Thing #23

Woo Hoo! I'm done!! the 23 things was A LOT of work but I really enjoyed all of it, some more than others. My favorites were Flickr, audacity, google tools, google.docs, image generators, library thing, del.icio.us (which I have shared with everyone I know), fuzzmail, pandora, YouTube, and TeacherTube. Through this activitiy I have learned that I will never quit learning. I kinda already knew this, but this activity really reinforced it. Before starting this activity, I had no idea what the web had turned into. It is sooooo cool! I would definitely participate in another discovery activity like this one. If I had to sum this activity up in one word I would say....who knows....enlightening.....I guess. I feel like I have learned so much, one word won't do it. I feel like I have gone from 0 to 100 on the information superhighway.

Thing #22 Nings

Cool, cool, cool! I explored the Texas School Librarian Ning and loved it. It has information about members, different forumns, vidoes, and groups. I really liked the forumns because it gives you a place to share information with fellow librarians. At most schools, there is only one librarian, nings allow librarians to collaborate when they want to. You don't have to worry about meeting someone at a certain time, you can just read and share when the time is right for you. I also found a video that was used for Dr. Seuss's birthday. I would have loved to have had this video several weeks ago when we had Dr. Seuss week. Oh well! I will have it for next year. I think I would use nings just to hear what other librarians have to say about different topics. This is a place I will visit everyday!

Thing #21 Podcasts

Without knowing it, this was one of the first "things" I did. My partner and myself made a podcast for our midterm. It was a lot of fun but very frustrating at times. We learned some things to avoid next time to make it a little less frustrating. The fifth grade GT class at my school made a podcast over the civil war and shared it with a near by school. The near by school is making a podcast over a different subject which they will share with our school. There a numerous ways this can be used in the classroom, and it will allow us to narrow the space between other learners and learn in collaboration. You can find the link to our podcast in the link section of this blog.

Thing #20 YouTube & TeacherTube

YouTube and TeacherTube were really fun. You can find a video on just about any subject you can think of. Both of them are very valuable resources. They are free, easy to use, and most importantly the students will love the videos.

Thing #19 Web 2.0 Awards

The web 2.0 winners were really neat. I like fuzzmail because it makes e-mail more personal. I don't think I would use it at work but I will use it to e-mail friends and family. I also like Pandora which "creates" a radio station based on what type of music you like. I might try to use this around the holidays when I am wanting to listen to Christmas music. However, I would be very apprehension about using it with children around because I couldn't find a way to see exactly what songs would be played and I would not want some inappropriate to be played. I also explored backpack, which is kinda like google.docs. I think it could be use to collaborate with teachers and other librarians. I watched the video on backpack and wondered how they made the video. I would like to use something that would help me demonstrate to students how to make documents in word or excel.

Thing #18 Google.docs

I watched the Google.docs in plain English and played around with googles.docs. I really like it and I think it would be good for collaboration. When Nina and I did our midterm project we would e-mail our power point back and forth. It got kinda frustrating because there was so many different versions of it and we never knew which one we were looking at. It would have been much easier to have created it using google.docs. A lot of times I create something at home that I want to use at school. I then have to e-mail it to myself at school and hope it is there. The major advantage of using an on-line productivity tool such as google.docs would you would be able to access your documents from any computer and many people could collaborate without having multiple copies. The only disadvantage I see is that you would have to take some time learning how to use it and convince others that it should be used instead of Office.

Thing #17 Sandbox

I THINK I like wikis. There seems to be numerous uses for them. I really like the idea of using them for collaboration, but my fear is that teachers will see it as just another thing to do, and won't use them. I made a blog for a novel we will be reading after spring break and shared it with the 5th grade GT teacher. I was surprised that she wanted to participate in the activity as well, because she is far from being "tech savvy". So there is hope, hopefully if teachers are exposed to things slowly and I show them the relevance they will be more willing to "give it a go".