Using the "Things"

Since finishing the course, I've been working to get ready for the new school year. I've already been using some of the things I created over the summer in the 23 Things. I've got some cute posters with my own unique point of view to share with my students and I find I'm not at all worried about having to add to a blog every week for a grant we are involved in this year.
So far in the one week and one day of school, I've used my SMART board, my projector, set up a class WIKI to help my students keep track of assignments and post their news stories where they can be easily edited, and incorporated some websites we learned about in our training before school started, most notably BrainPop. I've organized folders on the server and even managed to get my overall semester plans ready for my classes on my computer. I will be dealing with 3 different computer versions, PCs and 2 different MACs in my classes as well as electronic keyboards, digital and video cameras, and editing equipment. It looks like it's going to be quite a year for me and technology.

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.