose to download and save your pages there). Below you will find examples of professionally created pages that vary from the standard Filamentality format and plain Filamentality pages created by real users.

Treasure Hunt: Teachers (and students) can create Treasure Hunts to facilitate learning factual knowledge on a subject. The basic strategy is to find sites that hold information that you feel is essential to the given topic. After you've gathered these links, you are then prompted by Filamentality to pose a question for each site. At the end of the Hunt, you add a culminating "Big Question." I f learners are already emotionally connected to the topic, then ask the question, "Are they learning enough background information on the subject?" If the answer is no or if the best information on the subject is "hot off the press," that's another reason to try a Treasure Hunt. You can take a look at a very basic treasure hunt, or view one of our own professionally designed Hunts: Black History Past to Present*

Multimedia is driving me crasy!

We live in a a multi-media intensive world , and our children have fully adopted every facet as an intrinsic part of our culture!

We can only get them to focus on any one particular thing ,if it is sugar coated with technology produced by experts of a $7.3 billion industry. Budgets for high profile games range from $10 - $12 million . Presentations must be mind capturing .

Today , the romance between our schools and technology presents the view that , wherever there are computers students are learning? but technology does not guarantee effective learning. As a matter of fact the inappropriate uses of technology can hinder learning . We all are aware how consuming the computer can be , and sometimes we waste so much time surfing that we sometimes forget the real reason we we were online in the first place.

So then what can we do to keep students focussed ? Lets consider the case of asking students to read books from the International children's digital library! Great site... ,lots of colors ,lots of choices to make .

Here the interface is visual, the softare enables children to search by criteria that were selected by children-for example ;
--the country the book is from
--the genre
--the characters
--the language
--the color of the book
--the shape or color of the book

This week at Syracuse University

This week we will focus our discussions on Webquests, an inquiry -oriented activity in which most or all of the information used by learners is drawn from the web. One software that will help you create example of webquests is Filamentality.
It lets you create 5 different formats , and you can choose the order of your activities.
WEbquests uses sites you select as the starting point for a complex activity that multiple perspectives, possible group collaboration, and afinal project of your choosing.It has been suggested that you start with a subject of particular interest, or a specific goal.For students, a hobby or something they have heard about or always wanted to learn about could be the catalyst.

Filamentality helps you integrate the Internet into your handouts, research, lessons and activities.Students and teachers can access your pages from any internet connected computer.

When you want to go beyond learning facts and want to get into more challenging aspects of atopic you need a webquest!

Assistive Technology

Just recently I started having problems with my eyes. The words on the page would often appear blurred . On several occasions i would close my eyes and wonder if there would be a form of technology that could just read aloud for me , and I thought that would be very nice.I am also reminded of many of my students who would put their head up so close to the computer that you wouldn't be able to see anything on the screen if you were to look at that screen. I imagine what it must be like for those people with even greater disability!

John Slatin , of Texas state University posits that there are about 500,000 sudents with disabilities in Texas alone. Six percent of all college students ,he claims have disabilities! and while children in K-12 have special programs to help them along , college students have to figure it out by themselves.Organizations tend to believe that people with disabilities walk around with their own assistive technology, which is far from the truth.

I think that technology developers should begin thinking about the many disabilities in our society today, and make more technology available for those people .

If we are an equal opportunity society then everyone should have te appropriate technology to use at their disposal.

Filamentality

Dear Fellow bloggers,
Today I was in a plight.I really really wanted to find a presentaion on context clues for my 7th grade ELA summer school class, so I decided to search the internet and believe it or not I found the greatest , most detailed site composed by ATT affiliates just for teachers. It is called Filamentality!
Strange name but thats just it !
Yes ... so if you have a presentation to make and you want to be able to use the web so that others can use it too, the answer is Filamentality.

Filamentality is a fill in the blank interactive website that guides you through picking a topic , searching the web and gathering sites . It combines the filaments of the web with your mentality and there is no need for html or web servers .You will be guided along the way and you will end up with a web-based product that you can share with others.

Filamentality is for anyone who wants to compile resources either for personal or shared use , for professional use or just for fun... and of course ,it is easy to use .In fact there is a growing users club called "Club Fil". Here users exchange ideas and methods for incorporating Filamentality into the library or classroom.

Today , please check out the Filamentality Registry search engine at http://www.kn.packbell.com/wired/fil/registry.html
that will allow you to search pages registered by other filamentality users.

So come with me as I explore Filamentality.