Thing 23

What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
You Tube and Teacher Tube were wonderful. PhotoStory continues to be an amazing application. Flickr was lots of fun. I've been on it before to view photos, but never considered it as a teaching tool.

How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
I have always used computers in my classroom. At home I would check email and create documents for my students. I never considered the possibility of online communication via blogs. This changes my goals. I thought I was doing pretty good with my technology goals, but now I realize that I'm not exactly up with what's current out there. This definitely changes how I will think of computer use in my classroom and at home.

Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
Yes, I was really unhappy about blogging at first. It just wasn't natural for me to communicate to the void in the web. Email is different because you talk to people you know. Blogging is so different. I leave this program with a better sense of confidence in blogging. In thing 22 I had to create a ning account just so I could respond to a post I read there. I would NEVER have done that at the beginning of this program.

What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?
There were lots of times when I read the information and went, Huh? The Teacher Tube videos really helped me a lot. Perhaps including more of those whenever possible. Otherwise, I think it was great overall.

If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you choose to participate?
Absolutely! This is a great way to learn new things about technology and since it moves so fast these days, I rely on experts like you guys to help me stay current.

How would you describe your learning experience in ONE WORD or in ONE SENTENCE, so we could use your words to promote 23 Things learning activities?
You will learn more about technology than you ever thought possible!

Thanks for putting this together.

Thing 22

This site is cool! I chose Nings for Teachers. I looked at the lesson plans, which were okay, and at a few other tabs too. When I got to the general discussion boards there was a teacher asking for humorous parent excuses for their kids. So, I had to sign up and post one I had from last year. This is definitely a site I will come back to. I like the idea of setting it up with my students so that they can communicate with each other over the web without it having to be public. If I was still in 2nd grade, I would consider setting up a ning for students to communicate about citizenship, whether they saw someone or did something that showed good citizenship. It would have to be simple at 2nd grade because keyboarding skills are very minimal at this age. I've even had students that had never been on the web before. Great site!

Thing 21

This was a fun experience. I've used PhotoStory before with my class. It's a great tool to use. I plan to get an earlier start on it in the year so my students will be able to create their own projects and conduct their own independent study using this program. I chose to make my PhotoStory with Twilight the novel by Stephanie Meyer. My daughter and I have had lots of discussions about this book series in anticipation for the new book release.
Thanks to Keep on keeping on for having the directions on how to get the PhotoStory into the blog. Unfortunately, when I watched the video one picture has no talking on it. I did rerecord it, resave it, and reembed the video, but it still is a silent picture. Oh well. It's a cute cartoon that you can read for yourself.

Thing 20

I have enjoyed getting to know YouTube and TeacherTube. I looked at several videos for content areas I teach and decided to settle for videos on birds. The bird unit is still a big part of 2nd grade, and finding good videos for kids to view can be challenging. YouTube had some interesting videos on birds, but you have to be careful when you search. I also got videos for birds and bees with a picture of... well, never mind. Anyway, I think I would have to search through the videos first and identify the ones that I wanted kids to use. Then make those available to them. Here's the video I chose for my blog. When I put it on the blog the size was bigger than my space, so I had to adjust it to fit on the side. I don't know how to put it in the posting. It doesn't work the same as for the video clip.

Thing 19

Awesome! This was so much fun! YouTube should be able to get through our firewall. I've used YouTube before but today I discovered Will it Blend? Ha! Ha! This is great! This guy blends things that have no business going in a blender. Take a look at this: Will it Blend?
I also loved the cooking site. Have you ever wanted to see Christopher Walken bake chicken? The cooking videos are short and fun to watch. You can blog with other chefs about the recipes. For example: I don't have the cooking tool that he uses in the video to bake his chicken. One blogger suggests using a beer can. See? Fun!
I also looked at last.com. This is a music site that allows you to listen to your favorite music genres. You type in the names of bands you enjoy and the site finds other bands that play similar music. Then you can listen to the different songs by these bands. It's almost like putting your cd player on random and just listening to the different tracks as they come up.
This was lots of fun!

