Week #5 Things 10,11,12

Okay, so I might have gotten carried away when playing with the FD Toys and creating the Warholizer image. But it was fun. It took me a while to find a picture that would work. The other times I tried it I could not recognize myself. As far as the Web 2.0 winners, I am already a member and fan of Del.icio.us. I used it more when I worked in a high school but may eventually find that I use it on a much more regular basis in my new position. We will see. I also am a fan of Library Thing which got an honorable mention. I belong to it but use it more to get suggestions and read what other people think than for posting my own books. I use Shelfari at the moment for that. I also like that Shelfari sends me emails when one of my friends adds something to their shelves. It reminds me to go and look at when they are looking at. I set up a Rollyo for explorers and plan to compare it to the targeted searches that my colleagues use on Google. I can see that it would be useful for me to search on Rollyo and then put the specific websites that I want my students to have access to in an e-notes so that I know they won't see all of the sites I do not want them to use in research.

Week#4 RSS feeds, Bloglines

I ended up setting up an account on google reader and began looking for RSS feeds that I would like to subscribe to. So far I have found some useful things but nothing I would like to hear again and again. I have found useful podcasts on iTunes and have kept several. My favorite is Joyce Valenza and Ken Rodoff : Information Fluency Meets Web 2.0. I have listened to this one several times because it has so many useful things in it. I guess looking back at the time stamp it is relatively old since I first listened to it in July of 07. But I still think it applies. There are a couple of other podcasts I found at Conference Connections brought to you by Apple learning. There are a few on digital storytelling. www.digitales.us Bernajean Porter's website. I am going to subscribe to the Cool Tools for Library 2.0 since that seems to have short explanations of various tools for photo editing among other things. I have previously subscribed to other podcasts but if I don't get back to my iTunes to monitor these they seemed to add up geometrically so I ended up unsubscribing and just looking for them as I needed them. On iTunes there were a lot of interesting podcasts such as Iste's Podcast, Teach with Video, Technology Enhanced Classroom, etc. I actually liked the Screencasts better than the podcasts which can get boring if the person creating puts in a lot of beginning info before getting to the crux of the information. I also found Tech Chicks. So it was a productive Web 2.0 day.

Word Cloud with Wordle

I was viewing another Librarian's blog and saw that she had created a Word Cloud. I wanted to try it so I followed her link and made one with some of the research terms we use. Thanks joanneLMT2!

Snapfish Photo Album

Today I planned to catch up on the PSLA Web2.0 but never got there. I ended up spending hours scanning in my son's art projects from childhood and uploading them to create a photo album. Oprah.com has a free offer for one and I have always wanted to try it so this was the perfect impetus. It takes a long time to get all of the pictures and photos uploaded and organized and then selected for the correct pages. Snapfish allows a lot of customizing and that takes time too. They offer leather and linen covers. The ability to change backgrounds, photo layouts and themes. It was fun but exhausting and I am not done yet. I decided to add other photos so had to go search for them. If you are organized ahead of time that can save valuable time. The day was rewarding but not exactly the way I had originally had it planned. Maybe that is the key to enjoying Web 2.0; to be flexible. Have a great week.

Skype

I discovered the benefit of Skype when my son went off to college. It was easy to set up, we practiced it before he left and so we were set. It was so much more satisfying to see his face when we were talking. We usually initiated it through AIM IM (instant message). We would see through AIM that we were both online, send him an IM and agree to Skype. Then it was a matter of starting it up and initiating the call or waiting for him to call. If you want the video you click it on. You can still Skype without it but we prefer to see each other. We can see our faces in a small window at the bottom left of the screen and his face fills up the rest of the screen. We love it. I would recommend it to anyone. A friend of ours uses it with a friend from Denmark and they have a little more trouble connecting because they pick a time each week to be online to Skype but sometimes they just can't connect. AIM makes it so much easier because it notifies you when any of your friends and family are online. We both have webcams built into our laptops but webcams are inexpensive and easy to add on to your computer. So really all you need is to both have webcams, an internet connection and to download the Skype software for free and set up an account. It is easy and it is very satisfying. Try it.

Spelling with Flickr is fun

Hardest and easiest habits from Thing #1

I just realized that there was something else I forgot to mention in my blog. There were 7 habits from lifelong learners and the question was which was the hardest and which was the easiest. For me the hardest is Habit #1 to Begin with the end in mind. Have your goals in mind. The reason that is the hardest is that I see something interesting that I want to try and then move forward with it not sure yet how I will use it in my classroom. If I made my goals more concrete this might give focus to my technology learning. So that is what I will do. The easiest for me is #7 which is Play, be curious and read. That is what I like to do anyway and often my searches end up way off from where I started. I often find other interesting technology items along the way that leads me in a totally new direction. I have discovered immediately useful things to use on my latest wiki that way or in my Library. So Habit #7 is the easiest and most fun for me.