Thing # 17

Del.icio.us is a creative website and makes bookmarking a better experience and the site itself is very easy to use and navigate. Having to only remember one website is a lot better than having to remember 16, and this benefits me because I complete a lot of my work at school in the lab, which isn't my personal computer so I don't bookmark sites to those computers. I would write the web addresses down so that I could use them later, just to misplace them or throw them out by mistake, but luckily for me I don't have to do this anymore and can bookmark them using the Del.icio.us website, and have access to the websites instantly on any computer!

What's really cool is that when you are using or looking at other websites that have been bookmarked in your social network, you can see the comments and tags they used for the site, which saves you time because it helps you weed through the best sites from the not so useful websites.

This tool has great potential for use in the classrooms as well as a social bookmarking tool. When age appropriate, accounts can be set up and used for group projects allowing each student to see the research their peers have found, which eliminates each group member from using the same sources providing a broader research database for the project. It can also be used by teachers and their peers as a tool to share new and interesting student interactive websites that can be used in the classroom to help the students develop an understanding of the concepts being taught.

Thing #16

I chose iGoogle as my start page. Google is almost just too simple. I chose this start page right off the bat because it could be created it under 30 seconds...and who doesn't like quick, easy, efficient options to better organize their lives. I am definitely going to make this my homepage for one important reason: I currently have it set to AOL, but iGoogle lists the same items as AOL but it is all customized to my life plus more like my email, Clarksville's weather, local date and time, you tube, chat, recipes, and movies!

What more could a busy woman ask for?

The Hotmail Calendar I created will be useful to me in many ways. While I am in school I can use it to keep up with my assignment due dates, finals dates, class meeting times, project due dates, etc. It also allows me to make to do lists eliminating the need for a separate "ta da list"! Awesome. It's a great tool, and unlike my date book....I can't leave it at home or in the kids' diaper bag at their daycare!

I set up a Remember the Milk account and it was extremely too much work and difficult for me to navigate raising my frustration level to the point where I just quit and moved on to the next tool. And that is all I have to say about that!

I would recommend Sticky Notes and Zamzar to anyone any day of the week.  Sticky notes without the clutter...Awesome! Not to mention the many options the tool has: sticky's on your desktop, send them over local networks and internet, print them, you can even customized the format and edit them...have your cake and eat it too! There has been countless times that I have saved a picture in the wrong format and became so over heated, but now the Zamzar tool lets you change the format of many files and it emails the new file to you, eliminating the need to retake the picture...who wouldn't want to know about this tool!  Kawana save your comments!

Thing #15

Editing APSU 23 Sandbox wiki was a real pain, which  I wasn't expecting according to the tutorial, but I guess you win some and you loose some! Library wiki's are awesome, but you have to make sure your students understand the concept of wiki, so they don't believe any little thing their impressionable minds may read on a wiki. Interesting enough, I feel that there should be a "higher power" evaluating wiki sites to try to ensure the reliability of the information posted to them.

Using Wiki's can be great, but somewhat unreliable in the sense that anyone can post and make changes. Wiki's can be great starting points for research being that usually when someone makes a change they will often leave references for where they got their information and these can be used to jump start creditable research of your own! I just think it is important for the person who is doing the research or using Wiki to validate of their own work to eliminate issues of inconsistency!

Thing # 14

I chose to explore Gliffy (flow chart) and Bubble us (mind map) to explore for this "Thing". Both tools are awesome, but Bubble Us was more entertaining.

Gliffy has great templates that you can use to modify your task specifically. It has everything from website/ software designs, Venn Diagrams, Floor Plans, Flow Charts, Org Charts, Business Process, to Network Diagrams, etc. It allows to create your own document from a designed template or start with a blank document and you can choose your shapes and lines from the template options. Figuring out where all the lines are and the different types was a little frustrating, but once I located where everything was on the interface the program was easier to navigate. If we were allowed to use templates to create our Classroom Drawings, this site would have been AWESOME!...maybe next time kiddos:(

Bubble Us was awesome! I used it to help me brainstorm some ideas for my scavenger hunt and webquest and it was supper easy to you use. You create your account and just click on the page to bring up your first bubble and from then on you click enter to create a child bubble or tab to create a sibling bubble. All the other controls are self explanatory and if you can't figure it out;  if you put your pointer over the control a detailed description is at the bottom of the page...so don't freak out Ashley...you are OK! Oh, one more thing, when you get rid of a bubble there is an explosion, which I thought was really neat and made me laugh because I wasn't expecting it.

Overall, both tools will be extremely useful to my career as an educator and personal life. I can see myself using Bubble Us to create original, cool worksheets for my class to do their brainstorming on, or if it is age appropriate letting them set up their own accounts, especially for Bubble Us, they could use it for a variety of classes now and in their future education. Gliffy's Floor Plans can help me design my dream/retirement home when I am ready to build...I can be my own architect! Cool!

Thing # 13

This site is awesome. The first thing that came into my thoughts was....Uh-huh, Microsoft on wheels. It can be very frustrating to have a document that you created on your home computer and get to where you need it and it didn't save properly to your thumb drive...what do you do then...besides panic! It was amazingly simple to set up the account and if you can navigate Microsoft Word, you can navigate this application with no problems. They are eerily similar in design, but only on Zoho can you access your documents anywhere you have a computer and internet access. I will be using this application in the future.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​  You can even do mail merge using this application...great for starting midterm reports during a break at school and finishing them at home, making this application pretty useful for an educator.

Thing #12

I explored Google Alerts and Google Translate.  I set up a Google Alert for news feeds for Toddler Development in the hopes of learning of the newest findings of what these amazing little people are capable of and how to expand and build on their previous knowledge to help them advance in development in the most efficient ways possible.  Google Translate is awesome too. I tried to find a translation for "What's up Chicka," but apparently all languages say it the same except the Spanish, who would say it as "Que pasa Chicka," which was interesting to me.  These Google Tools can be used efficiently in the classroom, for instance, Google Translate could be used to spark interest in the kids learning a new language and they could search for translations of  their favorite sayings of that time, or Google Alerts could be used to further educators professional developments by alerting them to the newest technology and developments available that could improve the educational world.

Care to know what this means and what language it is in: Qual è il tuo nome?

Thing #11

Finding good feeds with the Google Blog Search and Technorati were definitely the easiest tools to use with the simpliest methods.  On Technorati, the search block is located at the top, center page and gives you the option to use key words to search for blogs or posts, which I thought was really cool!  However, Syndic8.com was my least favorite and most confusing for me...it had too much and too many random things on the homepage and it made it hard for me to focus on one thing with all the lists.  I subscribed to the Flat Classroom Project and The School Law Blog, because I felt they would have good ideas for the classroom and what is currently going on in different classrooms across the world.  I did a search for blogging about being a first time mom and the one and only site that came up on Technorati was Mysticmargarita, but when I got to the site it was giving translations of a different language....not at all what I was expecting.  Be careful of what you search for and you actually find! Not all are what they appear to be!