Thing #7

Flickr is an ideal tool for any teacher, student, and classroom. Finding free public domain photos to use in presentations is sometimes difficult. I like that fact that photos can be uploaded to the desktop, sent in an email to Flickr and it appears there in seconds and friends and family can be directed there. I hope that our district will help all employees see that this is a better way to send pictures and videos to others. So many employees send photo albums to their friends and co-workers through our district email and never realize that it slows the system down.

I also found it interesting that you can assign tags to your photos that essentially if you have a photo out there, it can be found. With the "misd23things", mary and Debbie could assign 75 tags to this one image, they are good at what they do but I think that even this might be a challenge?

The "23 Thingster group" looks a little questionable, I wonder where that image came from.

Ok, so I came across something called moo cards - my curiousity kicked in and I had to explore exactly what these were. If you really want to know ask me and I will tell you.

I uploaded two pictures onto my blog, a picture of my sweet Lexy and Cricket, see if you can tell who is who.

Thing #6

The choices were many, I searchedfoods, fun stuff, and widgets (I still am uncertain as to what a widget is, I am sure that will be covered soon in one of these "things" :) The fun stuff included Hairmixer.com - you could import your picture and mix it with a celebrity's hairstyle, the options were many! After you found the exact hairdo you could email it to friends, make a T shirt with the photo and many other products. This would be a fun project to do with your friends or do to your friends! The second site I went to was Onesentence.org - this site invites you to tell in one sentence and only one sentence a true story. This would be a great project to have the students be able to chose their words carefully and chose descriptive words in order to tell their own life event. Reading some of the ones that had been posted was hilarious. I kept going, the next site I found was Comiqs.com, I am teaching a class in the fall using a variety of comic strip sites. I hope that this class will show teachers the fun application that this tool can provide for the students in order to create their own digitial novel, (comic strip). This site was fun because you actually could import your own photos and create the storyboard. Too fun. Now I see why these sites received awards.

Thing #5 - What does School 2.0 mean to me.

School 2.0 is an exciting and innovative approach to teaching students in the 21st century. Students no longer have the need or desire to memorize meaningless facts and data when all they have to do is merely type in a word or two into Google or Wikipedia and get the info that they need. Unfortunately, so many teachers use what they are most comfortable with and are ok with telling their students that they computer illiterate. In my world we don't accept students responses to "I can't do this" or "This is too hard" we expect them to take the concepts that are being taught, learn and apply them and have mastery of these concepts on a test. So how do you get teachers to step out of their comfort zone and their little box and go forth and learn new things. I thought that by other teachers sharing and showing the great benefits of using School 2.0 tools that other teachers might be driven to want to learn, not so, many responded, "I just don't have the time to learn all that new stuff". So when training is provided and the teachers are given some time you have a small group of teachers that will embrace the training and try out these new tools and when things don't work sucessfully the very first time in the classroom, they don't want to try again. The answer? Many districts across the nation have spent millions of dollars in equipment, technology facilitators and trainers, staff development, incentives and yet bottom line it is the educator that must WANT to make the change and must WANT to do what is best for the students, they must WANT to be proactive and progressive. If each campus administrator expected the staff to move towards becoming a 2.0 School and set up a plan of action with serious expectations and accountability then, and only then, would the classroom change and become a more content producing, student centered classroom with real world application and a desire for a lifetime of learning. As educators we have a double standard, we are not willing to learn and stretch our ownselves, yet that is what we expect of our students.
Walk through any classroom and ask yourself, "How are we meeting the needs of our students to be interested and to embrace what they are learning, to be expressive and to provide opportunities for contribution, and how are we meeting the needs of these students to be ready for the workplace? With over 500 new tools to be utilized in the classroom it should never be a question of do I want to use these new tools, but rather what new tools should I teach today!
New Literacies - Is it Essential or Enrichment, I invite you to respond.

Thing #4 In Progress

After reading the details of the how and why's of commenting I see that not only does it help to keep the blogging format alive and interesting but that you can comment on someones ideas, relate, and respond to them on a professional and/or personal level. Several of the sites gave great suggestions for commenting, and a classroom teacher using a blog would want to have the students read the reasoning behind whether or not to use your real name or an alias - "Commenting using an alias vs, using your real name" - Blogging Basics 101 and "The 10 Commandments of blog commentary" - Brown's Thought blog. Both of these sites would help to establish the expectations and the protocol of using the classroom blog. I have benefitted from the info and comments from several educational blogs as well as some personal interest blogs. A great resource and tool for personal use as well as for practical use in the classroom!

Blogs to check out -
Loving Summer - by the way great blog name!
Doran's Documents - this blogger is almost finished with her 23 things and her blog site is awesome!
Learning Something New - having fun learning these new tools and gives great application ideas!
Coach D -classroom teacher and coach that can see the benefits and the implementation of the Web 2.0 tools in the classroom, for the whole scheduling aspect of all atheletic events on their campus and the many personal uses to make life a litle simplier, that is what tools should do!
Teachartiscool - she is coming up with ideas already for the many uses and products that her students can create using these great online tools.

Thing #3

How fun this would be for students to be able to communicate and share thoughts, ideas, projects and collaborate. So often teachers assign group work but the students are unable to get together outside of class, this way they could share anything for their project so much easier. I have seen blogs used in the classroom where the students and parents had access to due dates, assignment details, links to websites, and so much more. A great tool for the classroom!

Thing #2

Creating the blog did take some time, I am still trying to figure out how to export the avatar, I am going to come back to this in the morning. I like the avatar that I selected, she has some of my features and is showing off her new horse, Cricket, against the setting sun. The image is very much like me and my personality. I chose Cricket's Corner for my blog name because I wanted something unique and I didn't really want to put out all of my info on the web. I think some level of privacy is good.

Thing #1

Begin with the end in mind... only 21 more things to do :)

Of the 7 1/2 habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners I find that play is the easiest for me, I truly want to like what I do and do what I like! I am looking forward to this experience and know that there are so many new tools on the web to help me in my day to day world of work! I have heard several people say what a challenge this course is going to be and yet so far everything that they have done they have enjoyed. The hardest habit that I need to embrace is to have confidence in what I am doing and be willing to push the buttons without fear that I can break something. With technology you can either read the manual or just set out to explore and discover. That is what I am looking forward to the most, opportunities for growth and new tools and skills. Setting up the blog wasn't difficult, the hardest thing was thinking up what to write about myself and coming up with a blog name. So far so good!