Thing 17

Property of Delicious through CC

Delicious is a fabulous website.  It's a great way of collecting and sharing information to use later.  I can use this for personal, educational and just about any kind of use.  When I find a website that interests me, I can tag it and put it into a category of my choice.  This makes it much easier to find at a later date.  I can make it public, private, or share with specific people.  What a great way for a school to stay connected with projects for certain subjects!  So, all those websites we pull up and think we are finished with can be tagged for later use.  This eliminates tons of time researching for that site and information.
                                                                  
 

Thing 18

                                                 
                                                                  Facebook

               Most people today have a Facebook page.  Me, well, I depend on it. I get up, fix breakfast, get the kids ready for school, and check my Facebook page.  I seem to be unable to cope with beginning my day without checking my page.   I have found this to be my daily "newspaper".  I throw out a bit of information when at school or church with my friends and they inquire as to where I heard that.  My response is almost always "Facebook"!  The word Facebook is used daily as a noun, verb, adjective, etc.  It's part of our everyday conversation.  My personal facebook page can be reached here https://www.facebook.com/kelli.c.shoemake?ref=tn_tnmn. 

It's extremely important for educators to know that facebook is public unless specified!  I have read so many teacher friends' page and wonder how they ever became a teacher.  Not only is it public, it is a permanent record and can be used in court.  Employers use Facebook when hiring new employees.  If you don't want someone else to know, don't use a social network to announce it!

I don't personally have a Twitter account, but I found it a lot harder to start than Facebook.  Most Hollywood stars, athletes, singers, etc have a Twitter account and many people, many more teens, love to follow their favorites and keep up with their lives.

I think some of these tools, when used privately could be very useful to educators.  We could use it to keep up to date with parents and school employees.  Parents could see what their students are achieving daily their classes and also gives them a tool of communication privately with the teacher through messaging.

Thing 14

This is a diagram I created at www.Gliffy.com.  This was a lot of fun to play with.  I also tried www.mindmeister.com .  Mindmeister would be a great tool to create a family tree or even reviewing the basics characters, plots, themes, etc. of books and movies.  This diagram that I created would be used in my classroom to help students learn the basics of simple sentence structure and how the words correspond with each other.  Using the different colors, but same colors in each section, will help the students to associate what parts of speech go with other parts of speech.  Great tool!

Thing 8

I created this puzzle using www.bighugelabs.com website.  It was so much fun!  This tool could be used by the classroom to figure out answers or be creative themselves.  These puzzles can be printed or ordered.  This would be a good way to have students show their work and have fun at the same time.  You could also use it to create gifts. 

I had trouble getting www.mappr.com to work.  It showed what the finished product might look like, but I couldn't figure out how to create one of my own.  This tool could be very valuable to students as well.  It can show the student tourist attractions, people, landmarks, and all kinds of other things associated with each map they create.  That's a great way to help students visualize what they are learning and helps them more easily remember it.

Thing 11

Thing Eleven

Using Google RSS Reader, I found that Google Blog Search was the easiest for me to use.  By typing in what kind of blog you are looking for, it gives you many options to choose from and is easily accessible, especially for someone who doesn't know that much about technology.  I also found that  Edublog's Award Winners were great at finding appropriate educational blogs.  Using this site you can see who were the top winners chosen for their blog and by type of blog.  Now there is no searching for a specific type of blog and it be a great one too!  It's all right there at Edublog's website!

Topix.com wasn't as easy for me to use as the others.  It was harder to find the specific information that I needed and took longer to get there.

Unbounce was an unusual site I found interesting.  It would be a great tool for investors.  It allows you to find the top 75 feeds to keep you up to date on your financial investments.

Thing 4

I have checked out several blogs, even some that I didn't realize were blogs, such as Pinterest, Facebook, and Topix.  My daughter has used Stardoll.  I think it is really important to post comments on other people's blogs to let them know that you are reading it.  You get to know people and keep in touch with them.  There are many people that I am able to communicate with because of blogs that I normally wouldn't get to see in day to day activities.  I found it comforting of sorts to know that others were just  as apprehensive as I was about this exercise.  I also found other people's websites that they noted could be used by me also in my classroom.  I specifically chose Facebook, Pinterest, Doreen Merickle's blog, Emily Rittenberry's blog, Cristina Evans' blog, Doshanna Richards' blog, and Brittney Maultbay's blog to comment on.  I chose these because they were interesting to me and connected with what I was interested in.  I commented back about how I used or would use the ideas they had posted and what good ideas they had.

Thing 5

Thing 5-Web 2.0 learning

When I was a young student in elementary school, doing research was very time consuming and not very accurate, as printed information took several years to compile and put into a book, and then, who knows how long the library carried this information without updating.  Using Web 2.0 invites students and teachers to use the most current, unlimited knowledge on the work they are performing.  As in the article "Web 2.0 A Guide For Educators" states, this way of learning is just the "tip of the iceberg" in what will be in the future.  Many of us use facebook, pinterest, and other sites like these.  Little do we realize that these are also blogs.  It allows all of us "non-technical", as stated in the article "Web 2.0 is not about Version numbers or Betas", to use technology comfortably.  It is easily accessible by all.  Web 2.0 shows me how important the opportunites are and will be in the future to our student's learning styles.  Children do not always learn in the same ways.  Using web-based technologies allow them to communicate effectively to better their learning skills.  It is also important to me.  It's an excellent tool to keep up-to-date information on our family and friends when reading their posts.  There are so many people that I have met in my life that I am able to correspond with on a daily basis, that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to have a relation with.  So Web 2.0 means to me a whole new learning experience that is very beneficial to teachers and students.