Wait! I thought I was done? :)

I really enjoyed doing all of these 23 Things. I learned so much with using all of the different tools. This has helped me so much with technology and learning different websites and tools that I can use not only in my teaching career but also in my personal life as well. My favorite thing to do was Thing #21. It dealt with animoto. I loved creating this video. Although it could not be used as much in the classroom, I thought it was just really fun to do. But there were so many "things" that taught me how to use certain stuff. The only way I think doing these 23 Things could be improved is instead of having the first 12 due at midterm and the last 11 due at the final, is to split it up more and have 5 things due every so often. This way students don't procrastinate and rush in doing these "things". Because there really is some important information in doing these and I feel that many may have rushed through it because it is so easy to put off. I could use just about everything that I learned in doing these things in my teaching career. Doing this has really taught me a lot and even though sometimes they got tough, I really enjoyed it! :)

Thing #23

The 23 things is based off of Learning 2.0 designed by Helene Blowers. He program was based off of Stephen Abram's article 43 Things I (or You) might want to do this year. This was stated in the about 23 things that Dr. Anne Wall created. This gave the proper credit to who it belonged to. Creative commons is used for someone wanting to make a picture, song, video, etc. avaliable to others. On this website you can chose how much of it another person can use and so on. Anytime you see the cc with the circle around it, it means you can use it. Just sometimes you have to give credit where credit is due.

Thing #22

http://www.livebinders.com/play/play?id=685545

I really enjoyed using livebinders. I thought it was very different. I have never heard of an online binder such as this. This is a great way to save different websites that you like along with the information that you like to go with it. I made three binders. One being called math education. This is the one that I linked here at the top. I made this one because I want to be a math teacher and I can link and save different things that I find that will help be to be a better math teacher. Whether it be help for me as a teacher or help to a student. The next one that I made I called fun and games. Here I linked different sites that I found that would be fun for me to allow students to do in class that are dealing with the subject area that I am teaching. I really enjoyed learning about online binders.

Thing #21

The Most important people in my life

I really enjoyed making this video. It was very easy to do. This could be used in your classroom as a teacher. I would love to make one of these at the end of every school year to save to show to parents and students. Also I could keep them forever and be able to go back and remember all of the students I had. I absolutely loved doing this. Without a doubt it was my favorite "thing" to do.

Thing #20

I chose this video to watch because we as teachers need to remember that we will always make a difference in the lives of our students. And the impact that we make may be small or large but it will always be a great feeling. We need to continue every year with that goal.

I really like YouTube. Not only can you use it for your personal time to listen to music or watch videos that interest you but as a teacher we could easily use YouTube in a classroom. As a teacher we could add them into our powerpoints or just pull them up on the internet and show a video of the subject or idea that we are talking about. Watching a little video will get the students attention more than you just talking as a teacher. Also, I had a professor once that before every lecture or class was started she would pull up a funny video off a YouTube just to grap our attention and give us a good laugh before working time began. I loved this and thought it was a really good idea.

Thing #19

Exploring these different social networks was really interesting. It is a good way to communicate with others or get ideas. I signed up for TeacherPop. This is a great social networking place where teachers share many different ideas on lots of subjects and ideas. This is great for someone like myself who will just be starting out as a teacher needing many different ideas. I already have a facebook and twitter of my own, but there are very personal social networking places. They could be used in a classroom but for me they are more personal. This is a way for me to keep up with my friends and relatives that are close and many that are far.

Thing #15

All of this wiki sites kind of confused me. I think that a wiki could be useful in a classroom for group projects and such. Also for parents to log on a keep up to date with what it going on. Those are a few of the positives about wiki. But personally if I wanted something where parents and students could look up and keep up with what is going on I would rather use a classroom blog. The biggest problem about a Wiki is the fact that anyone can edit it or change another persons work. That is the same with Wikipedia. We as students are pushed about from using Wikipedia because it may not all be true since anyone can edit it. Therefore I am not a big fan of Wiki because it is the same way.

Thing #18

I already have a facebook and twitter page but mine is set to private so it would be kind of pointless to link it to here. Facebook for now is more popular and more people have it. But I do not think that makes it better. Twitter can be very useful because you can follow fellow teachers with great ideas. Twitter is more of a post and read kind of place, whereas facebook is more of a post and comment. It is really up to you which one you would like best. If you used this in your classroom, as a teacher you could make a private one and add only your students and/or parents of students to easily communicate with them, because I mean who doesn't have a facebook or twitter these days, right? This would just be an easy way to keep in touch. But I do not think that teachers should add their students or parents to their very own personal facebook.

Thing #17

First step that I did was to watch the videos that were linked to watch about tagging. Then I created my delicious account. This allows you to search for absolutely anything, including educational stuff. I love that it allows you to see how many people have "saved" it. It also tells you how popular each video is. This could be useful for a teacher or a student. You can find many different things on here and then tag your students and such in it. If you are working on a certain project you can look it up on here. But the important thing is that anyone that can get to a computer can use Delicious because it is FREE!