Thing 18

I didn't even bother with Open Office. I had Open Office on my home computer because I didn't have Microsoft Office at home for a while. Long story. Anyway, I downloaded Open Office to use until I got my computer updated. I hated it! It was so hard to work with. It doesn't have all the features I'm used to working with in Microsoft Office. Also, I could never create a new document. I could open Office documents, but if I needed to make a new doc, I had to delete what was on the document I opened so I could use it for my new work. It is very limiting and in a world where so much technology is available, I just couldn't trade Microsoft Office for Open Office, even though one is free and the other is really expensive. I did explore Google Docs. We did some exploring of Google Docs earlier on, but it was interesting to go back and explore again because I had a much easier time working with it than before. I made a slide show of my cat. It's just silly, but gave me practice with the format. The slideshow is really easy to use, easier in fact than Office because there are fewer choices to make as far as format goes. While I just said that I didn't like Open Office for that, I like Google Docs for that reason. It was easy to make a slide show. If I was still teaching 2nd grade, I would start here with this slideshow, and then move on to PowerPoint. It's a great starting place. PowerPoint can be overwhelming for younger kids, so starting with something simpler would make the transition easier. That doesn't mean I want to replace Microsoft in Spring Branch.
My Cat Slideshow
I was able to share this slideshow with a few people too. That is a really neat feature of Google Docs. Usually I have to email the parents the slideshows during my planning time. With Google Docs, you can share the slideshow by listing email addresses and writing a short note about what you are sending. That was really simple.

Thing 17

This was probably the most frustrating thing I've done so far. At first I didn't understand how it was supposed to work. It seems like some of the other things we've already done, but as I started putting in websites I realized how this could really help me when I'm searching for things on the web. I work in the literacy library in my school and I'm always having to look for books from publishers and book levels. I created my searchroll to include the sites I most commonly use for this job so that now they are all located in one place and I don't have to Google them any longer. That is really helpful. So, I was feeling better about the whole Rollyo thing, then I had to try to put in on my blog. Okay, that was an experience that made me want to throw the computer out the window. I didn't do it, and I'm not on my SBISD laptop right now, so nobody panic. I tell you, that took me time because I could get the image to appear but it wouldn't conduct a search. So, I visited other blogs about Rollyo and theirs all worked fine, which made me angrier. After much cutting, pasting, removing, and starting over again, I managed to get it done. Rollyo is a good way to save time with searching, and I'm all about saving time. Now that I've done it, I can see it being a useful tool at school and home.

Thing 16

I never knew what wikis were until this lesson. Getting my post on the sandbox was interesting. I kept looking for a box like this one for the blog to type in, but it wasn't there. Hmm. I guess I'm just not quite there yet technologically. This was really eye-opening because it seems so easy to use. I want to try it out before school starts on my own family to see how it all works together. Wikis would be great for kids to gather data on a given topic. If we are studying geography, I could see my students getting together using wikis to collect information about landforms, natural resources, bodies of water, etc and displaying that information in a variety of formats.

Thing 15

I read all the articles. Some of them were very technical, but the article titled A Ripple Effect had some really interesting ideas. That school really transformed their library. The idea that laptops are available for checking out by students, 52 computers make up the island in the library, MP3 players and downloadable audio books can also be checked out... Wow! That really does make you think. Could we actually have libraries in Spring Branch that look like this? Away from the Icebergs suggests the idea that we no longer need to build library collections. Circulation in his library my be down, but I don't believe that's the case in my school. Our library thrives and is always full of students and teachers. Libraries need to continue to add to their print collections, but access to information through technology must continue to grow. Unfortunately, that may end at elementary school. I have middle and high school kids and they rarely get to use the libraries at their schools, let alone computers. They are far more cut off from technology than my 2nd graders have been. I agree that libraries need to change and that students have to be able to access information through computers and other technological means. My own children read and write more on the computer through blogs and messaging than they do in school. My son took classes at HCC this summer in order to get ahead in high school. His English teacher had the class write a 7-page research report as a major project. The students were not allowed to use the internet to get information. They were only able to use print sources. This is at a college campus!
It's exciting to see the changes that are coming for libraries. I hope we will be able to continue to grow as the technology is made available to schools.

Thing 14

When I first searched school Library Learning 2.0 I got a bunch of hits, but as I searched in tags it went down to only 3. Now that I know more about blogging, Technorati seems a little easier to understand and navigate. Tags make searching for information much easier because the results you get are specific to the tag. I'm not sure how to use this in my classroom. Technorati is a blog search engine. Am I ready for my elementary classroom to read and post on blogs in this way? I want to begin conversations with blogs in my classroom, but perhaps with just my own blog and students own as well. This is a conversation I'll have with my librarian.

Thing 13

As I was reading about tagging, before I even set up the profile, I thought this would be very handy for research. What I really like is the idea that you can get to this collection of bookmarked sites from anywhere. If we are researching a topic at school, the site can be bookmarked and students can continue researching at home. This also allows me to find and mark sites at home and view them at school without having to remember where I got my information, or emailing the site address to myself so I have it in the morning for class. The other two sites seem to work the same as del.icio.us. I originally had ideas for the Google Reader in this way, but social bookmarking is much easier, especially for elementary kids. I plan to make use of the sites other users have tagged to add to my own bookmarks.

