Thing #10

Working with Photos -

I do like the resizing feature on snipshot, which is the photo editing site I worked with and explored. I noticed that I could not change it to sepia tho without paying a $9 fee for it. I know there are other sites that we have used that will format it for you for free. This picture is of "Once upon a Mattress". Mead Middle school just did the production, so stay tuned for pictures from our school play, with my Ryan as the "prince". Photos on the web means becoming a part of a community of photographers sharing experiences. It's another dimension to what students and teachers can do with digital images in the classroom. I know our music instructor will love when I doctor up my photos and present him with a plaque and this production! What shall I do? Any image generators or editing you can think of for this project?

Thing #9 - Technology

Podcasting - basically the creation and distribution of amateur radio, plain and simple! Getting alot of people to listen to you has become very easy! Podcasters are normal, everyday people talking about things that interest them. And then, there are others that are more focused in content. You can find interviews, presentations, and interesting news on a particular topic thru podcasts. Podcasting is all the rage, and with some technical expertise you can make it work for you! Creating a podcast has gotten easier. Our library created ours on http://www.gabcast.com/. We did a "book talk". It was simple, but you could get really creative! RSS allows you to subscribe to podcasts. Just like new blog content will show up in your aggregator whenever it's posted, new podcasts can show up in your MP3 player/ or computer whenever they are created. Apple created the IPod so that if it is plugged in to your computer the podcast will download directly to the Ipod, so when you're ready for your morning jog (who has time?), you can tune into all new content! Most major news organizations have jumped on the podcast bandwagon with nightly news summaries, etc. Give it a try at Gabcast ! Itunes also has a podcast directory in it! Find a subject that interests you, and start talking! I'll be happy to listen.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing. I do like Flickr, but I do have most of my photos as "private", so I"m sorry you can only see a limited number. There are others I'll share with you in the future as I become more familiar with Flickr and my blog being linked together!

Thing #8

Library Thing - For those Librarians that like to do their "thing". Okay, here's where I fail. I don't have alot of time to read, so there isn't much for me to share on this site. I read lots of papers and magazines, and books on web tools for classrooms, but not alot of Fiction. I did like the Zeitgeist and Group Tabs that Library thing has to offer. If I do find the time to read, I like the fact that I could go to library thing and get a review, or look at top 25 authors. This is a great link for librarians that have read lots of books on their shelves and can write reviews about those books. I see how it would benefit a student looking for a good read. They would be able to log on to Library thing and get a member review of a book title they might be interested in reading. There are lots and lots of tags here which would be great to add to our del.icio.us accounts!

Thing # 7

Social Bookmarking - I get it. But I still like "adding to favorites" better. Tagging in http://del.icio.us/ does make your tags "public" however, which is meaningful to those that trust you as a resourceful person. It is hard to keep track of all the information we have needed and found on the internet. This is a great tool in helping keep track of those links, however it does seem a bit time consuming to maintain it. If you were sharing it (making it public), you would want to make sure your tags were accurate, and the url's were in working order. This is a great tool to learn from each other's efforts. RSS lets us connect with what others write, so this allows us to connect to what others read as well. I like the fact that when you bookmark something at Del.icio.us, then you will immediately be linked to everyone else that has also bookmarked that site. The "community" points the way toward more tags that connects you to more resources. So, the power is in our hands to organize our own information and not just in the hands of Yahoo, or Google. You can apply "many" tags to one link because we all interpret information differently! Furl.net is another popular social bookmarking site.

Thing # 6

Image Generators-Wow! So much fun! Kim, thanks for passing along the glassgiant website http://www.glassgiant.com/ ! Here's my "wanted poster" of my 13 year old! He'll love it when I show it to him. I guess the real power in Flicker lies in ways that it connects people from around the world. If you tag the photo, it becomes that much easier to "search" by the public. Under the "organize link", you can create separate albums for different "sets" of pictures. I'm not getting too carried away however as I don't have the time right now, but I'll remember it when my kids go off to college, or I'll be on the golf course. I think students would get pretty excited about posting pictures on the web that they have taken! Image generators make for endless fun!

Thing #5

Flickr- I don't know anybody that doesn't like photography, a technology that is becoming more accessible every day. I loved creating something on http://www.bighugelabs.com/!

I think it's wonderful what teachers and students can create in the classroom now. Photos just bring that project to life! Flickr was purchased by Yahoo and I didn't know that. A teacher could post field trips, speakers, visitors, and special projects on flickr, and it would be a great way to share the teaching and learning experience of his/her classroom. The majority, but not all the photos on flickr are appropriate for everyone to see, so we do need to be careful about this site. You can not publish more than 20MB of images a month (100? images). If you do, it will not remain free. I thot that adding images to flickr was easy, but I did learn that you need to edit your photos before uploading. This is a great site for current events - like Katrina. Students can actually "search" for pictures and SEE what happened. I also enjoyed clicking on the "most popular" photos to look at in Flickr. Up until December of 07, I've been filing hard copies in photo albums. Will FLICKR change my mind about how I manage my photos?

The Journal-Blogs in the Classroom

I was just in the back room waiting out a lockdown drill. I was picking through some older magazines. I came across "The Journal" dated Febrary 2004. On the front cover was this; "Blogs in the Classroom". Huh? 2004?? And I thot WE were going to be ahead of this new trend! The article said that weblogs were the "unedited, published voice of the people". "Blogosphere", a term coined by William Quick (2001), is the "intellectual cyberspace" that bloggers occupy. They list 4 benefits of student blogging:

• The use of blogs helps students become subject-matter experts.
• The use of blogs increases student interest and ownership in learning. Students are blogging about topics that are important to them.
• The use of blogs gives students legitimate chances to participate. Blogging opens up assignments beyond the teacher-student relationship, allowing the world to grade students and provide encouragement and feedback.
• The use of blogs provides opportunities for diverse perspectives, both within and outside the classroom. Blogs allow all students to participate in a discussion.