Thing #16

1) I chose iGoogle as my start page. One reason I chose this one is because it is sealready my start page on my internet. I also like this because I constantly use google. Instead of me having to always type in google.com it is already there as my home page. Also, it allows you customize your page to your current city and chose your own theme.

2) Online calandars are very useful to me. It was helpful to be able to put everything that I had going on to help better organize me. They were also easy to use. I also liked the todo lists but they were a little more difficult to use. They both had similarities. Especially in the fact that they help us to be more organized and plan things out. Which who couldn't use help with that.

3)  Top 25 Web 2.0 Apps to Improve a Student's or Professor's Productivity, Online Education Database gives 25 different applications that help a teacher or student be more productive. I like the fact that it gives different opitions and things to look at. Because everyone likes something different.

Thing #14

Gliffy.com was a flowchart that I chose to look at. This can be used in a school for so many different things. Diagrams can be made here which is great for me because I want to be a math teacher and as we all know, there are always diagrams and such used in math. But they can be used for many subjects. They would ve great for english when teaching to write papers. But also could be used to just help put the everyday schedule together, in my opinion.  There is so much that can be used here for a classroom, but also used in your everyday, ordinary life, such as floor plans for a home, office, etc. The other that I chose to look at was bubbl.us. This was a mind map. I really liked this. It was very easy to use and is a great way to show students what a "spider" diagram is. Which is what I always called them in school. Students and teachers both can use these for many different things. I was just very impressed with how easy this one was to work.

Thing #13

First thing that I did for thing #13 was create a Zoho account. When I went into the writer I was instantly confused. There was not very much direction on where to go or how to do it. It's like it showed me a blank page showing that I had no docunments. Everything that I clicked on the website wanted me to download the latest version of different kinds of internets and so on. So it was very inconvinent.

Second thing that I did was explore Google Docs. I noticed first thing that it was much easier to navigate. I created a drawing. It was very easy to understand.


I definitely liked Google Docs better. I just did not get a good understanding of how to work Zoho. Google Docs was much easier to find my way around and to set up different things. It had spread sheets that seemed extremely easy to use and so on.

Thing #4

Thing #4 is all about commenting on someone else's blog. Why should we do this? Well it is very important. This brings the writer and the reader must closer together. This shows you that you are not the only one with a certain idea. This will bring people closer together because it shows you that you have things in common. Also, you can share your ideas with someone else as well as learning a new idea from your fellow blogger.

I chose five people's blog from my class to comment on. I commented on Jessica Pickering's blog #7 because she had chosen a photo that included a quote that was so inspiring. I think everyone should go read it. Anyone can relate to it. The second person's I comments on was KaTreva Foster because she had done a mashup with words and I really like those. I also made one myself. The third person's I commented on from our class was Amelia Downs thing #10. I really liked the generator that she chose to make a picture. It fit her personality very well, and I liked how she could make it do that. The fourth one that I commented on was Emily Brennan's thing #9. I loved the quote that she chose to use, along with the type of image that she selected putting it in. The 5th one that I commented on was Kayla Moore's thing #3. Her ideas about using a blog in a classroom were great. Some of them I had thought of previously, but there were some that I would have never thought about.

I also commented on two people from out of my class because I thought reading someone's blog that I was not familiar with would be kind of fun. I commented on Ava Jayne's thing #3 and Sarah Hemisong's #3 because I really liked their ideas of using a blog in a classroom.

Thing #12

One of my favorites of the "google world" would be Google Translate. As a teacher you will run into many different languages that you may  not understand or know how to respond. So I played around with this and decided to see how I would say "Hi my name is Ms. Lindsey." and it told me exactly how I would say it. This would be so helpful if you wanted to teach your students how to say something in a different language or even to speak to a student who does not speak your dominate language, or a language that you speak.
Also, I really liked Google Alerts. It seems to be very helpful and keeps you up to date on things that you are interested in. You can set up to be alerted for things that could help you as a math teacher or any kind of teacher, but also you can be alerted to know about the lastest happenings in your favorite sport team, or the town that you are from, and so on.
Google is more than just a search engine. Google has everything that you need when exploring the internet.



Google Translate:
http://translate.google.com/#en/es/Hi%20my%20name%20is%20Ms.%20Lindsey

Thing #11

I looked at a few of the websites that were listed under thing number 11. I really liked topix.net because it uses your current location and lets you know many different things going on around that area. Also, at this time election is going on so it kept me up to date on the standings of the people running. This would be very helpful to a teacher who was teaching about politics and such. The google blog search was very easy to use. When googling school library learning 2.0 it shows many different articles on 2.0 in libraries and such. Also, I found on there the 23 things by Dr. Wall and also another person. That was very interesting to me. When I visited technorati.com it was a little confusing to me. When I searched for different blogs it just seemed to be very broad. It was not as easy to look around and search in as Google Blog Search was for me.

