Thing 23! I made it!

Oh wow, have I learned a lot in the past few months. And I feel like the best part of it all is that this is just the beginning. I remember something from the first thing- something about how so many times we teachers are trying to fight technology in our classrooms (mp3 players, phones, etc)... when it's really not going away, and we need to embrace it and use it to our advantage. Using the students' desire to be interacting with technology constantly is turning into one of the best ways to reach them. I graduated from high school less than 10 years ago, and I feel like even in that short time, SO much has changed in the way teenagers think and work and live.

Many of the things I've learned about are things I can use both in my classroom and in my life outside of school. I've pretty much become obsessed with my delicious and bloglines accounts- a lot of the things we've done seemed like work at the beginning, but now have become part of my everyday or every week routine. The program has helped to changed the way that I view the web in general. I used to think of it as a place to find information... now I see that it's really more of a set of tools than a destination. And those tools are getting more useful and plentiful every day! How great is that??

Thing 22!

Well- here's my wiki! Obviously, it's just the beginning, but there's so much you can add to it that it could pretty much be a never-ending project! Well, I guess that's kind of the point, isn't it? I did feel a little like an invader adding to somebody else's wiki, but I suppose you probably lose that feeling as you do more. Blogs and wikis have some similarities, but the major difference is that while a blog is basically from one person, the wiki is really best used as a collaboration. So, I suppose that would affect my decision as to which one to use. I like the idea of using wikis for student group projects. I could also see my department using it for many things- from keeping track of who is using the lab on certain days, to lesson planning, to... well, anything else that we could think of! I currently have a blog for my classes, but it's pretty one-sided- just keeping parents and students updated on what's going on in class.

Thing 21!

I found some really great wiki's in my search (a number of them ended up on my delicious page!), and the biggest thing I noticed is just how much there is on each of these sites. I think I can see a few problems in using one in my classroom. First, it seems like a lot to put together on my own, especially when there are a lot of great resources out there anyway that are ready to use. This might be great as a department-wide thing when putting together ideas for labs or activities or common assessments. At this time, I can't really see a way to use this as a collaboration tool for my students. I hate to say this, but giving teenagers free reign to edit and add at will makes me a little nervous. It would take a lot of time on my part to monitor and stay on top of everything to be sure that it's appropriate content that they're adding. I think I'm going to spend some more time looking at the ones out there for ideas to see if there is a good way to bring this into my classroom.

Thing 20!

nclude in your post the name of at least one podcast to which you subscribed. Describe your experience using the various search tools. Which do you prefer and why?

Whoops, I guess I already did part of this one in my last post. Oh well! Anyway, all of the tools were pretty user-friendly. EPN had a number of podcasts that were older and are no longer updated, but still had some great content. Podcast Alley had a number of great podcasts. Not particularly easy for browsing, but good if you're looking for a specific topic. I really like iTunes- easy to browse, easy to download. A few of the things I found were the Mr. Science Show, which was pretty interesting and updates regularly, and also the Slightly Mad Science show (this was an old one on the EPN site, but in Googling it I found some great demo videos of many chem or physics topics).

Thing 19!

I have downloaded a few podcasts in the past, so this thing wasn't entirely brand-new to me like many of the others have been. I found some really great 5-minute podcasts about each of the elements- they offer some great info as well as some interesting facts I didn't know before! As for the ones on the site, I really enjoyed the K12 science in Michigan podcast, and ended up subscribing to it through iTunes. I also like the Merriam-Webster's word of the day- it's always cool to add a great word to my vocabulary!
My main problem with podcasts is spending the time to actually listen to them. I imagine if I had an mp3 player, it'd be a lot easier!

Thing 18!

Ch 9 Stoichiometry

View more presentations from kermis.

Here is a presentation I found on slideshare... this is a topic that I'll be starting this week with my students, and will probably end up embedding on my class blog too as a study aid. There were a lot of things I liked about slideshare- first, there are many, many different presentations on all sorts of topics. I'm trying this from home today (thank you snow day!) but I imagine this is accessible from school, which would make it all the more useful. Something I didn't really like was the lack of description of presentations when you're searching for something- it's tough to see if what you found is really what you want until you actually go through the whole thing. This is a tool that I can see myself using in the classroom. I also found some great quilting tutorials too, so it looks like it has some uses at home too!!

Thing 17!

