Thing 23

Finished!? Maybe I'm just beginning. I began this journey thinking I was pretty technology savvy and am ending this journey like I ended college, realizing that there is so much more out there I still need to learn!

To answer the specific questions asked in the final section:
My favorite discoveries included all the fun things I can use with my students such as the sign generator, the poster generator, Flickr, and how to create and use a Wiki.
I think I have been assisted in my quest to use technology effectively in my classroom so that students have meaningful opportunities to develop technical skills while still learning the material they need to know.
Some of the take-a-ways would include the social bookmarking sites and understanding tagging. I have no idea when or if I would have found those without using this program.
The program itself is the most enjoyable staff development time I have spent in quite a while. My only suggestion now that our district is focusing it more for classroom teachers would be to lessen the library emphasis a bit and maybe alter a few of the tasks to be more grade/age specific with classroom implications.
I would certainly like to continue in the Library2Play2.
The 23 Things learning experience allows educators an opportunity to explore web 2.0 tools available for use in their classrooms at their own pace and allows them the freedom to spend extra time and emphasis on those sections of the most interest to them.

Thank you for the journey. Now on with the bigger journey of actually using all the new fun tools at my disposal!

Thing 22

I visited each of the Nings listed. My favorite was Educator Ning. I am not sure I will be using these with students quite yet. At this point it seems like a classroom Wiki will better meet my needs for the students. I can certainly see the advantage in using them as a resource for teachers to collaborate online and increase their own awareness of what is going on in the 2.0 world. I'm not saying a Ning would not be useful in a classroom. I think they certainly could be; I just have too many other options I'm planning on using first. I think the usefulness would also depend on several factors including the subject you teach, the technology skills of your students and the availability of computers at home or after school for your students.

I do not see the point of having students on a Ning in class very often as they would have the teacher there face to face. If they have the technology available to them after school either in the library, a computer lab, or at home then the usefulness of a Ning would certainly increase. A class Ning could certainly come in handy for students to communicate and help each other out if they are likely to be online at the same time working on their homework.

I think there is a future for these social sites to be brought into the classroom and I believe as teachers become more familiar with the technology through personal use, it will be easier to incorporate it into valid classroom uses.

Thing 21

I had been waiting to get to this "thing" because we are going to be doing a lot of podcasts and vodcasts this year, many of them in my classes. Getting a good background and participating in the process will help me better lead the students through the process. I'm hoping my broadcast class will be able to produce short videos that can be both played in the cafeteria during lunch and be downloaded by the students as vodcasts to keep them informed of student activities during the year. I created a video for students to view when they return to school showing some of the things that have been taking place at and around the school while they were on vacation. The video shows photos of our incoming 6th grade students participating in summer camp activities (all taken at public places where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy and none of the students are identified), the demolition of our field being torn up in order to re-do the field and add a track, and a note about summer school being held on our campus.


I am concerned about the privacy issues technology leads us into. Our district permission form is a bit vague and confusing for most parents leading them to deny permission for anything about their child to be included even in the yearbook or posting of artwork they have created in class. If we want our students to participate in these new technologies, we need to clearly explain to parents what we will and will not use or post without their explicit permission and make them partners in this exploration.

We also need to be very aware of educating our students about protecting their own privacy when they start venturing out into the Internet world.

Thing 20

I had been to both YouTube and TeacherTube before, but I had not seriously considered the possibilities for using them in class. I watched several YouTube videos from the solar eclipse in Hong Kong to several different top 10 reasons not to have homework. I also watched the trailer for the new Twilight movie which will be a high interest topic for my middle school students.

On TeacherTube, I found a number of videos posted by New Caney High School Journalism that could be useful to me in my middle school journalism classes. There were a number of examples of their school newscast which I will be able to use as examples for my broadcast students. My favorite was their commercial for their school yearbook which was set up as a full story.



I think I will probably be returning for more short videos that will help explain topics to my students and keep them interested just because they are watching a video.

I also really liked the TeacherTube video on evaluating websites.


After spending my time in summer school trying to convince middle school students that information was not necessarily correct just because they found it on the Internet, I'm firmly convinced we need to do a better job teaching our students to think critically about what they see and read.

Thing 19

This one was lots of fun! I will be going back to these sites for a while just to do more exploring. So far, I've recommended my non-profit look into Giveness as a potential source for income, checked out MyHeritage for my son who is tracing our family history just for fun, checked out wiki sites at Wetpaint and Wikispaces, found a travel site I like called Farecast which actually takes you to the bing search engine, but will search multiple travel sites at once for you, and found a ton of cool documents already designed by teachers on Docstoc. I've definitely bookmarked that page to go back for more exploring later.

I definitely think I will be creating a wiki for my Journalism students to use in keeping up to date on assignments and editing the school newspaper articles and probably for homework as well.

So much to explore and so little time...

