Thing 23

• Go back to your thoughts/ideas about Library 2.0. Has anything changed as a result of this experience?
• What were your favorite Things and discoveries?
• How did you connect with others doing the 23 Things On a Stick?
• Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
• What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or content?
• If we offered a 23 More Things On a Stick program like this in the future would you participate?
• How would you describe your learning experience in one word or in one sentence, so we could use your words to promote 23 Things On a Stick learning activities to others?

One of my favorite things was thing 6, the online image generators. I have used it so many times since. I have images on my web page, I used it for a project that I was doing for fun this summer, and I have shared it with so many people. I also really enjoyed making a avatar. I had not done that before.

Thing 22

One way that makes it much easier to keep up with my blogging and Web 2.0 tools is to make sure that it is just something you do in the morning. I have my coffee, watch the news, read the Wall Street Journal and check my Google reader. This way I can keep up to date on what is going on. If I use any new Web 2.0 tools, I will just make sure to add them to my blog. I hope to be able to do on a weekly basis. I am not sure I would have enough to add daily.
I really enjoyed learning about all these tools and have so many ideas stirring for the new school year. I will keep you posted on what works and what does not work.

Thing 21

I became a member of Ning and joined the 23 things on a Stick Ning. I read through some people posts and found some ideas interesting. I feel it is a great way for media specialist throughout the state and country to stay connected and share ideas. I looked around gather as well and read the article about how they hope that it would be the MySpace for books. I think they re taking all the right steps to get there by getting authors and publishing companies involved. I will be excited to see what happens with them in the years to come. Will they become like MySpace or not?

I also use Shelfari. I am not one who can just go into a book store or library and pick out a book. I like to have recommendations, so Shelfari is perfect for me. I make my list, look at other friends lists and continue to add to my list.

Thing 20

I joined Facebook probably a year ago. Since then I have been accumulating friends and joining groups. At the start, I was on everynight, I was updating my status, putting pictures n and writing on walls. Now, I am more of a passive user. I love to see what other people are up to and like to see their pictures. I will occasionally comment on what people re up to and will sometime join a new group. The most recent group I have joined is IRA (International Reading Association). I jined right before I went this spring. I actually won a flip camera becasue I had joined this group. Being connected helps. I am not at all suprised with the popularity of Facebook. I get to see what friends from high school that I lost touch with are up to and I get to stay connected with more people. My husband on the other hand, thinks that it is just a site for people to overshare about themselves and their lives.

Thing 19

I have a few podcasts that I regularly listen to. One is a church service called the Upper Room and the other is a Wall Street Journal podcast. After looking through podcast.com I found a few others I might try out for awhile. I found one on yoga that leads you through a workout. I would love to have that for travel. I also was interested in the kids podcasts. There are tons of great book talks that kids could listen to. In the past I have had my students create book talks using gabcast, so it would be great to listen to a few of these podcasts before creating our own. I am interested to try gcast with students as well to see if it is an easy tool to use.

Thing 18

I love YouTube. I get stuck watching it for hours at a time. I love when friends send links to videos and love to send links to friends. My favorite video this week is the wedding dancers. It is very funny. Hopefully you can watch it from my video bar on the side of my blog. I have YouTube on my iGoogle page so I get caught watching a few videos each time I log in. I use YouTube in the classroom for the water cycle, School House Rock, and a few other movies. I also occasionally go on teacher tube to find videos. What a great resource.

Thing 17

Thing 16

The RPC site was very interesting. What a great tool for students to use to help them step by step through a research project. I wish that I would have had that when I was growing up. The RPC is a little too old for my fourth graders, but I found the site helpful for me in planning my research project for my students. It is very user friendly and has tons of great information that would help me be more thorough in my planning of the project. I would like to create one of these using the BIG 6 that we use in elementary school for research. It would be much more simple, but I like that it give due dates for each aspect of the project and it guides them through each step.

