Thing #18

I cannot find my school computer at the moment. I hid it in the house while we went on vacation, and I can't remember where it is, so I will have to look for it. This leads to.....I am using my personal laptop to do the 23 things and I had trouble downloading opendocs so I looked at, and tried some of the templates, etc. on google docs. I found a couple of items there that I could use for school purposes, calendars and presentation docs. I do not have my students do word processing assignments so I don't know that I would personally use these tools, but I have read a few other people's blogs about #18, and they have pointed out that opendocs and google docs are great for students who do not microsoft office.

Thing # 17

What a deal Rollyo is! I really enjoyed bgood's video, he did an excellent job of explaining how to use rollyo. I can see how this would be an excellent tool to help students do research, especially in middle school and 9th grade. It could also be used by team teachers highlighting sites that are of use to the subject they teach. What a wonderful tool! For my personal use, my "favorites" is quite satisfactory.

Thing # 16

I liked this "thing". I did not know what a wiki is and now I do! I was most impressed by a couple of teacher wikis that had class assignments on them with directions for the students to post their work on the wiki, like the APHistory review, that is cool! I would like to find a way to use wiki in my classes, could be a very easy way to post assignments each day, instead of going through the sign in process of a district website. This would be my site, and easy to use.
I do hope that the district allows access to utube one day.

Thing # 15

I am happy for having Thing # 15 because the articles are helping me "gel" the previous 14 things in my mind. The web is such a fascinating place, and such an educational place. The use of the web in research papers must help out tremendously versus looking in books. This is why libraries are changing, and the web makes so many books and site available to so many more people.

I was interested in reading 2cents Worth, and have book marked his blog. He talks about using the web as a learning tool and how students can be distracted from using it properly, which he says may not be too bad, in other words, I think he was saying it helps their creativity.
I can see how this would work really well in classes where reading for information is useful. I have trouble seeing how this could be done in a higher level math class where we are really teaching skills for the next class. I do see where the web could be interwoven occassionally into a lesson, but a lot of learning math is by practice, just like learning to be "good" at a sport, it must be practiced.
Anyway, I found thing # 15 to be very helpful for me in consolidating all of the previous things.

Thing # 14

I think I missed something on this "thing". I just looked around at Technorati like before, typing in key words, which is what I did on the previous site when we looked at search engines. Was that what I was supposed to do? Tags are key words. I guess I felt like I was repeating Thing #9. Oh well.

Thing # 13

I looked at the sites listed in the activity, looked up some tags, typed in my own search, etc. I then signed up for Delicious and was surprised that this is where my bookmarks could go and then not have any on a personal computer. Needless to say, I kept mine on my personal computer (I am not using my school computer to do the 23 things - had lost the key info to get into my home network -- anyway, that is another story).
I thought these sites were okay, probably a good way to discover what someone else has all ready tagged and therefore makes it an easier search for things.
As far as using this with students in Algebra II and PreCal classes, I really can't think of applications except maybe if a student needs additional help on a topic at home, this could be used to search the internet for explanations.

Thing # 12

I am definitely a Lurker. It was not so easy to find five blogsites and comment on them, I have been reading quite a few of them, but I have not been commenting back. Ones of the points that stick with me about commenting on blogs, is to make your comment meaningful, contributing to the discussion -- sometimes I just don't have anything to say. I did make the effort to comment on 5 blogs today, mhsbroadcasting, smithcounts, gal named Al, Ginny's blog and Queen of all Things Everywhere (I love this name!)

The two most important points about blogging are 1) be polite, constructive - not destructive, and 2) make meaningful comments.

I did Google blog search for LSU sports and found tigerforums.com. One of my main interests in life is gardening and I have all ready found all of the blogspots I could find on gardening in southeast Texas and I have them bookmarked.
One of my favorite is jungleintheheights. Also, the grumpygardener from Southern Living is a great spot.

Thing # 11

I love to read and am always ready for suggestions of books to read. My mother is an avid reader, so I am fortunate to get her books to read and an fortunate we have similar tastes in books we like to read. I found the Library Thing an interesting site and I joined the groups what are you reading and the crime, thriller group. I notice that I have read a number of the books being mentioned on what are you reading, so that means that I can probably get some great suggestions from the posts on that page. I don't know how this site could apply to my school setting in high school math, but I will certainly use it for my own pleasure.

Thing # 10

I have four cats, and this is a tribute to my kitties,

Chloe, Shasha, Sylvester and Phoebe. An aside, we named our last two cats Chloe and Phoebe, and my daughter works with a woman who has two young children by the same name!

This was the best "thing" so far. I have had a lot of fun playing around with the different sites. I think that I will use the wordl to make posters of important words in new units. Also, I could use banners, or magazine covers to announce test dates and post them on my door. There are so many creative ways to use some of these sites to get students' attention! I'm excited about these and hope that I can remember to use them!

On another note, my son-in-law changed his photo on Facebook the other day, and it looks like a sketch. Now I know how he did that!! Pretty cool!

Thing #9

I really had a hard time getting focused on the different sites and looking for things. My two subjects of interest were high school math and southeast Texas gardening. I did not like Bloglines, couldn't quite get it to work properly for me, but I though Tchnorati was the absolute easiest to navigate. I enjoyed that one.
Edublog is interesting, and I will make a point of going back to this site and read some more of the winning blogs.