MINT.com
www.mint.com
Mint.com is a site that basically replaces a financial advisor, the coupon mint, a budget advisor, online banking, and a tax advisor all in one place. It easy to set up an account: you create your login name and password, put in your online bank account user name and password, choose your bank, and the site does the rest. Oh, IT’S FREE! The site has the same level of securities as the online banking websites, it’s a money manager, gives timely alerts, helps with budgeting, shows your spending patterns, finds savings for you, and helps you reduce your debt. It also has a mobile application, graphs, gives credit card advice, and helps you get ready for taxes!
Hello Free and Goodbye expensive advisors and tax preparers!
Mint.com could be useful for older kids when they start managing their own starter banking accounts, but would be more appropriate for parents to use as a teaching tool at home instead of in the school or library setting.
This website is awesome in my book!
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Thursday, September 30, 2010
Thing #5
My reaction to Web 2.0: A Guide for Educators and The Horizons Report was: WOW….Really? I was amazed at what technology has done for the education classroom and teaching careers. I look forward to creating my own personal learning environment with Web 2.0 through blogs, pod casts, social bookmarking sites, aggregators, and RSS. Being able to improve my professional career at my own pace will make it easier for me to be the best educator, mom, wife, and house cleaner… I can be and better balance the roles. Furthermore, I realized that by creating my works in Livetext to create my Professional Portfolio, I was already using Web 2.0’s Social Operating Systems. Go Me!
Web 2.0 is very promising for schools of the future. By integrating, in the upcoming years, interactive projectors, mobile broadbands (cell phones), collaboration webs, virtual field trips, data mash-ups, collective intelligence, and more schools will become more convenient places to learn. Using these different technologies will reduce paper use and in turn lessens pollution, improve tracking systems, and reduces paper trails. The children already use these things for recreation use and by integrating them into the classrooms; just maybe, fun will be reintegrated back into the classroom along the process.
Web 2.0 is very promising for schools of the future. By integrating, in the upcoming years, interactive projectors, mobile broadbands (cell phones), collaboration webs, virtual field trips, data mash-ups, collective intelligence, and more schools will become more convenient places to learn. Using these different technologies will reduce paper use and in turn lessens pollution, improve tracking systems, and reduces paper trails. The children already use these things for recreation use and by integrating them into the classrooms; just maybe, fun will be reintegrated back into the classroom along the process.
Thing #4
Commenting helps create a sense of community and interaction by allowing others, usually friends, family, co-workers, etc to share their opinion on the issue being discussed. A community is made of people you love and value; commenting reciprocates their love and value for the blogger.
Commenting is important because it shows the blog author they are being heard. By responding to comments on your blog, you show your appreciation of your followers and if the comment is substantive it may enlighten your views on your initial blog. Most people blog because they feel they have something important to say and they want to be heard and share their thoughts on the situation. Commenting proves to them that they really are being heard.
I selected the following blogs to read and comment on: Meagan Artz, Matthew Ciezki, Sarah LaBean, Michelle Carpenter, Brittany Menees, the LA Times Local Blog, and Mommalicious-Striving For Fabulous With Spit-up On My Shoulder. I chose each of these because I could relate to their blog, they had a cool avatar, or the topic being discussed was of great interest to me.
I commented on Meagan’s blog because she had an awesome idea of posting upcoming school events on her educator blog and I wasn’t familiar with this technique for parent/teacher communication. Matthew had the cutest avatar that really does look like him; even more so, he writes like he is having a live conversation with you and makes his information interesting, easy to follow, and funny. I could relate to Sarah’s fear of learning the unknown and wanted to give her the comfort of knowing she was not alone. I had to comment on Michelle…The woman is a black belt martial artist and will now be a teacher, which I feel will be an inspiration to all her students. Brittany had already made it to exploring the Flickr website and the picture of the dogs she found is to die for! I commented on the LA Time blog on a story of a woman trying to kill her baby because she didn’t want her husband to know she was pregnant, but the baby was found alive. I didn’t agree with a lot of the comments that were being made, so I tried to give the conversation a new direction. Finally, I commented on a recently created blog: Mommalicious-Striving for Fabulous With Spit-up On My Shoulder, because I felt the exact same way she feels now when I decided to come back to school to become an educator.
Commenting is important because it shows the blog author they are being heard. By responding to comments on your blog, you show your appreciation of your followers and if the comment is substantive it may enlighten your views on your initial blog. Most people blog because they feel they have something important to say and they want to be heard and share their thoughts on the situation. Commenting proves to them that they really are being heard.
I selected the following blogs to read and comment on: Meagan Artz, Matthew Ciezki, Sarah LaBean, Michelle Carpenter, Brittany Menees, the LA Times Local Blog, and Mommalicious-Striving For Fabulous With Spit-up On My Shoulder. I chose each of these because I could relate to their blog, they had a cool avatar, or the topic being discussed was of great interest to me.