Thing 15

Online gaming can be a time sucker for me. I tried the Pirate game and played for a little, but was not totally into it. I tried some puzzles, did some missions, and got some booty. I feel like I have better things to do than to sit and play pirates or second life. I think it is great that there are classes that you can take in second life. It makes it a more worthwhile game to play, but at the same time I think that the gaming is causing kids to just sit inside and play rather than getting out and being active. I am not a huge online gamer.

Thing 14

Library Thing was a fun to play with. I started by adding all the Maud Hart Lovelace books so that kids could easily find which books were selected. I like the widget that you can put on your website. I think this is a great way to share books with kids. I find that when I do a small book talk about a book, kids are excited to read it. They have a hard time just sorting through my classroom library. I think Library thing could help me to catalog my own classroom library so that books are actually used and found.

Thing 13

The online productivity tools from this thing that I tried out were iGoogle, Google calendar, Don't forget the milk, PFD converter and Zamzar. I had an igoogle page, but I added a few gadgets to it. I now have a countdown to my trip to Colorado on it. I do like iGoogle and Google calendar because when I log onto the internet, my iGoogle page comes up and then I can easily get to my calendar, reader, lists, sites, docs, etc. This year as a fourth grade at Concord we made a Google calendar for all of our events rather than using a publisher calendar. We are excited to see how it works. I like the fact that I can access this calendar from home. The other productivity tool on my list from above that saved me tons of time and headaches this year was Zamzar. My students created a book commercial using Microsoft Movie Maker. Some of the videos they took did not down load as avi's so I had to convert them. Once I did that using Zamzar, the videos worked great. Last, my sister in law loves staying up to date on online productivity tools and she reads updates from lifehacker everyday. She finds amazing tools and applications. This summer she sent me a few fun ones. One combines Wolfram Alpha and Google to get Goofram. The other one is Google fight, where you put in two search terms and see which one is being searched the most at that moment. I might have to start reading lifehacker as well.

Thing 12

After spending some time looking at, reading, exploring on Digg, Newsvine, and Mixx I don't feel that I will be hugely into these sites. I found it interesting to see what sites other people thought were the most important and I got caught reading some articles and flipping through the tabs at the top. My problem is that I have my few news sources that I like and I stick with those. Each morning I read (skim and scan) the New York times and the Wall Street Journal online. I get all the news, entertainment and information that I need. I will give Digg a try and see if I change my mind after using it for a few weeks. I am struggling how I could uses theses sites in the classroom, but again, maybe after I use them myself for a little I will figure it out.

Thing 11

Last summer I took a few classes at Ties and I started using delicious for the first time. It was so helpful because I was able to save all the sites that I thought were helpful online and then I could get to those sites at school and home. I like the tagging feature because it allows you to search ad sort through all the sites that you have. I have not used this in the classroom but I have thought about it. I think it would be awesome for research. I could find some safe sites that students could use for researching. The Menasha library had a great idea for delicious as well. I like how they created author pages.

Thing 10

Wikis
Ever since Scott McLeod came to talk two years ago, I have been excitedly using wikis. I have had students use them to add character descriptions for read aloud books, I have parents sign up for conferences on a wiki, and parents also sign up for volunteer opportunities in the classroom on a wiki. I like that parents can edit from home and they can also check to see when they have signed up for something. I like the concept not only for school but also for home. My college girlfriends and I make one for our cookie exchange each year. That way we know who is bringing what type of cookie. Recently I have started using google docs instead of wikis and I like them even better. On google docs more than one person can edit at a time and they are easier to create and share with parents.
Wikipedia is a great tool as long as you teach students how it is made. It can be a great place to start and get background information to start research. I agree that it should not be used a fully reliable source, but what a better way to teach students how to evaluate information on the Internet than to use wikipedia.

Thing 9

I prefer Google docs for online collaboration. I find it easy to use and easy to save already made documents to. I use mostly Google products so it is very easy to publish a doc on my web page. I also like the organization that Google docs provides. All my documents, sites, photos, everything are easy to access when I am signed into Google.

