Another excellent Edublogs.org weblog
Where has the time gone!!! Thank you Jerri for being a wonderful teacher and moderator and keeping us on track. I thought after Thanksgiving when i was 3 weeks behind that i would never catch up, but i finally did. This class was great and I llved learning all of the new Web 2.0 tools. Some of them i had seen before and it was refreshing for me to go back and put them to use again to reinforce them. Practice does make better!!!!
I created my Ning account and introduced myself and withing 45 minutes someone sent me suggestions for 2 sites that they thought i might be interested in. How cool is that! Networking is a great way to share ideas and from everything i read in the introducion of this topic, the students are way ahead of us in social networking. We tend to wait until that class reunion comes around every 10-15 years and attend the reunion. Think how much fun it would be to connect during the years in between! I did go to the Classroom 2.0 site and spent some time looking around. I felt like i was in a virtual reality site. It was almost TOO live for me. I remember the first time i went to an online chat with just YAHOO…. and that was wierd. But i am open to new experiences and look forward to being a part of the WEB 2.0 community!
Yesterday in the Classroom 2.0 site, i found a group of folks that were all interested in WIKIS. One guy is trying to create an online WIKI class similar to the one I need to create for my Teach 21 teachers so it will be so much fun collaborating with others to see what needs to be included!!!
I really am glad for these reminders to go back and check on Google Reader. I did find several interesting things to read about. One was in my Smartboard blog and had some cute Christmas ideas for the Smartboard that i was able to share with my teachers here during the holidays! Wish i had found it last week. 
I also loved catching up with Warlick’s 2 Cents blog. He always has interesting topics. There was one on Nings that i am hoping will help me when i do the NIng thing next. He also had a blog about the first computer bug discovered by Grace Hoper. It really was a bug – a moth that got stuck in the computer!!!!
Just when i think my brain won’t learn anything else, here comes PAGEFLAKES!!!! What fun. I named my page Fincher’s Frivolous Favorites, knowing that i would spend hours looking through the ADD A FLAKE icon. I did get to page 35 and finally realized it wouldn’t quit. It’s like being in a Baskin-Robbins Icecream store with 100’s of flavors to choose from. I added quite a few fun things to my page, but skipped over things like US CURRENT DEBT and Pubwalks, even though they both look so interesting. I just spoke with our media specialist at SHS and she says she loves Pageflakes and used them all the time to create research links for many of the classes that come into the media center. I am thinking i need to add a page to my Pageflakes with all of my favorite Learning 2.0 things!!!!
I think we are just getting the tip of the iceberg with these Google Docs. I did not even realize that these software programs were available online. This could really help students who didn’t have the most update version of a certain software at home. I can certainly see how using the sharing feature would allow students to collaborate on word files or spreadsheets full of data. I am going to try to use these more often, especially with colleagues as we are coming up with ideas for training documents!
I keep forgetting to do my utube at home. I may have to use my override at school though to do this blog. I finally did use my override code. There are quite a few how to videos on both utube and teacher tube. There is a lot of junk out there but you can really find just about anything you ever wanted to see – plus some!
I loved being able to use Boomp3 to record. How easy. I did already know how to use Audacity though so i cheated and imported my wav file into audacity and converted it to mp3 format without using zamzar. I did use zamzar to find a utube file that i wanted and sent it to myself.
I have been listening to podcasts for about a year now, ever since i took my first podcasts class. I love being able to subcribe to podcasts through itunes on my IPOD. For this assignment i listened to several podcasts: One Minute How To podcasts that covered more topics that i could ever imagine anyone wanting to listen to, and LEARN OUT LOUD, which covered many topics by subject area. I have seen some Teach 21 teachers posting podcasts on their sharepoint sites so that students could listen to review lessons or class information. I have been in classes where students have created their own podcasts and most of them LOVE recording their own voices and hearing them through ITUNES. I am hoping to find more ways to use podcasts in the classroom in the future.
I loved the opening explanation – if you don’t like books, don’t tell me! I do like books but have so little time to read. I usually ask others to recommend things that they have read and look at the best seller lists in the paper. This would be a interesting way to get the advanced information about books that are coming out and also read reviews that others have read about books. But just like with movies, all of our tastes are different so just because one person likes a book doesn’t mean that the next person will. I am glad to know that a site like Library Thing does exist. Maybe the idea of the 50 book challenge will inspire me to read more AFTER i finish the class. Right now i don’t have enough time to read the things in my google reader list!
I created my Delicious account several years ago when the Teasley Media Specialist was doing training and i had completely forgotten about it until the class started. I was surprised to see how many links I already had stored. Now if i can just remember to open it and remember my user name and password it will be a wonderful tool to use, since i generally float from school to school and don’t always have my laptop with me. It is frustrating when you know you have saved something to your MY FAVORITES on some computer but can’t find it!!! I enjoyed looking at the favorites of other people – to see what sites are interesting to them.
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