Thing 12

I admit, I'm one of those bloggers that reads on a site and leaves without posting a comment. It's very intimidating to post comments. I found it really interesting that 90% of people do just that and that only 1% of readers actually contribute to conversations. Two points I find relevant are: responding to a post with ideas, questions, information, etc, instead of just a statement of agreement, and responding back to those who post comments on your blog. As I have been reading other blogs I find that many people do leave comments that are just agreements, like: "Yeah!" That doesn't really tell the reader or the author anything. If I am planning to use blogs in my classroom I would absolutely want my students to respond with something more thought out that just an interjection. On the second point, I never really gave any thought to responding to postings. That caught me off guard a little because I really just didn't even think about it. If the whole idea is to start conversations with people all over the world, then it only makes sense to respond because otherwise conversation isn't really taking place.
I responded on several blogs. There are some really great ideas out there. It was interesting to read what other people are thinking and learning from this exercise.
I used the blogs I have in my reader to respond. I have only just had them there to read and I haven't really responded at all. I chose writing and reading lessons because there was information about a conference with Lucy Calkins and I was interested to see what she has going on since Spring Branch is moving to the CCP model for writing. I also read a posting for math facts games. It had ideas that are not new to teaching, but since I'm changing grade levels this year, it was a good reminder for me. The site is http://www.math-lessons.ca/blog/2007/12/14/using-games-to-teach-math/

Thing 11

This was really, really easy to do. Signing in and creating an account really was just a user name and password. You don't have to fill in lots of information, and you can just get started working on the site right away. It is very user friendly. I found the very short introduction, not so very short and I began to get lost in all the steps to adding books, etc. So, I decided to just explore the site and see what I could find. I was able to put in the titles of books I'm reading right now and get links to postings from other readers of the same books. It was interesting to see what they thought of the books I'm enjoying and other titles that are in the same genre. That's something I haven't had before. I looked over the groups and I'm thinking it would be interesting to have students get on this site to write about books they read for homework. I could set up a group for them and they could see what their classmates read at home and get ideas on what they might like to read. I find that so many of my kids write the same titles over and over again on their reading logs because they just don't have ideas for new reads. This may be one way to get more kids to really read at home. I like the book talk group and the author chat group. It would be interesting to hear what the author says about their books in this forum.

Thing 10

I think this was the easiest of all the activities for me so far. I enjoyed playing around with all the image generators. The best one for me was comic strip generator. All of them were easy to use, but this one was the friendliest in terms of saving my work to put in the blog. It only took a few minutes to make the image and type the text. To put it in the blog I just had to pull the image from my file in my computer. It was that simple. I liked the custom sign generator too, but saving my work was more difficult and I had trouble retrieving my work to put in the blog. I've used Big Huge Labs at school to make trading cards. So, I'm really familiar with that site. I can see several ways of using these in school. The trading cards will work with any content area, but I thought it might be fun to have the students make cards about themselves on the first day of school, telling things they like, don't like, favorites, places they've been, family statistics, etc. Then I could put them on a ring to share with another class and they could write letters to use throughout the year. They would know information about the person they were writing to based on the trading cards. They could even blog to each other if I get our librarian to help me set that up at the beginning of the year. The images from the generators can be used to respond to reading, leveled books, or writings that other students have done. That would be a fun way to add comments to published student work in the class library.

Thing 9

Looking through all the search feeds took tons of time. Maybe it's just because blogging is still so new to me. Anyway, I found that edublogs awardwinners gave me the most interesting blog sites to follow. It was by far the easiest for me to use. Technorati came in a close second. Both of them had lists to help guide me in a direction toward sites I would be more likely to blog on. Having preset lists, like: best teacher blog, or parenting gave me choices and a focus to narrow down my searching. Bloglines search tool wasn't really confusing, but it gave me too many choices. I checked off what I was interested in and then it asked me to subscribe to all their selections based on my choices. I had to create a profile before I could subscribe to anything. It was more steps and the others were just easily available. The most useful feed I found was bionic teaching. These guys go out and find out about all the cool stuff available with computers and put it on their blog with ideas for teachers, specifically for teachers. They have a posting for setting up blogs in classrooms which I'm planning to go back and read later on. I read through lots of their listings before moving on to another site. Topix.net was really neat. It has Houston news as well as news from around the US and the world on that one site. Bloglines also had news feeds but to subscribe I had to create a profile. I found that I already had lots of their newsfeeds on my reader.

