Week 6 Thing #15

After reading multiple perspectives about Library 2.0 I have mixed feeling on the matter. As Michael Stephens outlined in his perspective, Into A New World of Librarianship, librarians will change as technology changes I understood that, yes libraries need to stay current and make information easily accessible to people, but I think books are so often overlooked and people go straight for the internet. I often see students going straight to Google to do research for projects. They get tons of hits for the thing they are searching for and have to wade through all the material that is quite often above their reading level. Students today, in my experience anyway, rarely take advantage of books in the library that are quite frequently layed out in a way that would make it easy to organize a research paper. However, if we want to get students to the library using the most current and up to date technology is the way to do it. Students today are very technologically in-tune and having the latest and greatest will make the information relevant to them.

Week 6 Thing #14

I took some time to explore Technorati found it not to be as useful as Del.icio.us. I tried to search for a few different things, but did not get any great results. I thought maybe it was just me because I get easily frustrates, so I decided to check out some of the blog posts by others taking this glass. After reading a few of the blog posts I found that many people were not that impressed with Technorati. I am not sure that I will be using this tool in the future.

Week 6 Thing #13

I think Del.icio.us is a very easy to use and useful tool. I did not yet create an account, but plan to in the future. I think that it looks like an easy way to search for sites from the internet. Some of the footwork is already done for you, because the sites have already been explored and been found as useful. I also like that you can see the number of people that have bookmarked the page. I look forward to using this tool in the future to help save time. While searching around on Del.icio.us I have already found some sites that have great educational tools to be used in the classroom.

Week 5 Thing #12

VoiceThread was quite easy to use. This would be a fun way to share pictures and videos with family, as well as in the classrooms. I think students would love to comment on each others work. I really liked the way that Joni recorded the sounds for her alphabet book. I hope to incorporate this into my classroom.

Let me have the Cheetos

Week 5 Thing #11

This "Thing"took me quite a while to complete because I checked out many of the sites on the Web 2.O Awards. It was so neat to have so many cool things in one place. I looked at the Peer Trainer site which looked like a great tool, and it is great that it is free. The one that I thought might be the most useful to me was Mothers Click. It has a Q & A portion, pictures, information, recipes, shopping and more all in one place.
I joined The Family Ning. A social group for parents and educators of children with disabilities. This will be great for me both in my personal and professional life.
I played the Travel IQ game which proved to me what I already new, I am terrible at geography. My husband played and also proved to me another thing which we already knew, my husband is much smarter than me at geography. I think kids would love to play this and I am sure they would score much higher than me.

Week 5 Thing #10

I used Image Chef to create a fun little bumper sticker. There are so many neat things that you can create I had a difficult time choosing. This was so easy to use, it was refreshing after my difficulty with the last assignment. It was even easy to upload to my blog. I can see students having a great time with this and being very creative.

Week 4 Things #8 & 9

I had never heard of RSS feeds until this assignment. Frist, I read some of the information about RSS feeds on your blog and watched a video from your blog. This was quite informative and pretty straight forward. After getting information I went to set up my account from my Yahoo account, but was having difficulty so I decided to go to Google Reader to find out that I already had an account and was following a friend's blog. I did not have websites or blogs that I followed regularly so I began the search. I found a few educational blogs, a parenting website, a support group for cleft lip and palate, as well as a site that gives recipes. I think all of these will prove to be educational and interesting.
The next thing that I was having difficulty with was figuring out how to add my shared items to my blog. This should not have been that difficult if I would have read the assignment a little more closely. While trying to figure this out I found that there are many videos on youtube.

Week 3 Thing #7

For thing #7 we can write about anything we wanted. At a staff meeting recently, a few teachers presented how to use Keynote, which is similar to PowerPoint. I have used PowerPoint in the past which made Keynote easy to use. There are many ways that you could incorporate Keynote into your classroom. I have seen teachers use it for book reports. The students seemed very motivated to do the project and it is more interesting for other students to look at than a paper/pencil report. The second grade teacher that presented Keynote shared some projects that her class had done. They had made presentations about bees. It was amazing the quality work that second graders were able to do with the technology. The teacher created a folder of pictures that students had to use in their projects so they did not spend a majority of their time looking for pictures on the web. It would also be a great way for teachers to present material to kids instead of just standing in front of the class and taking.I hope that I find an opportunity to incorporate this into my classroom.

Week 3 Thing # 6

My creation
Originally uploaded by akendres

I created this movie poster in Flickr Toys. I will say that I found this a little frustrating, but that was my own fault. Once I took time to read more closely it was very easy to use. I looked at many of the neat things there are to do, but will have to take more time to explore later. I love my poster, if I do say so myself.

IMG_0890
Originally uploaded by akendres

Sweet Baby Face

IMG_0902
Originally uploaded by akendres

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Week 3 Thing 5

I explored Flick. It was very easy to set up an account and upload photos. I played with picnic a little. One of my neighbor girls has actually shown me picnic before. I added some frames and other little accents to my photos which was fun. Some of the other photos on the website are very interesting as well.

Week 2 Things #3 and 4

I have created my blog and registered it. I am off to explore and learn.