I commented on Meagan’s blog because she had an awesome idea of posting upcoming school events on her educator blog and I wasn’t familiar with this technique for parent/teacher communication. Matthew had the cutest avatar that really does look like him; even more so, he writes like he is having a live conversation with you and makes his information interesting, easy to follow, and funny. I could relate to Sarah’s fear of learning the unknown and wanted to give her the comfort of knowing she was not alone. I had to comment on Michelle…The woman is a black belt martial artist and will now be a teacher, which I feel will be an inspiration to all her students. Brittany had already made it to exploring the Flickr website and the picture of the dogs she found is to die for! I commented on the LA Time blog on a story of a woman trying to kill her baby because she didn’t want her husband to know she was pregnant, but the baby was found alive. I didn’t agree with a lot of the comments that were being made, so I tried to give the conversation a new direction. Finally, I commented on a recently created blog: Mommalicious-Striving for Fabulous With Spit-up On My Shoulder, because I felt the exact same way she feels now when I decided to come back to school to become an educator.
Friday, September 10, 2010
Thing #3
Using a Blog can be beneficial to an educator in numerous ways. It can be a social outlet that allows an educator to reflect on his or her teaching experiences in a public journal that allows other education professionals to comment, share, or discover new information at the click of a button. An educator can teach his or her students how to blog and use it as a journal for classes, as a positive outlet to express the way they feel. They could be known as the "Internet Freedom Writers"! The most important benefit of a blog to an educator would be letting his or her students discuss activities done in class and what they thought about them. These postings would allow the teacher to see the good, the bad, and the ugly of how that activity was received and allow him or her to make adjustments as necessary to improve his or her teaching styles.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Thing #2
Deciding on my posting name and the name of my blog was easy; it represents who I want to become and when I striving to accomplish this goal. I want to be a Great Educator by the end of the year of 2012 and APSU 23 Things is the only the start of many more New Beginnings along my journey to accomplishing my goal.
It was hard, frustrating, and stressful creating my blog. I couldn't get my computer to accept the right cookies, I didn't read far enough to know where to create my avatar, I couldn't exactly remember where to go back to start posting, and my two year old was tearing up the house while my six month old was crying because he couldn't help her! Creating my blog was a crazy experience, but once I settled down and followed the step-by-step instructions in Livetext it became manageable and a positive experience that I will never forget.
My avatar was created to reflect my real personality and appearance. She is smiling, confident, wearing braids (which I almost always have) and awesome glasses. She is dressed somewhat current, but comfortable because she has two kids...just like myself! We are awesome!
It was hard, frustrating, and stressful creating my blog. I couldn't get my computer to accept the right cookies, I didn't read far enough to know where to create my avatar, I couldn't exactly remember where to go back to start posting, and my two year old was tearing up the house while my six month old was crying because he couldn't help her! Creating my blog was a crazy experience, but once I settled down and followed the step-by-step instructions in Livetext it became manageable and a positive experience that I will never forget.
My avatar was created to reflect my real personality and appearance. She is smiling, confident, wearing braids (which I almost always have) and awesome glasses. She is dressed somewhat current, but comfortable because she has two kids...just like myself! We are awesome!
Thing #1
The Lifelong Learning Habit that is the easiest for me is accepting responsibility for my own learning. Once I decided to attend college, I knew that at that time my learning opportunities were in my own hands. In college, there would be no more of anybody telling me to go to class, take notes, participate in class, study, read the material, and practice concepts. I understood from day one that these were now my responsibilities and I took them seriously mainly for two reasons: I am now paying for this part of my education and I want to be the best Educator I can become.
The Lifelong Learning Habit that is the hardest for me is using technology to my advantage. I am not a computer illiterate person, but I am completely computer savvy either. I use technology for the basics like social sites for communicating with family and friends, email, banking, research and writing papers, and etc. I have never blogged, used a smart board, etc and would rather use a simpler method, but I do understand to be an effective teacher, I have to evolve with technology, learn to use it effectively for its learning benefits, and give my students the learning opportunities it has to offer them.
By playing with Web 2.0 tools and setting up my blog, I would like to become more familiar with emerging technology and the correct ways to communicate my learning experiences and learning from others experiences. Setting up my blog was an eye opening experience; it showed me how inexperienced I was with some of the internet's technology and became frustrating at times, especially adding the avatar, but its something I can say I know how to do now and the first step in improving my knowledge of technology for the classroom.
The Lifelong Learning Habit that is the hardest for me is using technology to my advantage. I am not a computer illiterate person, but I am completely computer savvy either. I use technology for the basics like social sites for communicating with family and friends, email, banking, research and writing papers, and etc. I have never blogged, used a smart board, etc and would rather use a simpler method, but I do understand to be an effective teacher, I have to evolve with technology, learn to use it effectively for its learning benefits, and give my students the learning opportunities it has to offer them.
By playing with Web 2.0 tools and setting up my blog, I would like to become more familiar with emerging technology and the correct ways to communicate my learning experiences and learning from others experiences. Setting up my blog was an eye opening experience; it showed me how inexperienced I was with some of the internet's technology and became frustrating at times, especially adding the avatar, but its something I can say I know how to do now and the first step in improving my knowledge of technology for the classroom.
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