Thing #17

Del.icio.us

The tutorial video really helped me understand Delicious since I have never heard of this before. I am feeling a little overwhelmed after learning about Delicious, Digg and Stumbleupon. I think that delicious is only slightly user friendly than the other two, although Digg didn't seem terrible. I will need to play around with this a little more, after watching the tutorial it seemed a lot easier to use but when I went to search for educational technology I was getting things posted from 2007, which we all know seven years ago in a technological world is ancient. Even MacBooks are considered "antique" after five years and you can't even get parts for them at the Apple store. I like the fact that this is different from bookmarks because then if I am not on my own computer I can still save websites that I find without needing to be on my own computer. I did find a tag about 100 websites that will make you smarter. I went down to the section about science and clicked on wired science. I was hoping it would have been a little more educational but it was interesting. The website has current information about the polar vortex and other current events. 

I can see how this would be useful for teachers to stay up to date on the most current teaching techniques and the tags make it easier to organize everything. I liked the social aspect in theory. You still need to rely on people to tag things the way would would tag them yourself. I did like how there was a follow button, I think that would be very useful as a beginning teacher to have access to other more seasoned teachers website that they deemed as useful. I think I will need more classroom experience before I know which websites and activities are helpful in the classroom and which ones are not. Once I get the hang of the website I hope to find teachers that have useful websites to use during my first year. I think is it a great way to share ideas with teachers across the country and not just the ones what teach in the school that I will be teaching at in the future. I am not sure how this tool would be used in the classroom for student use. I think that this might be a little over the heads of elementary school students. I think that I would only use this in the classroom to get websites off of it that I have already tagged.  

Thing #16

Get Organized

I first clicked on Ustart for my start page and I chose my horoscope, google drive, and tasks. There were a lot of options that I could have on my start page that I have no interest in such as video games, movies and stocks. I wasn't really impressed with this start page. It does have a calendar, weather and a place for gmail which made it easy to access everything from one page. It kind of reminded me of our APSU OneStop page that has all the information we need on one page. I'm not sure if I would ever make this my home page. I have a MacBook and I am used to how that is set up and I don't think I would have a start page in addition to the widgets on my computer. 

I liked the name of the tool rememberthemilk so I tried it out. Not a big fan on signing up for things even if they are for free. I feel like it is just an extra step and extra e-mails in my mailbox that I need to spend more time to delete, making me less productive. I wonder if I had done it on my phone first if I would have needed to "sign up". I always make "to do" lists for myself on a daily basis. In fact the first thing on my to do list is to make a to do list, that way I can cross it off after I make the list. I feel like something is lost when it is on my phone or computer. I enjoy the actual act of crossing things off my list. I have tried other apps on my phone that were to do lists. One actually marked things in red if I didn't get them done from the list. That app was quickly deleted. I find it a lot easier to write my to do lists on paper than on my phone or computer. I don't think I will be doing anymore to do lists like this. I liken it to reading an e-book compared to an actual book. I need to physically turn pages and I need to physically cross things off of my lists. 

My other tool I chose was the mint.com, I feel like this would be a good tool for me to use. Once again you need to sign up for it but sometimes I fee like I need something to show me where my money is going. I feel like one day I have money and then the next day I have no idea what I spent my money on. This tool displays the information for you in pie charts and in bar graphs. Maybe if I keep track of my spending I will get my credit cards paid off this year.  The only downside I see from this tool is that it has all my financial information on it, if it were to get into the wrong hands, but then again everything is on line and if someone really wanted my information, they would get it.

I think the tool that would be most useful would be an online calendar. Whenever I have observed teachers in their meetings, they are constantly planning things for their students, whether its testing, computer times, guest speakers or everyday activities. I feel like I am going to need some type of calendar to keep myself organized. I would like to see what other teachers use as far as calendars goes before I commit to one. 

Thing #15

Wiki

I really had no idea that you could make your own wiki page. The little tutorial on our APSU 23 things page was really helpful in explaining how you can use a wiki (not that I will ever go camping). I frequently use wikipedia and have the app on my phone. The only other time I have heard anything with wiki in it was a few years ago when the news was reporting about "wikileaks". I know wiki means quick or quickly and I can see why they chose the work wiki for all these pages. It is a fast way to communicate back and forth between multiple people. 

I looked at a few of the wikis that were provided and I really liked the educational origami wiki, I liked how it had information on Bloom's at each level. If I were to become a member I could add things to these pages based on what worked in my classroom for the different levels of Bloom's. I liked how the wiki was set up and it seems very useful. For my APSU 23 Things Sandbox wiki, I added an entry about Thing #14. I feel that I could actually use flow charts and mind maps in the classroom for reviews and for learning centers. I was however a little confused as to the "appropriate page" part. I had a hard time finding it. It seems that most people just posted to the front page. 