I tried out a few of the tools for this thing- here are my thoughts on those:

Zoho show- I think this could be a very useful tool for students to use when collaborating on a group presentation. it seems one of the toughest parts of group presentations is actually finding the time and means to get together outside of school to work (seems like students are so much busier than I remember being in school!). This way, each can contribute and modify on their own timeframe and it will still be a cohesive, finished product.
Remember the Milk- great tool for those of us that can't seem to remember what's going on next week, let alone this afternoon. Easy to update and modify.
Trailfire- I wasn't crazy about this one, or at least the trails that were posted by other users. Kind of confusing to use, and I'm not sure how I could use it with my students or in my life at home.
Knowtes- I think if done right, this could be a great tool for my students. I could see creating decks on polyatomic ions, group charges, vocab, really a whole lot of things.

Thing 16!

I have actually used Google Docs before to share some extra practice materials before tests or quizzes with students and parents. I like it because you don't need to worry about them having the right version of Word, or WordPerfect or whatever program you created your document in- it's available quickly and easily. It's really easy to upload documents and easy to share them! Love Google docs!

Thing 15!

I like RSS... I especially like the "sub with bloglines" button on my toolbar. Seeing it there reminded me to check it at first, and now its become part of my routine of things that I check whenever I get on my computer.

Thing 14!

The first thing I want to mention is wow... I wish I had discovered this before my laptop was stolen last year! I had so many great sites bookmarked that I lost.

Anyway... my username on delicious is laurenpetz (creative name, I know!) On my delicious page, I added a few sites that I knew of before and had bookmarked, and I also added some sites that I found through searching on the delicious site itself. I like the fact that I can access my bookmarks from anywhere- if I find something at home or at school, I can easily use it at the other location. I can see using this in a few other ways too. It's great to share good sites with fellow educators... but it could also be used to share help sites and extra stuff with my students too. This is a tool that I can definitely see myself using in my classroom in one form or another.

Thing 13!

It seems like tagging is kind of like having folders for your bookmarks, but things can show up in more than one folder if they have more than one use. I like that part about it- the fact that you can have more than one tag for something- if a site contains more than one type of useful info, it will show up in different categories. Plus, if you have a good system of tagging, it can make everything more useful. I can see disadvantages if you're not very organized about it- say you have two tags that are really similar, but not quite the same; it might be more difficult to find exactly what you're looking for in your bookmarks. I can see how this would be useful if you were connected to your whole department on it- sharing links and helpful info is always great and it makes it easy to do on your own time frame.

Thing 12!

I love the idea of widgets- there are so many cool ones to choose from and you can design your own too if you have something more specific in mind. From what it looks like, you don't need to be really knowledgeable about technology in order to do it either, which is nice for people like me! I had no idea embedding would be as simple as it is- really not sure why I haven't gotten into any of this stuff sooner.

I used to have a Facebook account when I was in college and it was first starting out. It was a great way to keep in touch with people- regardless of whether they're ones I didn't see often or ones I talked to every day. Through facebook I never created any new relationships with people I didn't know already. On the other hand, I post to a message board for fans of my favorite soap opera- kind of silly, I know, but it's nice to discuss it with other people that are big fans and watch every day like I do! While I wouldn't consider any of the other people on there close friends, I feel like I've gotten to know some of them at least a little over the time that I've been posting. I can see how over a long period of time, relationships like those can become pretty meaningful, but I don't think they can ever replace face-to-face contact.

Thing 11!

Getting comments makes blogging more real, I think- it helped me to really realize that there are other people out there reading this and its not just for my benefit. Commenting is what makes it an actual community- can't exactly have a community of one! So far in commenting, the hardest part is being certain that what I'm writing is of real, timely value to the blogger, and that it's soon enough after their post to still be relevant. Feedback is really important for students... and I feel like its especially valuable if they can get it from their peers as well as their teacher.

Thing 10!

I have my students listen to this song every year when we first start talking about the elements... I have it on my Ipod and it never gets old! Downloading was really almost as easy as embedding- this is great because I can find a video and save it to my flash drive to show my students, so I don't need to worry about trying to stream it on my computer at school and having it not work during class. Now that I know these two strategies, I can definitely see myself using videos in my classes.

Thing 9!

