Week 7 Things # 16 & 17

The thing I love most about 2.0 tools is that anyone can now be a content creator for information on the web. We are no longer limited by programming skills and expensive software. I see the potential of wikis in many different environments. Students can maintain class encyclopedias for science terminology or maybe students could contribute and post different types of poetry for a language arts class.

I know I'm a MOODLE pusher, but the thing that I love about Moodle is that your classroom is limited to your students. Once they post to a wiki their posting is linked to their account along with any edit or changes made to that wiki. That way you can track their contributions as well as monitor the appropriate uses of posting.

Posting in the "Sandbox" was fun. I posted information gleaned from Wikipedia. It's amazing what information is out there. Has anyone ever posted on Wikipedia?

Week 6 Thing #15

I like the idea of discussing the evolution of the library. We are currently having this discussion in our district as there's been a movement to eliminate librarians at our secondary schools. My response to this now and then has been utter disbelief. Our libraries are already evolving. Our librarians are the guardians of resources both text based and electronic. One of our major concerns for the future is teaching our students how to manage the vast amount of information out there and our librarians are the key to this process. As a TOSA I have spent the last year training teachers on the use of technology and in one of the videos we show to everyone is Howie DiBlasi's YouTube video Did You Know III? (If you haven't seen it I highly recommend it!) DiBlasi says More than 1442 new books are published....Daily and It's estimated that a weeks worth of New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century. The libraries are crucial to preparing our students for the future, and our librarians are the front line in that preparation.

Vacation

I apologize for my recent absence in cyberworld. I've been visiting my grandfather in South Dakota where there is an actual dead zone for technology. No Internet and even my phone found zero service. After the first couple of days of slightly freaking out...I found I was able to function and it was actually kind of nice to stop compulsively checking my e-mail and voice mail. Of course, I wasn't at the airport for 5 minutes before I picked up my old habits, but it was nice to know I could survive without my technology.

Reminder: Web 2.0 gathering at the District Office on July 23rd from 2:00 - 5:00. You can get staff development hours for this or Tier 2 pay!

Week 6 Thing #14

I have already discussed Technorati. I find it a little thick to wade through, but the information is helpful. I really enjoyed the non-Disney video on copyright! It reminded me of another video I found on the TED website. The video is entitled How Creativity is being Strangled by the Law. It's worth watching. I love the analogy of land owners owning the sky above their land!

Week 6 Thing #13

Yeah social bookmarking! I have been using social book marking since the mid 90s. I started out using Backflip.com and I love it because it put a little tool on our toolbar to help us "backflip" our favorite websites into folders. It worked pretty well. Now, I'm working on updating my del.icio.us page. It took me a little time to get used to the tagging aspect, and I still have way too many categories, but I'm gaining on it. I love that I can access those bookmarks anywhere and share links with others. Some of my classmates from SDSU have shared their links with me and I can get lost for hours browsing their favorites.

Week 5 Thing #12

Ok, so maybe I'm just tired. I can see that eventually something like Rollyo may be helpful to set up searches for teachers looking for specific topics. I prefer a simple hotlist or using backflip.com or del.icio.us. What am I missing here?

Week 5 Thing#11

The web award winners was a lot of fun! I was very excited to see many familiar faces under some of the categories i.e. Flickr, Linked-in, Etsy, Twitter, del.icio.us and Pandora to name a few. Now I've added Spanish Pod, Picnik, and yelp to my list of favorite sites. I have great delusions of learning Spanish, and I've been working (a little) using the Rosetta Stone software. I think the Spanish Pod website may be a good way to inspire my learning....besides who really needs sleep?