This wiki experience was an interesting one. Once I got the hang of it, it wasn't too bad. I had a little bit of an issue trying to figure out how to edit the page, took me a while to figure out I had to join before I edited the page. I still a little cautious about wiki's because anyone can delete things that others have spent time on and posted to the wiki. Plus I feel like it would need to be monitored by the teacher to make sure nothing inappropriate was posted on the wiki. With that said, I feel like it would be a great way to organize things for the classroom, for students and parents to see. Perhaps in addition to the classroom blog, put the year's schedule on a class wiki so parents can what has been covered and what needs to still be covered, or even a classroom supply list that parents can add things to or take things away like the tutorial with the camping trip supplies. I'm not sure if schools still do class trips, but when I was in school we did and we always needed parent chaperones, this would also be a quick way parents could add themselves to a chaperone list for a trip. I'm not sure how young elementary school students would really utilize wikis, it seems a little over their heads but I could be wrong. I will need to find out how tech savvy my students are once I get into a classroom.

Thing #14

Flow Charts and Mind Maps

When I was a student, I was never one for pre-planning anything out. I wish that I had bubbl.us and Gliffy back then. I always struggled with keeping my ideas organized when writing a paper. Teachers always encouraged us to take a few minutes to read an essay test question, and write an outline but no one ever really taught us how to really use them to our advantage. I really liked using Gliffy, it gave a little tutorial on how to use the application. I liked these flow charts because it gave the user the freedom to put the arrows to the boxes anywhere you wanted and to change it as my thought process changed. I didn't try flowchart.com because I didn't feel like waiting for the invitation. I think they probably loose a lot of potential users because of their wait time. For mind maps I really liked bubbl.us, it was very user friendly and great for brainstorming. I am also a big fan of all the changing colors of the bubbles. I think it adds a nice touch to the visual aspect of the mind map as well as being able to see ideas on different levels based on color. 

I would like to teach elementary school so I think that these tools would be great to implement at a young age so when they get older they are able to use flow charts and mind maps on their own when they get into middle school and high school. Depending on what grade I eventually teach I think that this would be a great activity but need to be teacher directed, whole class type of a lesson. Using these with heavy scaffolding for upper elementary school students would be useful as well. After scaffolding with upper elementary school students, I think bubble.us would be great for brainstorming ideas about a  group project that students would do. I think that these tools would work best in a small controlled setting for students to work with in pairs or in small groups after whole class instruction.

Thing #13

Google Drive

 I used google drive to do a Class Newsletter for my future classroom. I think google drive will be helpful because I plan I doing a newsletter every Friday for the parents to see what has been going on for the week and other important information. I have heard of Google Drive before but I was surprised to see how easy it was to use and questioned why I didn't learn about this earlier. I really liked the "make a quiz" template option under create. I can share quizzes and tests with other teachers and vice versa. I liked that I can create things on google drive and I can upload things as well. This was a nice touch to using this tool. 

When I went on to Zoho, it was a litter more confusing for me. I found it a little more difficult to get the hang of it. For that reason I prefer Google drive over Zoho, I don't really have time to figure out how to use Zoho when there is Google drive which is equal if not better. I have a better time when things are broken down step by step and Google drive does this. I will definitely use this tool in the future when I have my own classroom.

Thing #12

Google

I decided to look further into Google Alerts and Google Translate. I really liked google alerts a lot, I set my google alerts to look for stories about Clarksville Montgomery County School System and elementary literacy strategies. I think that using google alerts is another quick and easy way of getting information as it becomes available. I liked how you could change the settings to the alerts as well. I set my alerts up for every week. I think that this is a good tool to stay current on school related information.  I can also see how it can be used for anything a person would want to look up whether it be business or pleasure. 

I also tried Google Translate. I think this would be a great tool if a teacher had ELL students in their classroom and wanted to find a way to help the student along with their integration in the classroom. Although I think Google Translate is a great idea, I would advise against any language student taking the translation verbatim. I translated a few paragraphs from Le Petit Prince, a child's story from French into English and there were a few errors where google translate took a direct translation of the text which when read in English did not make much sense. I would cross reference any translation from this to make sure it made sense when translated. For a quick translation back and forth between languages I think that this is a great tool to help ELL students and to help the whole class work with ELL students. 

Thing #11

Finding Good Feeds

I think the easiest way to find feeds was the google blog search tool. I am the most comfortable with google and I found it easy to navigate. I searched literacy for elementary education and found a good feed to follow. I am excited about getting updates for this. I think the most confusing one for me was the Technorati one. There was so much going on when I first got onto it, it actually took me a minute to fine the search bar to type in my search. I don't think I would really use anything other than the google blog one to be honest. I found Edutopia this way too, which was nice to know that I would eventually get back to this website. I feel like that it means it is a good one to follow. I did find it interesting that some of the blogs I went to had the RSS split into comments and posts, so you can be updated on one or the other or both. I think that was a nice little feature because sometimes people write comments that have other links to good resources in response to a post and I might miss it if I didn't have an RSS for the comments as well. I thought this was a good exercise in ways to find feeds because I didn't even know google had a search for blogs.