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.