Thing 23 - I hear the fat lady singing! Must be over!

I did it! I had doubts that I could finish once school started, but I did it! I really enjoyed this! I am constantly trying to get the teachers in my school more aware of the technology available. Many of the other TLTs in our district are somewhat shy of exploring the possibilities. I am just grateful for having the opportunity to try out so many new things. Some were not useful to me, but most were useful in one way or another, either for work or home. And a few will be very very useful and, hopefully, used to excite teachers and students in our school.

The best for students? Where to start ... Blogging - Great stuff. It really helped to put my thoughts and words on "paper" so to speak. It's great to look back on now, as a reminder, of the many new things I've tried. A lot in a short time to take in and blogging it helps sort it all out. I intend to show my students my blog while explaining the technology and Internet safety. I am a fan of the wiki too. I hope to use that with some of my classes. It may have to be as a "whole class" project rather than individual, but at least they'll be exposed and know what blogs and wikis are (unlike their teacher who didn't have much of a clue at the start off all this.) Flikr is great, didn't know it could do so much. And I always wanted to know more about podcasting. I may try to add a podcast or two to my webpage.

My very favorite and most useful to me is the social bookmarking. I will be using this a lot for both school and home. I can't wait to get my very favorite favorites onto delicious! I'm not importing them because it's time to weed them out anyway. I hope to introduce it to other TLTs too.

It's been a great experience. I appreciate it being made available to me. I love learning about technology, and know that this is one subject where the learning will never end. Join me! Awww, come on in, the water's fine!

Thing 22 - Video to go

I like watching the videos on YouTube. There are some fun ones on there. I don't think there's much there for elementary school use, however. At least I couldn't find any that I could use. YouTube is blocked at our school at any rate. TeacherTube had some good videos though. I found 3 right off the bat that either I can use or that I'll share with other teachers. Good for elementary school. I'll have to check when I'm back at school to see if it's blocked for teacher or for student viewing. SchoolTube seems to be more for High School use. There were some educational ones, some like the student math rap, that might be useful. Other than that it was more students making reports or projects there. My biggest problem with both TeacherTube and SchoolTube was that the videos took forever to download. YouTube and http://www.ted.com/ downloaded much faster.

Thing 21 - Be still my twittering heart!

I was not terribly impressed by any of the microblogging sites. Pownce "looked" the nicest and Twitter seemed to have the most traffic. I see no real use for me at all, either at home or work. Using an instant message program seems to serve the purpose that these would for me. To do a blog to share opinions and ideas or to get or dispense help is fine, but other forms of "permanent" dialog on the web bothers me. Then again I am not into Facebook or anything like that either. My college kids are into Facebook and that makes me nervous. I hope things posted don't come back to bite them. Some stuff I read on these spaces, without even being a member, and the pictures! wow! Some stuff was pretty personal. I don't think I'd ever use this form of technology. It's just not for me.

Thing 20 was delicious!

I LOVE this! My user name is adacutandpaste . I still have a few bugs to work out but I love the idea. I tried adding the buttons to my other computer too, I signed in and they added, it says my user name, shows up in my del.icio.us tab, but aren't added to my page. I know I can add them separately, but the buttons are much easier. Hope I can work it out so I can use the buttons in both places. Maybe I have to reboot, I'll see. Once I get set up with buttons in both places, I'll be able to do things so much better and faster!

I don't think it will be used in the classroom, but between home and school, definitely. I'd like to get the other TLTs in our district to use this and we can network and share websites so much easier. We can tag with a common name and use the name+topic in the search. It will be great if we can get people to do this. Sharing is so much fun! Thanks for showing us how to do this!

Thing 19 - TAG - You're it!

I think that tagging is a wonderful way to organize things. I wish we could tag saved emails or documents on my computer! I can't tell you how much time I've spent trying to find a document that I put in a folder (I made folders to organize, right?) only to find out that I can't remember WHICH folder. It could be one of many! Same with saved emails, I have them organized in folders in my cabinet, just have trouble figuring out which folder. Being a computer lab teacher, I'm always looking for websites to use in class. I end up bookmarking them into several folders, because they could go lots of places, and then I still can't find them. I am so excited to try this! I can add as many tags as I want and it's still only one bookmark. I think it's important to think about what tags you want for the item. Stop and think ... "If I come back next month, what would I put in a search if I wanted to find this site?" Then use that as tags and then ask, "what else" and not worry so much about the "proper title" of the item, more about how YOU would describe it and look for it. If you are sharing the items (such as the case with social bookmarking) then think in broad terms about what other may search for.

