Revised Senses Lesson

I edited a lesson for a Five Senses Introduction. It was a great lesson to start with, but I added an extension to broaden the age and use of the base lesson. The extension called for the teacher to allow students to use only one of their senses to determine what the object was. This could be hard with some objects, so specific objects may need to be used. In the end, students would see how hard it is for just one sense to do all of the work, or how important each and every one of our senses is.
I thought it was really neat how I could actually edit this lesson plan for all to see. This is my first experience with a Wiki and I was apprehensive at first. However, I now see how so much more information could be shared on a site like this. Collaboration is an important part of our society these days, and social computing is a great outlet for this to happen. In the social computing article, it mentioned that most of these tools are free. This should encourage schools to take advantage of the learning opportunities available because of the technology. There is no financial excuse here!

Environmental Observations Lesson Plan

I created a lesson on Environmental Observations for my Ecology and Ecosystems unit. Observations are such an important part of science and are stressed in our lessons. Students get to observe various organisms in our classrooms, but I think they need to learn how to observe how they interact with organisms everyday. Using Flickr, students can post their photo observations and written analysis for others to read and comment on. Social computing is all about collaboration and the sharing of ideas. This lesson allows students to share ideas freely in a safe group environment created by the teacher online.

Changing a Lesson Plan

I have edited a lesson plan on Music and Other cultures. I changed 3 things:
1. Students would listen to 6 examples instead of 2

2. Students would travel to all different listening stations in the classroom instead of travelling to none.

3. tudents would create charts that would compare and contrast the different cultures

I feel that students should have the opportunity to be exposed to as much as possible. Hopefully this lesson plan will work for its original creator.

Topic 3 - Social Computing - ubuntu wiki

ubuntu is one of the many versions of open source linux. Their tag line is, "Linux for human beings." They also have edubuntu, "Linux for young human beings". The ubuntu people are using a wiki for their product documentation. That means anyone with something to say can edit the documentation. Very clever.