Thing #23

1. My favorite discoveries or exercises were Thing #10 & 13. Del.icio.us & Big Huge Labs are both awesome and I see many uses for these!
2. After my head stops swimming & I am able to correctly file these tools in the right place in my brain, I see myself using some of these tools often and I am so thankful for this opportunity to expand my technilogical saaviness!
3. Not really, except that I have created another blog for my son and realized that it is apparently the "hip" thing to do when you have young, growing families. I have been able to reconnect with many of my friends indirectly because of this professional development assignment. Thanks SBISD!!!
4. The only thing I noticed is that a lot of this is geared toward librarians and so many of the sites/tools indicated are not really pertinent to a regular classroom teacher.
5. I would absolutely participate in another discovery program!
6. Using the tools I explored in my 23 Things experience, will certainly enhance & jazz up my teaching!
7. Sure thing!

Thing #22

Nings are pretty cool! Having used MySpace & Facebook before and listening to my students talk, I understand how important social networking is. For teachers solely, Nings could be used to share ideas....sort of like a ListServ. A teacher could also set up a Ning for students to post information & assignments, hold online office hours, etc. I think students would be very open to this method of interaction since they are so fond of Facebook & MySpace.

Thing #21

My audio recordings are not working, but here is my podcast.

Thing #20

YouTube & TeacherTube are both very valuable tools for the classroom. The only problem I see with it is that YouTube is blocked by our computer security. I hope they change this. It is uber easy to embed videos into the blog and into presentations. Here is a video I found on TeacherTube on photosynthesis:

Thing #19

I explored a few of the links on the 2.0 awards site. Some of them I had already explored (Flikr, Technorati, Del.icio.us, Craiglist, etc) but many were new to me. I explored:

• MothersClick - it was ok as far as the social networking, but I really liked the recipes!
• LinkedIn - I found a couple of people I work with, some family members, & even a French man I used to babysit for in high school - I've been wondering how his family was.
• MyHeritage - pretty cool! You can upload a picture and see what celebrities you most look like
• HairMixer - sort of silly, but I guess that's the point
• Monster - I was familiar with this before, but I think this would be a great site to use to show the kids just how many jobs are out there that they would use their science background for and show them that most of the jobs posted require a college degree
• MySpace/Facebook - I was also already familiar with these, but I have heard of teachers creating Facebook pages for their classes as a way for students to check assignments and as questions, etc. Very cool & "with it" thing for a teacher to do - really connects with the kids!

Thing #18

I really like Open Office Writer. It is a whole lot like Word, but a cool thing I discovered is that you can choose a background (stones, rice paper, etc.) for your entire document. If that can be done in Word, I'm not aware. Open Office Impress is almost identical to PowerPoint, but there aren't many backgrounds at all...I only saw 4. It may be possible to download more, but I haven't gotten that far. Google Docs is not bad, but there don't seem to be as many options for fonts, etc as with Word. There are however, more presentation templates & backgrounds than in Open Office. I think I'll still stick with Word, but it is nice to know that both of those options are out there should I ever encounter a computer without Word.

Thing #17

Well since it didn't specify, I created a Rollyo to search for housewares & home decor. We are buying a new house and need various things so I created a search engine of my favorite sites -- Pottery Barn, PB Kids, Restoration Hardware, Crate & Barrel, Land of Nod, Company Kids, etc. So then when I typed in "area rug," it only searched those sites. I love it! This would be very useful in my classroom for both me & my students. Throughout the year, the students do a couple of research projects and could very easily tailor their searches for more efficient use of in class time. I am constantly editing my flip charts & PowerPoint presentations by adding further explanation or a diagram/picture. I will use Rollyo to expedite my searches since in th past many of my diagrams have come from a common site.