23 Things Reflection

WOW is where I want to start. How knew that there was that much technology out there and I had no idea it was there let alone how to utilize these great resources. It is great to expand my technology to this level. I must say I am not proficient in most of these new sites and information but it is a great start to use more information that is out there on the web and begin to incorporate it into my classroom and my life. There are some application that I know that I am probably not going to pursue even more but there are already some that I am using weekly in the classroom now that I can use them correctly. These "things' have defiantly changed my mind about the information that is on the web and how I can use it more each and every day. I love the cool things like blabberize, You/teacher tube and the Librarything. These were great as well as so many more. I have evens tarted to use some of them in my personal life and will continue to do so. Thanks to all that put this awesome course together and made it easy to go through step by step!

Thing #23

Social Networking on the non popular sites. Well I can now see how these sites would allow educators to use social networking. It would allow educators to share ideas and work together to create new and better ways to deliver a topic. It would help also in getting feedback from other educators as well as the students point of view to help assess their teaching of a topic.

I found lots of good ideas of how to start using more technology in the classroom and how to execute the technology successfully in the classroom. I would defiantly use social networking more now that I know where to go and how to use the sites. I love the Classroom 2.0, it was great and there were many resources that I still need to go and research to help my classroom. It will be a learning experience and hopefully help me more and more.

Thing #22

Social Networking sites oh where does on begin. I have used MySpace and I am a current user of Facebook.

Educators need to know how these sites work due to the high usage of them by their students. Most students have a page on one if not both of these famous sites and they find ways to keep up with their friends and the happenings. I did not learn much of anything new since I have used them but helps make me aware that anyone can have a page and can be used for many purposes good and bad. They do not filter out the bad so there are many ways for people to get into trouble with these sites. This moves into what I dislike about them and that is there are bad people out there that do bad things...enough said. I love facebook because I can easily keep in touch with family that is far away and the ones that are near. It is very easy to keep in touch with old and new friends. I prefer Facebook because it seems to be a much more mature site than MySpace. Features were about the same just different ways of expressing who you are and what you like. I do not see a way for this to be used in education other than a way to demonstrate networking and communication.

Thing #7b

So, I had forgotten about the google reader and lets go ahead and say without saying you should not do that. I had tons of stuff to "skim" through. I found a reoccurring post on Let's play math, blog. It is great there is a joke that gets posted quite frequently and it was kinda cool to see some of those jokes that are ment for a specific crowd. I enjoyed reading them and having a good giggle in among my slightly long overwhelming list of goggle reader posts. I need to set-up an alert to remind me to check my google reader!

Thing #21

Other parts of google...there is a lot out there. I played with google alerts and picasa web albums. Google alerts was kinda cool you just had to know what you were looking for and what you would want to have constant alerts about. It was nice to have the updates but then again hard to keep up with on a daily basis. It was cool to create more than one alert and then have them get updated all the time. Picasa web albums were fun to play with it was very similar to iPhoto. It was fun to play around and have them on the web for family to see the photos and creations. It was extremely easy to get used to creating the albums and slideshows. Google Earth was amazing especially to see the 3D views of pictures. I checked out volcanoes and it was very impressive. Alerts could be helpful for blogs and info on your content in the classroom. Picasa could be used by the kids to create photos and slideshows and have them on the web for all to view and comment on them. Google Earth could be used in lots of ways for the pictures especially in science and social studies...the pictures were phenomenal.

Thing #20

Using google aps has been great at our school and I never knew that it was that easy to create my own. Creating was much easier than expected and a great way to get feedback quickly when needed. I like how you can change the setting to only certain viewers and open to the public. And it was so easy to use and edit. We use this for documentation at our school and it is great to see how other teachers comment and I can see if I am the only one with this problem or if it is across all the classes. I would use this for a communication tool for the parents. I can send notes and let them know how things are going in the classroom or tutoring. I made my tutoring flyer and can change the names as well as who has access and when and if the student was there or absent. I also made sheet to show what we did and if that students needs more practice or if they got it this time around. They still need some tweaking and editing for continuous use, but ti was a good start and can be added and edited as much as needed in the long run. I could also make presentations for absent students to access at home and keep up to date on what is happening in the classroom while they are out!

Thing #19

After playing around with this application I am not totally sold on it or totally going to get rid of it. I liked how it can be student created work and then get input from classmates and other followers, but the input might not be helpful for a learning experience. I liked how I can record a lesson and have someone else share the lesson (aka sub) and things along these lines. Or when sick and not able to speak have someone else record lesson while I go through some examples would be a great tool. I think that this could be used very well in ELA, fine arts and history classes but not so much in Math...except for kids to post work and talk about it in their own words. Students would like to see their work posted for all to view and share and it would be great collaboration for the kids to do in the computer lab once they have created their work to share.