Thing 8

I am in the process of creating a presentation in slideshare. This will be my first time using it and I am excited about the many possibilities this tool provides. My first presentation will be a webinar. I am going to do a tutorial for partial quotients division. Parents never understand this method and it would be nice to have a tutorial that students and parents can refer to at home. I will let you know how it turns out...

Thing 7

I feel that I am pretty well connected online. I have a facebook account that I check on my phone. I email and text more than I actually call people and I even have a twitter account. I am not very active on twitter, but find it interesting all the places and people that are on twitter. I follow a friend of mine who is a bike racer and I can see how she is doing in races. These communication tools have it it so much easier to connect with people. I enjoy the ease of communcation, but my husband complains that it makes everone too connected.

Thing 6

I love Big Huge Labs and Image Chef. I can see myself using these often I have already made a banner for my web page and I am planning on having my students make trading cards as a get to know you activity at the beginning of the year. I could also see using the trading cards for books and authors. It would be great to have students make a trading card for each book that they read. They could do a brief description (summary) and a recommendations. It would make finding a book much easier for all students. I also liked the badge maker. I thought I could make name tags for the kids with that. Image Chef was also fun to play around with. I would use this to change up images on my website!

Thing 5

More Flickr Fun: Wow, I love all the fun tools that you can use either with flickr or your own photos. I liked spelling with flickr. I put an example at the bottom of my page. I also love the Big Huge Labs projects. I made a movie poster, a magazine cover, a collage of pictures and also a puzzle with pictures that I had. The only unfortunate thing about that is that you have to buy them. I wish you could do that and just print them out. I am amazed at all the fun options that there are for photo sharing. I can see myself using these tools to create classroom posters and also I like the idea of book trading cards. How great would it be to have studnts collect trading cards for the books they have read so far that year. Or students could share books that they have read by making a magazine cover or a movie poster for that book.

Thing 4

I have tried using flickr in the past and thought it was cool how you could tag your photos and put them on maps and share the photos. I also liked the sharing options, but unfortunately did not think it was the best photo sharing site for the classroom. Many times inappropriate images would come up, parents had a hard time uploading images and it was harder for the kids to get pictures off the site for certain projects. I switched over to Picasa and love it. I have both a personal site and a classroom Picasa site. Parents can easily upload pictures that they take on field trips to share with the class and students can access the pictures for projects or just to look at. I can easily upload pictures and they can be on my website in minutes rather than having to upload the pictures and send them to the media specialist to upload through dream weaver. Personally I love Picasa because I can easily share pictures with my friends. I get updates when a favorite of mine has uploaded pictures so I can stay up to date on what is going on in their lives. I also like Picasa because it shows up when I am on my iGoogle page or in my GMail. It is really easy to get to. Picasa has now added the map feature as well so I can tag where certain pictures were taken. I know that there are so many more uses of Picasa that I am still trying to figure out!

Thing 3

RSS feeds make it so much easier to stay up to date on topics that I am interested in. I enjoy getting all my blog posts in one area. That way I just have to go to one place to read all my posts. I use it for both professional development reading and also for personal interested. I get updates from technology blogs and I also get them from reading blogs. I get National geographic posts, a recipe of the day and also updates from blogs of friends who are traveling or enjoying writing about their lives. I use Google Reader and find that it is very easy to use and add feeds to. I like Google reader because it is attached to my iGoogle page and it is very easy to get to. I have not used reader in the classroom. but find it a valuable tool for professional reading and staying up to date.

Thing 2

I am taking this class to learn about 23 things on a stick because I feel that it is important to keep up to date on all web 2.o tools. Not only do these tools make my life easier by allowing me to communicate and stay in touch with others, but they are also changing education. It is important to stay up to date with these changes and allow my students to be prepared to deal with the technology they will be required to know how to use in their futures. I am excited to take the time play with these tools so that I can use them with ease and comfort in the classroom. I am also anxious to find new applications of these tools for the classroom. I will let you know what I find out!

Thing 1: Set Up Your Blog

I have started the 23 things on the stick. I set up my blog and created a fun summer avatar. I am looking forward to having time to review and learn more about these great web 2.0 tools.