Thing # 16

I chose a Google start page and spent probably 45 minutes reading from my widgets and completing the NY Times Crossword puzzle. That made it so much fun. I had a great time getting things to keep me informed about all the different news and entertainment. I'm getting movie reviews, games, and political news. I chose google because I knew I would be able to get everything I needed there.

I also like that I'm using the google calendar so that I can make it all work together hopefully. I'd like to be able to add my daily calendar to the igoogle page so that when I open my page it pulls it up with all the rest of the information.

I have honestly never been good at creating and following to do lists. I am more likely to just scribble a note later so I think maybe stickits would be best for me. I read through all the differnet websites and I thought lifehacker was interesting.

One of the websites mentioned something called chalksites and that looked great. I'd like the immediacy of contact and communication it would allow. I'm so looking forward to getting things ready for the year.

Thing #15

Well, I enjoyed adding to the WIKI, but I can see disadvantages. I wasn't aware that Wikipedia was a wiki. Well, I guess since I didn't know what a wiki was, it makes sense. However, with so many students having access to it, it could easily be changed to be, well, less than factual.

Still, I can see lots of opportunities. As I mentioned in the sandbox, you could use a wiki to do a class project where everyone contributes their own portion. I think this could be a very efficient way to jigsaw big projects too.

Thing #14

Well, Bubbl.us was very easy to use. It was even easy to import into the blog. I'm excited. I can see many ways to use this in the classroom.

Gliffy was quite a bit harder to use. In the first place, there are so many different ways to do it. There aren't open instructions, so I had a hard time figuring out how to make it work. I was going to use it to do a flow chart of my nursery organization, but it really was too much trouble to work with. It would be easier to do with a mindmap. The flowchart was to hard to manipulate.

I guess one thing that is really different was that you had to have a plan in place to do the flow chart, with the mind map, it was easy to do from the top of you head. In essence, I loved bubbl.us, but hated gliffy. Oh well, one by one we learn from the 23 things.

Thing 13

Thing 13

This  is my Zoho Writer examination.  I think it seems to be very easy to use and it might also be a good way to avoid students saving to the server.  I wonder do you save to this server or do you save to your own computer. 

I think I'll check.

 

Ahhh, it works.  Nice color choices.

 

I see it works well with pictures, hyperlinks and formulas.  It seems to me this would be helpful.  If you can save it to this server, open and create at home or at school.  It would allow so many kids to work at home and at school.  I like the idea of being able to use the presentation software too.  That way you don't have to worry about whether it works with various versions. 

 

I love this thing.  I think it will be very useful.

Thing #12

I looked at all of the tools and was fascinated by notebook and calendar. I think if we could figure out a way to make sure each entry in notebook was properly documented, it would be amazing. Imagine getting rid of all those foul notecards. As a student I was never able to keep up with them all and if I kept up with them couldn't remember where I got the information. This would enable us to keep up with all the information in one place and figure out where it was.

I love calendar. I was thinking I might make a calendar public to publish homework for my team this year. That might enable kids to be able to get online and find out what the work was. It could also help warn them about projects etc. I think it's a wonderful idea. Now, I wouldn't want my personal calendar public, but a homework calendar. That sounds like a great idea. I wonder if you could merge several public calendars? For example, if all five teachers on my team published one, could kids merge the info on to one calendar?

If I was principal, I'd insist on having the school calendar done here to keep things from conflicting. What a wonderful tool!

Thing #11

Honestly, finding blogs on things I think were interesting was not as easy as I fought. I was surprised to find there wasn't much available on Harry Potter any more. There's not a This day in History site, that I could find again. I'd like to find something on teaching TX History. Some daily hints on using HOTS, things like that.

I tried bloglines search tool and technorati. I thought the technorati site was interesting. It had a lot of sites listed anyway. I may go back and look at feedster and some other sites. They were both pretty easy to use. I was shocked at how much there was on knitting.

There are a lot of unusual sites. Some seem to be usesless and others seem really great. I can see where blogs might cause confusion for students who have yet to learn to evaluate the validity of information and the difference between facts and opinions. It would require us to really focus on teaching students to evaluate sites.

There's so much potential in blogging. I can imagine setting up a blog site for my class. It might be a great way to get interaction.

Thing #10

Ok, this is a really cool way to keep up with things. I signed up for quotes of the day, Dilbert strips, About Cats, always learning and bloglines news. I tried to set up a Today in History, but I'm going to have to find it again.

I think this could be helpful in my personal life to keep up with things and I can see using the quotes in my classroom. I love using quotes as sponge activities to get kids thinking. I don't really see myself using it a lot in the classroom though unless I can find a blog on TX History. One thing I didn't see anywhere was if you can respond to the posts that you pick up in your e-mail without going to the website.

I like that the RSS allows you to just read what's new instead of digging through the tons of blogs out there. If there are indeed 50 million + blogs, even if I only choose 1 in 1 million I'd never be able to keep up. This allows you to just keep up with the updates.

Back when I was a figure skating fanatic, I would have loved this to keep up with all the latest in skating news.

I don't think I'm quite up to setting up a public page yet. Maybe some day, but not quite yet.