Thing 18

I explored the Open Office documents and was surprised at how similar they are to the Microsoft counterparts. I was pleased to see the Writer (Word program) and Impress (PowerPoint program) were very similar to the ones I am so familiar with. The Impress program seemed to be lacking only in the colored templates available at start up. They do however offer a smiley face in their graphics :-) The database program called Base sets up differently from Access, but looks to be much friendlier if you are actually going to create any queries. The Excel type program is called Calc. There are also more programs available than the standard Microsoft suite, including a drawing and a math program that math teachers would have to love for creating practice sheets and tests. In the suite on our teacher laptops, I did not see a program similar to Publisher and nothing for email.

I certainly appreciate the cost savings of using the Open Office documents, but I wonder if our students would be ahead of the game using these programs or behind by not using the industry standard.

I have had one previous experience with Google docs. We tried to create our district Power to Learn grant using that system, but we encountered a number of glitches getting everyone logged in or being able to access the document when needed. Some of the glitches appeared to be district based and some with Google. As the system is more and more used I'm hoping any bugs in the program will be worked out and it will be the seamless group editing tool that it can be. Just to be fair, I tried to log into the grant document again today and had absolutely no problems getting in or editing. Hopefully my previous problems were not the norm for this service.

Thing 17

I can certainly see uses for Rollyo. Being able to create searches, especially for middle school students who think the world lives and dies by whatever they find on Google seems like a great idea. In teaching summer school this summer my class project was to find information proving or disproving the idea of global warming. The students had a difficult time sorting through all the results they obtained with Google. Because I am working through the 23 things, I was able to steer them to Delicious, Digg, and Diigo to narrow their search. I created a Rollyo search of those sites for Evidence Against Global Warming because that was the most difficult information for the students to find. This would have made their lives much easier.

Thing 16

I loved learning about wikis. This was a topic I had a vague knowledge about, but now have a much clearer picture. I think a wiki will be a big asset to my Journalism class. This will allow students opportunities to develop their editing skills without my having to kill thousands of trees to make paper copies for everyone. I will also use them to create a syllabus for my course and assignments that can be completed in a random order with students adding to the process as they enter. I will be spending a large amount of time trying to get my thoughts organized before school resumes in order to set up an effective wiki for my classes.

Between the Things

I just had to share the fact that working on Library2Play this summer has put me in contact with a teaching and learning specialist in Australia who has been doing podcasting with her teachers and students over the last year. In response to my being required to leave some comments out there in the blogosphere, she has offered to help my school as we develop podcasts with our students this year in response to our district technology grant. Wow, who would have thought that making global contacts could be so easy?

Thing 15

The readings about Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 were interesting. The video definitely points out the need for a faculty that is more techno-savy and less attached to the textbooks and scantrons we have used in the past. Our students are definitely multi-taskers, but I wonder how much they are losing from each task they attempt at the same time. I've often remarked that if I could just blow myself up each class period in a battle with an idea or alien that I would certainly have the students' attention. Barring that, schools and libraries are facing a world that our students understand and function in easily while we are still working toward a basic understanding of the potential. With blogs, WIKIS, podcasts, Kindles, and almost unlimited Internet resources, we are forced to examine the methods we use to deliver information while still teaching students to be intelligent, critical inhabitants of this age.

One experience I had in summer school this week pointed out to me just how far we have to go in educating our students for this society. I showed my students some fraudulent web pages, one about a Velcro crop in California being threatened by drought and another about a small rodent type animal being boiled, chopped up and used in the making of cheese. Not one student questioned either page and when I prompted them that there was something wrong, they told me the type was too small. I think we have a long way to go with teaching students to think critically.

I particularly enjoyed the reading about taking the steps beyond Library 2.0 and moving into a 3D world in Library 3.0 or 4.0 and beyond in To A Temporary Place in Time. It makes you think about what's next in our journey.

Thing 14

I spent a while exploring more about Technorati. In my opinion there is a lot of useful information there, but it will take some time using it and getting familiar with it for it to be a truly useful tool. The search for School Library Learning 2.0 returned a different number of hits for each search, demonstrating the usefulness of using the tags.

I think it's interesting that the service sorts popular videos, games, books and movies. The video section would be good to keep an eye out on what the current popular videos are.

The value of using tags is increasingly clear. One of the tricks will be to check tags that are currently used and match those if the situation warrants. I may choose to tag a post one way while someone else may select a different word.

I did go ahead and register my blog just to see how the process worked. I will be interested to see if it gets any readers to the blog. If you came through Technorati, please leave a comment to let me know.

Technorati

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Thing 13

I enjoyed searching through the various social bookmarking sites. I signed up for del.icio.us and diigo. It will take me quite a while to finish tagging all of my bookmarks, but I'm sure it will be worth it in the end.

Magnolia is no longer operating and every time I tried to go to Furl I ended up back at diigo. Even typing in Furl's web address directly still sent me back to diigo. I had also heard of many of the other sites for bookmarking. I will use diigo with students because the educator account will allow me to set up classes and the students will be able to comment on the research of their peers with annotations. I will love being able to see what they are thinking as they sort through research information. The fact that I can keep it private between my students and myself is a distinct advantage and will help avoid any privacy issues.

