I am a big believer in allowing students to express their opinions.  This is a tool that they will take with them for all of their future endeavors.  However, opinions without backing and organization are often considered moot when young people express them to parents, professors, or bosses.  Since I believe that, I feel it incumbent upon me to teach these students not only the social studies subject matter for which they are responsible, but also how to express their opinions about that subject matter in a thoughtful, intelligent manner.  The concept mapping tools that I looked at this week appear to offer some organization of thoughts as well as some degree of flexibility in their use.  In this way, any student can shape their use to his or her needs.  These tools may also be useful to teachers in that they may provide some insight into the thought processes of their students.  This insight may allow us the opportunity to direct their thoughts or their expression to more accurately reflect their final opinions.  If we are really trying to prepare them for their future, isn’t this the direction that we should be looking in?

This evening I attended an online discussion on TappedIn.org about web tools that can be used in the classroom. While the discussion itself was disorderly at best the moderator, PamB, did provide some excellent tools for future use. One tool that seemed to grab a great deal of attention was Animoto, a site that takes your pictures and music and turns them into a sharp looking video that would be great to introduce a unit or to reflect back on the class at the end of the year. Students could also create wonderful videos to reflect some learning that they have gathered over the course of a unit. She also introduced us to a newspaper generator, that could be used for a host of applications. JeffC, one of the site administrators, introduced us to www.snurl.com, a URL shortening site that saves your longer URL’s as shorter easy to remember URL’s that you can provide to your students. That could prove very convenient.  As for the discussion itself, I guess the nature of this type of forum is quite disorganized.  The moderator for the discussion did not seem to control the conversation as much as I would like to have seen.  Many individuals apparently did not feel the need to read all that was typed and constantly missed URL’s and instructions.  The discussion could easily have taken 20-30 minutes, but the interruptions and repeated instructions necessitated a full hour’s time slot.  Perhaps I expect too much.