Is it the end or only the beginning

This project was tedious at times and a lot of work but it did help me to learn a lot of useful things I wouldn't have learned on my own.  My favorite excercise was the animoto lesson.  That was fun to do and it also a useful tool.  My least favorite one was probably the flickr thing.  I did not expect to learn as much from this project as I did nor did I think that it was going to go as smoothly as it did.  However, I'm very proud I have completed this and gained so much useful information.

Thing 23

The Creative Commons was something I had never heard of until this class.  I used to always just go on to google images and copy and paste any picture I want and come to find out, that is illegal.  I will always be sure to inform my students of this because this is the right way to do things.  I imagine in the future rules and regulations are only going to get more strict so this is vital that kids learn about this at a young age.  However, with all these regulations, Creative Commons does help out a lot with finding information that you can use.  If you plan on doing your work legal, Creative Commons is something that could save you a lot of time.

Thing 22

My binder titles are, World War 2, The Great Depression, and Pearl Harbor.  The one I provided below is Pearl Harbor and I'm not sure if I did it right but it is the only way I could figure it out. This could be very useful for teachers and students in the classroom.  You could creat one of these for a project you assign and just give the students access to your binder so they have all this information for thier project.  The student could also use this if they were doing a group project.  There are so many different options you have with this.  This is an excellent tool for anybody who would like to use it.

<div style="width:75px; height:78px; background-image:url(http://www.livebinders.com/images/binder_icon_private.gif); border:0px; margin-top:4px; background-repeat: no-repeat"> <a href="http://www.livebinders.com/play/play_or_edit?id=381430"> <img src="http://open.thumbshots.org/image.pxf?url=http://www.nps.gov/usar/" style="width:60px; height:60px; border:0px; padding:0px;margin:11px 0px 0px 13px;" /> </a> </div> <div><a href="http://www.livebinders.com/play/play_or_edit?id=381430">Pearl Harbor</a><br /></div>

Thing 21

My Animoto Video.
This is probably my favorite one yet.  It is real easy to use and it is very neat to create a video like this for yourself.  I remember in high school, one of my teachers created a video like this about herself to show to the class the first day we were there.  That is one way that you could use this tool in your classroom.

Thing 20

As many people are, I’m very familiar with YouTube and love the site.  While looking for a video I liked, I came across many good lessons that teachers should watch but I found one I really liked.  The title of it is “David McCullough on the importance of teachers.”  David McCullough is a former Pulitzer Prize winner and is a very interesting man to hear talk.  The reason I liked it is because, he explains that our teachers are the most important people in the community and it just rejuvenates me and gives me a confidence boost as to why I chose to do what I did when I watch this. Here is a link to the video if anyone wants to watch it.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvbhcMv3Sp0&feature=related.  As for adding some of these components to our library site, I think that would be great.  Like I said earlier, there are a lot of informational and educational things on YouTube.  Not all of it is that good but the good out weighs the bad.

Thing 19

Most all of these online communities are excellent but I’m not a member of any of them.  Probably will be in the future, but I just hadn’t got around to joining any of them yet.  The two I like the most are flixster and the educational networking community.  Flixster has not got too much use in the classroom.  On the other hand, the educational networking can be very helpful.  It gives all of these social networking and just good informational sites for teachers to look at.  I noticed that Diigo and sites like that are listed on there and many others that we have talked about.  This site is filled with resources that could really come in handy.  Also, I thought the TeacherPop was a neat site to get involved in.  It is kind of like a Facebook for educators.  I really enjoyed being introduced to this.

Thing 18

It is very important for teachers to know about social networking sites because there is useful information on them.  I have a facebook and a twitter but I prefer facebook because it is not constantly blowing up with tweets.  However, I think some information could be gotten off these sites to share in class, I don’t think I would.  Facebook and Twitter are not the most educational sites out there and its better if they stay out of school.  There are many sites on the internet that would leave these two way behind so I think we should focus on other sites.

Thing 17

I really like the social bookmarking site delicious.  I had never really thought about not being able to access your bookmarks from other computers but that can cause a big inconvenience at one time or another.  With this site, you always have your tags right with you.  Also, you can help other teachers out if you run across a site that you know another teacher can use.  Just tag that site and that teacher who needs the help can see it too.  This site is a great tool for students as well.  Students can get on here and find helpful study sites that give review questions on a book or something they are supposed to be reading and share it with everybody.  This site has many good tools that will be used a lot in our schools in the future.

Thing 16

I chose the iGoogle start page and I really like this.  It is kind of like your own information page. You can have many different things sent to you about all your interests.  Online calendars are very useful to people of all ages.  In today’s world, there is so much going on it helps to not have to keep up with dates in your head and have someplace that does that for you and this is perfect for that.  You can put all kinds of information in your calendar and forget about it until it shows up on the calendar.  I did not try any of the to-do lists because I chose to do the calendar.  Both of these tools could be useful to you as a teacher.  The calendar is a memory jogging tool that helps you keep up with what you need to be getting done.  The start page is something like your rss feed that you can get information sent to you from all over, like the news or anything, and helps you keep your class up to date on what is going on in the world.