I will keep my delicious account for my personal bookmarks and use the diigo account for bookmarks and information I want to share with students. Since we will be developing a number of podcasts this year for our technology grant. I think these sites will be very useful. I also like the fact that searching these sites gives you more information and less advertisements than a standard Google search.

Thing 12

This "thing" took me quite a while to complete. I've been sitting on the sofa with my laptop for two days sorting through mountains of websites and blogs I found that interest me for one reason or another. The good news is that since I already had the reader set up, I was able to subscribe to a number of them...and to think I had trouble finding things I wanted to subscribe to back in Thing 9. I am feeling a little bit of overload. Now that I know where and how to find a lot of these sites, I could use another summer vacation just to explore and create lessons using some of the things I found. I agree that commenting makes more sense than just lurking out in cyberspace and evesdropping on others' conversations, but I still find myself hesitant to comment thinking I'm not enough of an expert to add much to the conversation. I left comments on a blog from an Australian teacher who is working on a project similar to one I will be trying this year. I also left a comment on a site called Information Overloaded. Wendy is a Canadian teacher who is also trying to sort her way through all the information out there to help teachers. I found two sites in my searches that are worth sharing, iLearnTechnology, a site that lists tons of technology tools and links, and TheWeekinRap, a weekly rap covering the week's national and international news.

I also found the assignment to comment on other Library2Play blogs interesting. I discovered several others who had similar comments to mine and others who gave me some wonderful ideas for using some of these ideas in my classroom. Special thanks to Watt's Up, Things That Make You Go hmmmmm, and Queen of All Things Everywhere for their posts that encouraged me or gave me ideas.

Thing #11

I signed up for LibraryThing and spent a couple of hours just browsing through all they have to offer, which is a lot. I entered a number of my personal favorites and signed up to write reviews. What could be better than getting free books to read and review?

I think this site would be particularly good for those Language Arts students who march to their own drummer and prefer to read the books that are not so popular with their peers. Here they could find others with similar interests no matter what those interests seem to be.

I expect I will be going back fairly regularly just to see what else is out there. I'm not sure how many of the groups I will eventually join, but I will probably follow several for a while to see how I like them.

Thing #10

I love the comic strip maker.http://www.comicstripgenerator.com If you're good at comebacks, you could come up with lots of fun posters to say the things you'd like to say. The Sign Maker is lots of fun too. http://www.customsigngenerator.com/ I think I'll be using our poster printer quite a bit this year.
I also created a mosaic in ImageChef. http://www.imagechef.com/
I had already found Dumpr through an in-service earlier this year. Everyone had fun with the Goo feature. This time I played with the pencil sketch feature and made a pencil sketch of my daughter's dog to send her. I think this feature could be used particularly in Social Studies. Students could take the pencil sketch of some area or person from an area of study and color it in just to reinforce the content. It could also be good for ESL classes looking for particular vocabulary development. I think I will have my Journalism students feature several of these sites in our school newspaper this year so the students can have opportunities to play with them and hopefully give us ideas on how to use them.

Thing #9

I was not particularly impressed with the search tools for blogs. I liked Technorati and Bloglines the best and found them the easiest to use, but there seem to be a lot of steps involved in looking for a blog or newsfeed on a certain topic. I did not like Topix.net at all. I found it too cumbersome to deal with. I did come across one or two feeds to subscribe to and have some ideas of others I'd like to look for and add to my list, but it seems like it will be easier to go to the sites I'm interested in directly and sign up from there. I found education feeds, feeds from other countries, and financial feeds. There are so many available it would take a lifetime to go through all of them to find the ones that are the best "fit."

Thing 8

I think the RSS idea is a really good one. I'm all for saving time and having information come to me just makes sense. This could be useful in a classroom doing research on a specific topic. Students could find newsfeeds and blogs on a current topic and use their reading to evaluate the credibility of the source and to gain information. It is a tool that should be shared with students to enable them to follow topics they are interested in at home. Given advance warning, librarians could help narrow down the vast resources available to provide a list of posts that may be appropriate on specific topics to teachers.

Thing #7

I enjoyed exploring all the Google tools. I used Google Earth to see if I could see some specific tourist sites I visited a couple of years ago. The photos were amazing. I can see where students would enjoy viewing their hometowns, or places they would like to visit. I set up my iGoogle homepage with all the options I would like to have there. The one that surprised me the most was Google Docs. I had tried it previously for sharing a document and had problems with it, but I was impressed by the forms. I set up a sample form and sent it to my mother, kids and friends just to see how it works. I could see this as an option for students completing assignments or responding about an assignment. It could also serve for students who are out sick for a while if they have a computer at home.

I also really enjoyed finding the Google Scholar search. There have been several times when I wanted some research on a particular topic but couldn't find anything. I already found and read an article on my subject that was quite interesting. This could make keeping current in the research on your subject area much faster and simpler than subscribing to multiple journals and hoping for topics that interest you.

On to thing #8...