Thing 8 RSS

This is a really easy way to keep up with things I'm interested in. I won't have to spend time searching websites, or asking my self, "Hey, what was that site called that gave me that information last time?" This is very simple to manage. What confuses me are the huge amounts of sites that I was able to list in Google Reader so quickly. One blog has many links to it. This is a great tool to use for school. Whenever I've done research in the past using the internet, the kids always have a hard time finding information that meets their needs. I can set up a Reader with sites already marked for kids to use and they will be more successful as they research on different topics. It will all be right there and the reading level should be appropriate if I'm picking it first. Our librarian is great about having our students us computers and technology. If I tell her I'm working on a certain unit in a content area, she can pull sites for me to add to the Reader. It's overwhelming to see all the information I have available in this one area. It is addictive. It makes you want to come and read more and find out more about what's going on outside your door.

Thing 7 cool tools from Google

Some of these tools were really easy to use. iGoogle - the home page that you customize was probably the easiest. I set that one up right away. It only took a few minutes to decide what I wanted on my home page and that was it. Probably my favorite of all the tools was Google Earth. I've been on Google Earth before, but this time I chose to explore a different area. I chose the seismic images and what I got was a tour of the Earth that I could pause, move, and explore. There were photographs of many of the locations, but the best part is just seeing these cities and buildings, then flying out and zooming around the world to see something else. I can see this having a great impact in my classroom because there is so much to observe and learn from each location. I like the Google Notebook, especially for my teenagers in middle school and high school. If only they could take a laptop to school and use this instead of the journals I need to buy for them each year. This could be such a leap in bringing usable technology into schools. I did try the Google Calendar. It was a little challenging for me. I couldn't get the start time for my appointments to be just right and I had a hard time figuring out how to adjust the entry so it matched the timing I needed. It was more work than I was willing to do at that time. I may have to go back later and see where I went wrong.

Thing 6...Mashups and more

This was really cool! I've done trading cards before with my 2nd graders. It was really challenging for them at first because they had never done anything with JPEGs before. This was new ground, but as we tackled bigger challenges in the year, like Photostory, they were very comfortable with manipulating photos in a computer program. The trading card I made shows my son Alex playing guitar. This is his Showmaster Black guitar. It's probably his favorite to play. As I went through the mashups I really liked the Flickr Toys Mapmaker. I made a map that showed all the places I've been and where I haven't yet visited. I can see myself using that in my classroom. It was very easy to use. I also had fun with Bubblr a web ap. In it I made bubbles for a comic strip using some of my daughter's favorite band members. I can see how this would be really motivational for kids. I will need to make sure I get hold of the digital cameras in my library quickly so we can use them in programs like these.

Thing 5 ... Flickr

Wow! There's so much to look at on this site that it's a little overwhelming. It took me more than one session to look at much of the site. The world map was exciting! There's so much that can be done with that in a classroom. Judy Wallis presented a writing lesson using a photograph as the inspiration. With Flickr there are so many photographs to choose from that even the most reluctant writer would find inspiration on this site. On my first try with Flickr I put in some photos I had in my computer and organized them in groups to share with my family. That was really easy and lots of fun. Later, I worked through the tags and groups. I understand what the tags are for, but I still don't think I have a really good handle on how to put them in my own pictures yet. The groups were easy enough to figure out. I searched for different groups and you can find them for just about any interest. For example: my daughter wants to be on Broadway. There is a Flickr group that has pictures of Broadway that they share. Neat! The picture I chose was of downtown Houston. I chose it because as I move to 3rd grade this school year, Houston Proud, is a big unit that we cover.

Thing 3... The Avatar

Okay, I'm really slow on this one. I thought I had done all the work I needed to do when I set up the blog, but after many problems with Thing 3, I think I've got it now. I finally added my avatar to my blog. It really was easy to do. I struggled getting it into the blog at first, but was able to fix my mistake and get it up right away. I chose a woman in her living room, because that's really as far as I plan to go this summer. She's dressed is shorts, which is ironic for me. I wear skirts about 99.9% of the time at school, but at home in the summer I am a shorts/jeans girl. So, my avatar is living the life I want this summer - at home, relaxing, without the hurry and rush that accompanies so many days in my life.

Step 3

I created my blog and it was much easier than I thought. I followed the steps and it was really simple. To put in the picture I just went to Google images and found one that matched my blog name. I decided to go with Luna from Harry Potter. My daughter and I are rereading the 6th book right now and she's one of my favorite characters. She's kind of strange in a unique way, but there's definitely more to her than meets the eye. I tried to choose a picture that portrays her this way.

My Best Habit

Well, after watching the video about the 71/2 Habits of Lifelong Learners I think the one that fits me best is goal setting. I'm a big picture person, so having a goal at the end really gets me going. I like to see where I'm going. It makes getting there so interesting.

My First Post

I've never actually written a blog before. It's a little like stepping out into a void hoping you won't fall too far, or onto anything sharp below. Kind of like a leap of faith. I hope I do it right.