I must admit I've spent a bit of time on YouTube in the past, but mainly to either watch music videos, or to watch some ridiculous funny clip my husband finds on there. I like how easy it is to find things of interest, but at the same time (like anything else on the internet, it seems) there is just so much stuff that if you're not really specific, you end up with a lot of random stuff that doesn't necessarily apply to what you're looking for. However, I did find some things that would be useful for my students. I think some of the best were ones that showed demonstrations that I'm unable to do in the classroom due to safety reasons- there are some really cool videos of explosions and other things that do a great job of not only telling my students about concepts but also showing them I'm fairly certain it's restricted in our building, but it's still something that I could link to on our class blog that they could look at outside of school. I like that YouTube (unlike TeacherTube) doesn't make you sit through an ad before the video begins... that drove me a little crazy, especially when I wasn't sure the video I was waiting for was what I really wanted.

Thing 8!

Wow, there were a lot of things to mess around with in this "Thing"- you could definitely lose track of time just looking at all the possibilities. I think a few of my favorites were the spell with flickr and the color picker tools. I ended up using the spelling tool for the blog I started for my classes (yes I started one last week!) and my students thought it was really cool. I liked the Big Huge Labs site very much because it was easier to navigate than the image generator site, and linking it to my flickr site made it even more simple. Here's the link to the mosaic maker I used to make a mosaic of one of my sewing projects from last summer. I'm still trying to determine how to apply these tools with my chemistry classes; haven't quite figured that out yet but they were definitely really interesting to play with and I'm pretty sure I'll be returning to do more of that in the near future.

Thing 7!

So, uploading to Flickr was really easy. Before now, I had only thought about this site's uses with family and friend photos, but I guess why not in the classroom too? Students can upload photos of the progress of projects at home, we can upload photos of classroom projects and labs... the possibilities are pretty much endless. Maybe we're talking about a certain topic in class, and their homework would be to find an example of it, take a photo and upload it- that could lead to some great discussions. It appears that you can upload photos from your phone too, which would be great because just about all of our students have phones with photo capabilities. I like the map feature too- posting or seeing photos taken in different places was really cool. I can see how that would really be useful in social studies classes.

Thing 6!

So, this picture pretty much wraps up a few of my favorite things all in one- chemistry and quilting. I found it while entering in random searches- it is kind of cool how people interpret tags so differently- what I think of when I type the word "atom" or "elements" or something is completely different from some of the pictures that pop up. This could be either really cool or really annoying; if you're just looking to find something cool, then great, but if you're looking for something specific you probably have to do a lot of digging to get there.

Thing 5!

Out of the different ways to subscribe to sites, I like having the subscribe button on the toolbar of my web browser the best. It makes subscribing a lot more simple- you don't need to scroll through a site looking for the button or copy/paste anything. I wasn't crazy about the Google blog search, but I think that's just one more thing that gets easier the more you use it.

The most difficult part about this Thing was navigating Technorati at first... I couldn't find that "advanced search" we were supposed to click on. Once I gave up on that step, however, I found a lot of interesting blogs. I like how they have different rankings- top blogs overall, or which ones are moving up or down in the rankings, or that you can just search for whatever it is you're looking for. I found a number of blogs that were interesting to me both professionally and in my personal life. That's where the folders come in handy... everything isn't just listed all together. I try to incorporate a lot of science news into my classes, and this will help me find postings that are relevant much more easily.

Thing 4!

There truly are SO many blogs out there... yikes! RSS seems like a great tool to keep updated on the ones that I think are important. I guess I've seen that little symbol on websites before but I never knew what it meant! Now all the sites that I check regularly are available to me at the same time- saves a lot of time because you no longer have to check each individual site to see if there's anything new. Also, I can get bloglines on my phone too, so I don't need to fight my husband for the computer to check things out. On second thought, maybe I'll set up an account for him so he can use his phone and I can use the computer... :)

Thing 3!

In checking out all of these blogs, I think there are a few main ways that I would use blogs in my classroom. Mainly, it's a great way to keep students and parents updated on what's happening from day to day. Parents can see what we've been doing (maybe even including pics or video of labs and activities?) and what's coming up (important dates or events)... and it also seems like it's especially good for students that are absent, because we really only see them 3 times a week and we do so much in one day! Providing links for extra help on topics would also be great for those that need it, and maybe links to topics that are a little beyond what we do in class for those that are interested. Also, as a pretty new teacher, it'd be great to have a place to reflect on ideas and get feedback from other educators on things that work in their classes.

I feel like a lot of students might really get into the idea of responding to a blog- it allows them to see what others think before they respond, and there's not that embarrassment factor of raising their hand or being called on in class when they're not sure they have the correct answer.

As far as concerns about this go... I guess my biggest one again is just the fact that not all students have access. In reality though, there's not many that don't (public libraries are amazing!) Also, having the time to keep everything up to date- but then, I guess it really doesn't take a ton of time!