Ning 18 - I mean Thing 18

I must confess that I had no clue what you were talking about when you said "NING" and "Social Networking" I looked through the site, and was still confused. I had to look it up on Wikipedia! I took a lot of time looking through the site and forums and blogs and individual members and education sites. It's an interesting idea, but I don't think practical for students K-4 that I teach. There doesn't seem to be the controls we need to protect students. At least that's what I understand from the blogs and forum questions. Maybe for High School, but I'd bet our district wouldn't allow the NING. However, I could see it as being useful between teachers within a school or within the district. It may be that there are quicker solutions when questions are asked or ideas shared this way as opposed to calling or emailing a fellow teacher who can't answer and sends it on, etc. In fact, you would get multiple ideas shared across the board. Someone in the district is bound to have had the same problem before, or already made up a lesson you want to tackle, etc. I think I'll look into starting one for our district.

Thing 17 - Web 2.0 winners

I visited the "My Heritage" site, not expecting much, and was thoroughly delighted! It was so easy to use! Really just fill in the blanks, and you can add pictures, more than one to a person if you like. It creates reports, cool charts with fancy frames and all, and even will help search for ancestors, although I suspect you'll have to pay and join other sites to obtain information if the search results are outside of "My Heritage" (which is free). I don't know if there is much use in a classroom or library setting for this, but I'll love it at home. Things are pretty touchy nowadays with divorces, single parent homes, and grandparents raising kids so Family Trees aren't done in elementary school anymore.

Thing 16 - Teach Digital

In the first video on Digital students at Analog schools I agree with the sentiments. My daughter is in college and I have one recently graduated from college and they are facing the same problems I faced 25 years ago in college. Lectures. Professors stand and lecture for 50 minutes to 2 hours. You, as students, take notes and fall asleep. The only respite is if you have a lab. I don't know if new technology is the only answer, I just believe that more variety in teaching and learning has to happen. In grade school and Middle school they were both hands on learners. Give my daughters a choice and dioramas, making videos, or doing demonstrations was always a hands down winner. Never the written report or oral presentation. That doesn't change as they get older. Why is it that there are so few choices in High school and College? If you learn by doing as a child, what makes teachers think that you can suddenly change and learn simply by reading or listening? Yes, I know you can't do dioramas in college, but you can build webpages, make podcasts, create charts and graphs, film videos and a lot more.

The second video, the teacher movie, just made me sad. I feel that I am lucky to be in a great district where these kinds of attitudes are few and far between (although not totally missing). I think that many districts may have these attitudes in the majority rather than the minority. I do think that many of our teachers are afraid to learn new things though. Or maybe they just have to much on their plate. I know as a tech person I encourage my peers and offer to help or teach them and very few take advantage of the offer. But I'll keep plugging away at them!

The last video on "Do schools kill creativity" was entertaining. I must admit that when it started I looked at the timer and thought "19 minutes! Urrgg!" but it was OK. I realized half way through that in a way, he was teaching in the old fashioned way, lecture. He was, however, using comedy so it wasn't all bad. Overall I agree with his sentiment that we, many times, squelch the creativity of students to make them fit into a mold. I also agree with a comment on the page that a viewer said, and that was that his meds helped him focus so he could produce his creativity. I think we need to open up more to our "creative mind of a child" regardless of our age. We need to not be afraid to try new things and explore. Isn't that what we are all doing in this class?

Thing 15 - Cast your pod out there

There are some podcasts of value to middle and high school, but for teaching in the elementary, not many. The only thing I found for younger kids were storybooks. They are great, but I would want them to follow along in a book so they make the correlation of words on paper to spoken words. I was not sure where to find them, never really looked because I didn't think there would be anything of use to me. I'm glad to know that there is a wide variety of podcasts out there. As far as using them myself, as a computer lab teacher in an elementary school, it probably won't happen very often. I have thought about making my own podcasts though, to go with lessons I teach, or just to spark interest in technology with my students. Our principal is very tech minded and I think she would like the kids to have the exposure to podcasting. We wouldn't download them to ipods or anything at the school level however.