Is it the end or only the beginning?

One of my favorite challenges during this blogging journey was the Animito video. I guess that I never really realized how easy technology can be to use nowadays, and this definitely proves that I need to make more of an effort in using technology to my advantage. The biggest unexpected outcome for me is the fact that I actually really enjoyed parts of this blog. I expected for it all to be a complete nightmare. The biggest improvement I could think of is making it so that I wouldn't have to sign up for 25 different sites. I know that there are some sights that I signed up with that I will probably never use again so if the sites could be streamlined a bit I would have appreciated that. I've learned that technology is my friend, not an enemy. I plan o keeping up with sites like the bookmarking sites to stay up to date with Web 2.0.

Thing #23

The idea for the 23 Things blog came from stephen Abram's 43 Things I want to do This Year. Helen Blowers then took this idea and helped to turn it into the Learning 2.0. Creative Commons will definitely be something useful for me as a teacher. These laws help to protect individuals from copyright laws and give you more creativity. Also, the more that I know about and am informed about Creative Commons the better that I will be able to instruct me students and teach them about how to use work legally. Many students will not learn this if it isn't taught to them in the classroom so we can't just assume that they already know about Creative Commons.

Thing #21

Sweet Summertime

Animoto was pretty easy to use. I just had to choose which theme and song that I wanted and then added pictures and you can pull from Facebook, Flickr, or straight from your computer. I was a bit apprehensive at first. I thought this would take me hours but this would definitely be easy enough for students to use. This would be a fun way to show what students did over Christmas or Summer break, I think. Or you could make a video of a class field trip to send to parents so that they could see what all their children were doing. All in all I did greatly enjoy this site.

Thing #20

I absolutely love YouTube! You can find anything from funny Super Bowl Commercials to computer tutorials. The video that I found and really enjoyed was [Educators] Drs. Harry and Rosemary Wong, it was all about what an effective teacher is and how to become effective teachers. I think that YouTube can be an extremely affective tool for students. I can upload tutorials or clips about historical figures to help enhance my lessons.

Thing #22

The titles of my binders are: "Differentiated Instruction", "Classroom Management", and "Middle School Social Studies". I chose these for my binders because these are the things that I am most concerned about being proficient in. I know that if I don't differentiate between the different types and levels of learners or if I have poor classroom management then I will not be an effective
teacherhttp://www.readingrockets.org/article/263/

I could use live binders in the classroom in several ways. This would be an easy way for students to organize their own research and for me to already have binders of information for them and all I have to do is click share and my students would be able to access them. This would also help me to keep tabs on where my students are going when they're online. It's so easy for them to accidentally click one wrong link and see something completely inappropriate.

Thing #19

Until now I was never a member of any online communities outside of Facebook and Twitter so I found these sites very interesting. One of my personal favorites was the Education Networking. On tis site I can literally connect with hundreds of teachers from around the U.S. This opens many doors to different activities and ideas for me to use in my classroom. We all know that the more ideas and information that we can gather the more successful we will be as teachers. So I plan on begging and borrowing many ideas from this site in the future!

Thing #18

http://www.facebook.com/lauren.kaycee.5

Finally! I get to blog about something that I'm very comfortable with! Social networking is crucial in my opinion. The world is becoming more and more closely knit and sites such as Facebook and Twitter can really help to propel your career. It's helped me to reconnect with old friends, and stay in contact with current teachers. I also believe that you need to be very careful with these sites. These days anything can be screen shot and sent to anyone, anywhere. This is why I'm very watchful over what I post or allow to be posted on my pages. In terms of use in the classroom I feel that Facebook is a more useful site because students can create groups and communicate to each other. With this opportunity though, we need to teach students about how to present themselves in a responsible manner, since many children will not be taught these behaviors at home.

Thing #17

I liked Delicious to an extent. It was super easy to find tons of articles on anything I could want to research. However, a lot of the sites that it was connected to weren't always the easiest to navigate. I could see this being a very easy tool though to connect with new resources. This would also be a fun tool for students to use to get hundreds of new resources, websites, articles, etc.  So overall, I have my reservations about bookmarking but I do think that it holds a useful place in the classroom.

Thing #16

I chose to use iGoogle for my home page and while I liked that I could choose my interests and immediately was shown articles relating to my interests, there was also a little note at the top of my screen saying that iGoogle would no longer be available after November 1 of this year. Because of this I won't be keeping this as my homepage. The only reason I would be a fan of online calendars is that I could use it to keep parents and students up to date. For me personally though I prefer having my paper planner in front of me, you can just call me old fashioned. I did however really enjoy the LifeHacker site. It had lots of fun tools , tips and tutorials that technology challenged people such as myself could really find helpful.

Thing #15

I think that wiki's can get a bad reputation but at the end of the day I do believe that they hold a lot of value for students and educators. While I agree that you shouldn't just believe anything you see on a wiki page because just anyone can edit it you can find some really helpful sources through articles and websites posted on them. They can really be a good umping off point for a research project.

The APSU 23 Things Sandbox was really fun. I had never heard of anything like this before and it was super easy to just scroll through and see what other people did and used for their blogs and it was also super easy to share my ideas. This would be really fun to use for class projects or sharing ideas with fellow teachers.

Thing #14

I chose to use bubbl.us for my mind map and I really enjoyed this site! It was super easy to navigate and I love how I can save all of my documents and I will definitely be using this in my classroom! This is the chart that I made. I also tried experimenting around with gliffy.com for a flow chart ad I didn't like that site at all. I thought it was complicated and I honestly won't be heading back there any time soon.

Thing #13

I found Zoho writer to be very similar in set up to Microsoft Word. This made it very easy for me to operate and I would definitely recommend for an easy document set up site. Google Docs was also very easy to use. However, I really liked this application because I was easily able to create and share documents like this,

Jack	Amy	Paul	Mary	Jane
Research the reasons for the Civil War	Research the major battles in the Civil War	Research Spies for the North, during the Civil War	Research Spies for the South, during the Civil War	Research the ending of the Civil War and start of Reconstruction
Write one page	Write one page	Write one page	Write one page	Write one page

This document can be shared within a group, so I could use this to help keep groups organized for group projects. Like for this hypothetical group of 5, each student knows exactly what they and everyone else is supposed to be working on. 

Because of this last point I think that I do prefer Google Docs. That way students can combine their Gmail accounts with their documents to make things more simplified.