Niels Damgaard's Page

I've got this J thing going on with diigo - hopefully I've exorcised it now :-) the diigo link should be, diigo

Hi Susan, I think what you are proposing is an excellent way to harness new technology to make you and your colleagues life easier. I think diijo is probably a good social bookmarking platform to use as you can easily set up and co-ordinate a distinct group with the ability to comment and discuss with each other. when you say "Are their any websites that I should begin with?" do you mean general websites on elementary level education? I've included a couple of ning networks that might be useful and a search link for 'elementary school' on diijo. http://web2oh4teachers.ning.com/ http://onlineproj4tchrs.ning.com/ http://groups.diigo.com/group_mana/search_groups?keywords=elementary%20school if you want to setup a test at anytime before you talk with your colleagues, to give you a feel for how it might work - I'll contribute to get you going Steve

As a current teacher and graduate student I find the idea of creating educational social bookmarks intriguing. Simply providing students with access to the web and letting them try and find information on their own often leads to useless and inappropriate web pages. Providing students with a list of bookmarked websites would help alleviate this problem. While I do try to bookmark sites for my students, it often winds up cluttering the common computers in our lab. Before this discussion I had never heard of social bookmarking. I think that having multiple educators create bookmarks would ease the pressure on the individual teacher to find everything for themselves. In addition, by giving multiple educators the ability to edit the bookmarks, it could help cut back on dead links, which in my experience is a big problem with searching the internet. I’m going to research this topic more and talk to my colleagues to see about staring one for our school. Are their any websites that I should begin with? Are there any that cater to elementary school students?

What a wonderful site! I will be happy to post my VoiceThread! Thanks for the opportunity. ~Jennifer

Jennifer, Great idea! Last year I participated in Postcard Geography and we looked up each school in Google Earth and discussed landforms, bodies of water, major cities,etc.. I am doing several professional development workshops on VoiceThread and would like to include your project in my presentation. If you haven't seen http://voicethread4education.wikispaces.com/ - please check it out and consider adding your project. Colette Cassinelli http://www.edtechvision.org

I also use social bookmarking accounts for safety issues. Having a bookmarking site allows students to have multiple resources at their disposal without having to conduct much time-consuming searches on the internet.

Hi, my name is Anely Arencibia and I'm from Miami, FL. I'm brand new to Ning, but I'm planning on using it in my classroom this upcoming school year. I would love to set up a classroom page for my students to be able to network with each other and build their writing skills while improving their knowledge of technology. If anyone has any ideas on how else I might use Ning, please comment! Thanks!

In case you're ever interested in learning about a do-it-yourself approach, check this out: www.ingeducatorsdirect.com (on the right-center of the screen, there's a quick little demo you can view). Thanks for the insightful dialogue.

I think most young people just don't think about it, especially if it's not something they heard at home. I think if they were shown the effects of saving early, it would make a huge difference in their decisions to save (at least in moderate amounts such as $50 a month). I just don't think anyone ever shows them. I think it would make a great addition to new teacher induction programs at schools. I wish I knew more about how to do it myself than to have to rely on someone else to do it for me. But, I don't have the confidence or the know-how to do it myself so I just bite the bullet and go ahead and let someone do it for me.

Hi. I'm an art teacher who teaches 6, 7, and 8th graders in southern Michigan and am working on developing a Ning site for my 8th grade art students. They are already using MySpace....so I want to teach them how to use social networks and give them a safe one. My plan is for each page to act as their portfolio where they will post digital pictures of their work. They can comment of each other's work and blog about their own. I'm hoping this will increase a sense of pride in their work!