Thing 15

I enjoyed the activity we had to do.  It was very easy to do and it was neat looking at all the things people had posted on there.  I think a wiki could be very useful for teachers and students.  Teachers can post their syllabi or anything that is important to the class like checklists or important announcements that students can easily access from home and stay on track with what is going on.  Students could also post things they are doing for maybe a group project or something so all their piers can see what has been done and what needs to be done.  All in all, it is a very useful tool and will be a major part of the future of education.

Thing 14

I started out with the gliffy flowchart.  I really like this tool and it could be a very easy way to present information to your class without it seeming to crammed or jumbled up.  You can create a chart and when you switch ideas just start a new one on the same template and start branching off of this one.  After doing this, I started thinking about it and there are not any other tools on the web I can think of that allow you to create charts this easily and proficient.  It is definitely something I will use in my presentations to come

I used the Bubbl.us mind map and once again I have high praise towards it.  A mind map is more like a brainstorming tool whereas a flowchart is used to organize thoughts and see how they transition from one point to another.  I can see using this mind map when brainstorming ideas for a research paper or brainstorming ideas once you already have a topic and deciding which ones would be more appropriate and easier to explain.  I know many other people have mentioned this too but I liked on both of these sites the fact that you didn’t have to create an account unless you wanted to save your work so you can get on and see if you like the scheme without having to go through creating an account.  Overall, these two sites are excellent tools for teachers and helpful towards them in helping them do their job more competently.

Thing 13

The zoho writer is a lot like Microsoft word.  In fact, I couldn’t find hardly anything that was different.  The thing I like most about is you don’t have to worry about emailing it to yourself or saving it on a flash drive.  It is very accessible anywhere you are.  I think most people are very comfortable using Microsoft word and since this is practically the same many people will enjoy using this.

The Google docs are good but I didn’t care much for it.  I tried to create a drawing and it is hard to get it to do what you want.  I couldn’t find an eraser on the Google docs which is one thing I did not like at all.  A person could use the document builder on Google docs but I don’t think it is near as good as zoho and as far as the picture tab goes, I don’t see where that would come in handy at all in anything you tried to do.  However, I have used Google docs before and it comes in handy just like zoho would if you have a group project.  When I used it we had a group project and anybody could get on and do their part of the project at anytime because all of it was stored in one place and we didn’t have to worry about emailing to one another and thing like that.  Here is a link to my drawing I created in Google docs.  https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1Fg_3G6b5VywYCxQ6tW6FvMlcpF_xD-he5D8gW2dPa5k/edit

All in all, I think zoho is the way to go out of these two.  It has a better document setting and looks more like what people are used to so it is more easily navigable.  Everything Google docs has zoho has and I think they have it at a higher level.  I just lean towards zoho because I feel more comfortable with it.

Thing 12

 I created the google alerts and the google translator.  If you look at my link for the google translator, I put my website that I get alerts from up in spanish which I just think is neat. I also got google alerts to send me alerts on the events that are taking place in Syria right know.  These two tools could be very helpful to a teacher.  The translator can be helpful becuase a teacher can show information to students in different languages if that was necessary.  With the google alerts, I like it and think it can be helpful to me becuase it constantly sends me alerts about different things and with me trying to be a history teacher, history is made every day and if I can get alerts on events taking place around the world, it gives me something to talk about with my students before the lesson or even during it if it ties in with the standard I'm trying to teach.

http://www.google.com/alerts/manage?mqm=c&q=problems+in+syria&x=AMJHsmXUw93VKx-9Rj7QP_eUKqhk1bLqzg:1330189054541

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=en&tl=es&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3Fhl%3Den%26gl%3Dus%26q%3Dproblems%2Bin%2Bsyria%26lr%3Dlang_en

Thing 11

What I did on this one is, I went to edublog award winners link and found all the award winners off of there that I wanted to subscribe too.  The method I like best is just copying and pasting the URL of the sites into my site but the other way they show you works too but I just like my way better.  I dont see the toolbar they talk about on a lot of the blogs I want to subscibe too so that is why I prefer copying and pasting more.  There are a lot of blogs on the edublog site that are incredible.  They had a group of bloggers who won awards for inspirational blogs and that is the one I like best.  I also chose one about play based learning which might be more beneficial for someone who is teaching smaller kids and even parents.  They also have awards for best classroom, teacher, and student blogs which embarasses me a little because there are kids that come up with more interesting things to post than I do but it is also interesting and exciting to read and get feedback on what teachers blog about because it lets us see the problems and things they encounter so we can better prepare ourselves for what we might face in the future.