Thing #10

I really enjoyed looking around google reader. It was easy for me to sign up for because I already had a gmail account. I subscribed to some math teacher posts. This will be helpful in a classroom because you can subcribe to different teacher posts and things for students. A teacher can subscribe to something and it can be a weekly thing to read with your students. You can subscribe to certain websites and makes it easy to access, instead of going to each website and having to find what you are exactly looking for. Google reader will help save a lot of time in the classroom.

Thing #9

http://www.imagechef.com/ic/word_mosaic/

http://www.imagechef.com/ic/myitem.jsp?myremix=23594439

There are many different things that could be used for your personal life or as a teacher. I really like the second photo that I created because you could make one for each student in your classroom to make them feel special and like they did a good job on a project or homework assignment. But there are so many more images you can create through this website. Like name tags and so on. This could be used so much in a classroom.

Thing #8.

http://www.familyartstudio.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/product/FamilyArtStudio_Photo_Letter_Art_4DiD5kDs5W.jpg

I created this using Flickr. This is a great website to use to look up pictures, save pictures, and created things like this. It may not be so easy to use as a child, but this would be a fun way to create "cute" words to print off to help children learn their spelling words. Flickr has really impressed me with all that it includes.

Thing #7

http://www.flickr.com/photos/doug88888/5730746409/

After playing around with Flickr I found a picture of these two giraffes. The reason I chose this picture is because I absolutely love giraffes. But also I learned that with Flickr that you can set up your own account and upload and save pictures. This is a good place to keep your pictures safe and easy to access. But it is a good source to use to find pictures as well. This photo belongs to @doug88888

Thing #6

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13546_109-10237633-29.html?tag=mncol

There were many websites that I thought were very useful wesites but one that we all have is Facebook. Although Facebook is many times used as a social network between our friends. But it could also be used in a classroom. A teacher could make an individual profile for her classroom, so that, depending on the age of the students, the parents or teachers could become friends with that profile. The teacher could post up coming tests, homework, and updates for the classroom. This would be an easy way for teachers, students, and parents to keep in touch. And it's easy because almost everyone has a facebook now.


http://news.cnet.com/8301-13546_109-10237739-29.html?tag=mncol

Skype was another tool that I think is cool. I have used it before to chat face to face with friends and such. But a teacher could use this to have a chat with a parent of one of his or her students. This would be easy for a  mother/father/guardian that does not have time to come to a parent/teacher conference. This would give a face to face conversation with them. But also, you do not have to do a face to face conversation. The teacher and parent/guardian could chat.

Thing #5 Web 2.0

Web 2.0 means to use technology in the classrom to improve and help students learn a certain subject that is being taught. I chose two of the links that were givent to us to learn about Web 2.0. The two that I chose were A guide for educators and Web 2.0 is the future for education.
Everyday in our lives we use technology. If it is not a phone, it's a computer, if its not an ipad, its some other piece of technology. There is so much technology used in the everyday life. There are so many apps that can be downloaded on a droid, iPhone, iPad, and so on that can help a teacher teach his or her lesson.
I do think that Web 2.0 is the future for education. There is no reason that a teacher should not use technology to help them teach.

Thing #3

I would use a blog in my classroom for a couple of reasons. I would get the children in my classroom write a blog about how their day was, what they learned, and what they did not understand. Also, have them include what they liked the best and the worst. If the children had an idea on something to do in class, have them write in the blog. I think using a blog would be so helpful with ideas and helping you as a teacher understand exactly what the children like and do not like. The blog would also be helpful to students who are shy and too quiet to talk during class and give their opinion.

Thing #2

When creating this blog it was a little difficult for me to do because I have never created a blog before. It was definitely an experience. Creating my avatar was fun. Although I tried to make it look like me, it just did not turn out that well. My avatar does have the same hair, eye, and skin color as me. When chosing the name for my blog, I went very simple. I just went with my name so that it would be pretty easy to see whose blog you were reading.

Thing #1

When reading and listening to the & 7 1/2 habits I noticed some that would be easy for me, and some that might be a little more difficult. One that might be tough for me would be the one to have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner. Sometimes it is so hard to keep your confidence up when you're getting stressed out and have so much to do. It tends to discourage me. Another one that might be tough is the one that states to view problems as challenges. This goes along with the previous one I was talking about. When things go wrong I tend to get discouraged and look at the negative side instead of making it a positive. One that would be fairly easy for me to do is to begin with the end in mind. Just always remember that there is a tomorrow. I set goals for myself quite a bit and it helps to get through things. There is always something to look forward to.