Thing 16

Google docs, what a great discovery! To be able to allow students and/or teachers to work on documents or spreadsheets with others, but at their own computers and at their own convenience without the hassle of email, is almost life changing. For example, I have the leveled library for our elementary school in my room and have distributed copies of all the books and levels several times to the other teachers. They come in and hope that the set of books they want is there and check it out. Now, I have uploaded the list, in spreadsheet form, onto Google docs. I can add new books, put in columns for checking out/checking in books and teachers can see all that are available. No more need to copy and re-copy the list. I am also on several committees where letters and other documents are created and the collaboration for these will be so much easier with Google docs.

Thing 15

In this lesson I learned how to subscribe to a tag and also how to clean up my Bloglines folders. This will encourage me to access my Bloglines account more often as I will have more control over the content. As I read feeds more often, I'm sure it will become a habit. It has not yet, but is so new to me that I haven't developed that yet. I want to create folders specifically for the committees I will be on once school starts, as well as folders that will help me with recurring problems and areas of interest in my work. I think the sense of organization will be a great help.

Thing 14

In Thing 14 I subscribed to Delicious and bookmarked and tagged web sites that I wish to share with others. My user name is ellie19z if you wish to explore my chosen pages. I look forward to looking at others' sites and I'm sure I'll find some great ones that will be very helpful to me. Now, instead of finding out accidentally about another teacher's gem of a site, or losing the paper on which she/he wrote the url, we can open accounts in Delicious and share generously.

Thing 13

In this lesson I have been reading about social bookmarking. There are lots of new terms like "folksonomy" and "tagging", but I am excited about the prospect of really putting this to use. I used to email myself a website if I found a good one at work so that I could go on it when I got home. Now, with Delicious, I will have my websites available to me on any computer that is connected to the web. Another aspect of this is the fact that I would save a website if I felt it was really good, but would often forget about it as it was merely one of many in long list of favorites, categorized in a very general way depending on the folder it was in. Now, with tagging, I can search for a specific tag and all the sites that apply will pop up.

Thing 12

In this exercise I learned about widgets and how to put them into my blog. I knew interactive items existed, but I didn't know that I would be able to shop around and find some that I could actually insert into my blog. This is a lot of fun!

Thing 11

I enjoyed this activity very much. I have not been going to other people's blogs so it gave me a chance to see the way others have their's set up. Reaching out to other participants and commenting, hopefully in positive ways, gives me a sense of responsibility to support other peoples' journeys. I think this feeling would also come across to students if used in a classroom setting when making comments about other students' writing. One of the blogs I visited had indicated that she felt students would develop a sense of writing for an audience by commenting and receiving comments from others. This was kind of an "aha" moment for me because I think she is absolutely right!

Thing 10

The title of this video is How to Play Mancala. After completing Thing 10 I see that this lesson answers all the questions I had in my Thing 9 post. Yes, I can download a video from YouTube and yes, I can embed it into a presentation for my students. I chose this video because my students love playing this game, but they all have a different way of explaining the rules. So, I thought I could use this to show one version of the game that we could all learn. Youtube now appears to me to have almost limitless possibilities for educational use. I am very excited about it! I can find videos where authors talk about their own writing process or are reading their own work. If we are working on writing in a certain author's style and have it explained by that author - how wonderful is that! In the past I would have had to find or purchase a video and have to settle for what I could get my hands on. Now, I can search the internet and come up with very specific videos geared to what I am teaching. Amazing!