Thing 10

I really like Google reader mainly because I like having a site that sends me random facts and information about things such as history, that I'm really interested in.  As far as using this in my personal life, there are many things it does that could be helpful.  You can subscribe to many sites such as websites that have great recipes and sites like that so when you have to cook a meal you can surprise everybody and claim you did it all by yourself.  It is a fun tool for teachers because they could have new information coming in all the time just from subscribing.  Like I stated above with the facts that you can get about different things, in my case history, you can surprise your students with a fact of the day or this day in history kind of thing.  It is just really neat having all these resources they keep coming up with everyday to help you out as an educator.

Thing 9

http://www.imagechef.com/ic/make.jsp?tid=Candy+Hearts



This is definately a tool I have never heard of or seen before.  The main thing I can see teachers using this for is decorating thier classroom.  Teachers probably wouldn't decorate their rooms with the tools I used but they might and plus there are many different templates and I just found these to be cool.  I know in all the younger grades, you always see teachers put the alphabet and the vowels above thier whiteboards and this would be an ideal tool for that.  Also, It might look a little cheap and probably not the most professional but you could create yourself a name sign to put on your desk however, I would have one that looks more professional on my desk and just have this one hanging up behind my desk or something for fun.

Thing 8

Flickr can be a great tool for teachers in trying to make learning fun.  Teachers could use this to make unique images in thier presentations to show students what they are talking about.  It also might make the students pay attention better.  With the mosiacs you can make using different pictures could definatley make your presentation look more professional towards the kids and to other peers.  You could also make this a project for your students when trying to learn a little about them at the beginning of the semester.  It could help you see thier hobbies and interests which could allow you to relate to them better.

Thing 7

Overall, Flickr seemed like it could be a legitimate tool to teachers.  The site is easy to navigate and it is also easy to upload pictures and communicate with people on there.  I imagine like geography teachers or geologists posting pictures of the places they have traveled and letting all the geologists and geographers use those pictures to show thier classroom just what they have been trying to explain but haven't been able to show.  Besides the pictures though, it is still another social networking site so it could be beneficial to everybody.  After looking at many pictures on here, there are some people that have gotten real good shots of different things.  The picture I chose doesn't really relate to anything but it is an really neat shot taken from above a big city.  The phograher's name is Daniel Cheong and he really did a good job with this one.   http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielcheong/6299677556/

Thing 6

The website I chose is called GAIAonline.com.  It is a social networking site but allows users to play games and earn what they call virtual money and different things for different achievements in the games and networking.  Users can also  create avatars much like we did to put on thier sites.  I think that eventually teachers could have thier younger students play these games and get thier virtual money and have fun with it all while learning whatever standard it is they are trying to learn.  Although this might be for the older people, I can see where you could work around and maybe block your students from everyone but your select classroom and it would be fun for them getting to create thier avatars and different things and would also help out a lot with thier learning because they would get practice doing something they like.

Thing 5

The 2 Links I looked at explained what web 2.0 was and then showed how the school system technology director in Philadelphia was using all of these new things to her advantage.  Web 2.0 is the different things on the internet now such as wiki's and things of that sort that better organize a learning community and make things much easier and quicker.  Using social networking sites and blogs like these for example  help make learning easier for the students and makes things much more accessible.  I see much more of this in the future. First of all, I believe that everything in the school will be computerized in the future.  All the students will have like ipads or something and the pen and paper will be no longer used.  I see more social networking sites being used in the education department.  They have already tried to incorportate some of this and it will just get better with time.

Thing 4

After reading the sections on how to comment I was able to find blogs that related to a lot of my feelings and interests and comment fairly easily.  I do find it true that people do like to see other people comment on thier blogs.  It makes you proud to know that other people are reading your blogs and it is also fun to see what other people think about your thoughts.

Thing 3

Once everyone gets the hang of the blogs, it could be real helpful in a future classroom.  It is kind of like the message boards on D2L that we have.  A blog gives the opportunity to let everyone post what they are thinking and gives everyone else the opportunity to comment on their posts and give thier opinions.  It would be a good way to let the teachers see what the students are thinking by reading their blogs and seeing how thier fellow students are interacting with each other.

Thing 2

Getting everything set up and creating the avatar was very frustrating to me but now that is it done hopefully I will get the hang of everything pretty soon.  As far as coming up with my avatar, I just took and step by step and messed around with all the features until I got comfortable with everything.  I guess my avatar looks somewhat like myself but there are differences.  It took me a while to get my posting name and name of my blog and they ended up not being what I prefer but it's ok as long as they are done and I can remember them.

Thing 1

The thing that I found most easiest to me was the step about looking at the end from the beginning and setting goals for yourself.  I have a lot of goals in life and strive to reach them so that step is not one I have trouble with.  However, the one that gives me trouble is using technology to my advantage.  I do not know how to do a lot on a computer and when given a lot of work to do on one, I panic quickly if the directions aren't cut and dry.  Once a person gets irritated and confused computers hurt them more than help them and that is where I definately need to improve my skills.