Thing 11: Tagging and Del.icio.us

I still don't understand how tagging can be beneficial to me...
I did create a del.icio.us account however and see how wonderfully useful that could be. Now I don't have to have separate bookmarks at school and at home! This would be a great place to create a page of bookmarks for a class project, so that students could access them from home and at school! I can see another staff development idea pressing on me now. I wonder how many of the teachers at my school even know about del.icio.us?

Thing 10: Wikis

I went to the 23 Things Wiki and had some fun changing the colors of the title letters. I thought that would do no harm. I also added an entry on the Content Suggestion page in red: keeping up with the 23 things. My biggest suggestion to new users was to allow for time to learn these new things! I can see great value in wikis - especially after watching the Common Craft video on creating a wiki for organizing a camping trip. This is truely a one stop shop for all viewers. An entire staff at a school could wiki about a new project coming up or a new idea that needs everyone's input. I would imagine that you just give the wiki url to everyone you want input from. More fun than I realized! Since users can edit wikis, I do wonder about the validity for students to use during research. Yes, others can add important information, but what if some troubled users edit it just to confuse others? I can see hacker type people really wanting to cause trouble that way too, so I am more hesitant to use it for research. But for collaboration on a project, by all means, go for it!

Thing 9: Online collaboration tools

I personally liked using google docs better than using zoho writer, only because it was much easier to import the URL into google docs. It seemed to work just like zoho writer however. I was able to publish it to my blog, but I don't see it on my blog now, so I am wondering what step I am missing? I think that this is WAY cool to be able to edit a famous doc on line. I can imagine how easy this would be to post a document that I wanted feedback from teachers on - then they could make changes and everyone else could already see what changes had been made! Now I wonder if more than one person can make changes at a time? Will it say "this file is read only or locked for editing" or something like that? Anyone else have comments about this, please send me a comment!

Thing 8: Share your collections

OK, I tried to sign up for a membership with Picture Trail and Flick and they both seemed to require me to purchase a book that I didn't want, so I went no further with signing up. I did sign up for a Mixx account though, and that seemed pretty easy. I suppose I could use this with my friends or even better, my librarian/media specialist friends as a good networking tool. It actually seems kind of like the delicious accounts that you can share your favorite links? I haven't learned about the delicious accounts too much yet, but that's what it appears to be. So for that reason, I do think it may be helpful to share good links with other people in my profession. I am looking forward to thing #9!

Thing 7: Web 2.0 Communication Tools

We are big time users of email in my school district. It is the first thing I check when I go into work. It is something that I leave on all day and continuously check for new emails from staff throughout the day. Sometimes it's as simple as clarifying what time a class is expected in the library or computer lab and other times it may be some collaborative planning for a lesson, just minutes before the lesson begins. And of course, an email might be notification of s announcements of school issues or even district wide issues/notifications.
I have attended various webinars from Minitex on the use of Kids Infobits and most recently one on Play Attention (not minitex). They are valuable tools because I can attend them when the time works for me, and I can even do it in the comfort of my own home! I also like the feature that participants can send a message (hey, that's probably one time I really like IM!) if they have a question. I usually find that I can learn a lot from other's questions too.
Text messenging, I have begun to do with my own children. I have found out that if I want to keep up with staying in touch with them, I'd best send them a text message! It seems like that is thee way of teens in communication these days.
The tool of IM has not really appealed to me yet because I guess I'm just an old fuddy duddy on that one. When my email and cell phone/text messaging works perfectly well, why use IM? It's just one more account that has to be set up. That's just my opinion of course!

Thing 6: Online Image Generators

WOW, now that was much more fun and easy to do! If you know how to browse to find your photos, you can add a trade card or banner to your flickR site, which is what I did. I am relieved that this one was an easier one than Thing 5. I can see how this would be fun for staff and students to create some fun things on their flickR page, while building their individual creativity. Oh my this can be so much fun, but very time consuming! It was really fun to create a calendar too. So easy! It amazes me how many free web resources are out there for the public to use!

Thing 5: More fun with FlickR

OK, I am really very frustrated. I want to put some "spell with flickR" words on my blog but I cannot figure out how to do it! I can see how time consuming this can be. I've gone to the http://metaatem.net/words/music site to spell some words, but I cannot find any directions to post them on my blog. Is there someone out there who can direct me? I do think this would be fun for students and teachers to do to add creativity to their page. That's all I have to say about Thing 5. I would like to hear if anyone else has had some of the same frustrations.

Thing 4: Flickr

WOW! What a fun idea to post pictures to the web so several family members or class members can easily see them! I was thinking that this might be a fantastic thing to do with our 2nd or 3rd grade classes that read Flat Stanley. They usually send a Flat Stanley paper character home with family, relatives or friends so that they can take pictures of Flat Stanley in a different part of the country or world. Pictures are send via the postal service back to the classroom so they can be hung up on a bulletin board. Why not use Flickr? That way the students, parents and relatives could see the pictures right away!
I also like the idea that St. Ben's college is doing, but who the heck would have time to create all those tags on the pictures/??? Not me, that's for sure. But what a great idea!

Thing 3: RSS feeds

Good grief! There has been so much to read on RSS feeds. I can easily see how it takes way more than 15 min. a day! But now that I have set up some feeds in bloglines, hopefully that'll help condense the time it takes to read them. I can see how this would be a great time saver for the elementary staff at my school. They might be frustrated at first in how long it would take to set up and read through many of the "top 1000 feeds", but in the end, it would be a time saver for them. Teachers are so swamped these days just with the everyday tasks of teaching,ut this is a new and exciting venue to teach them. We'll see what happens now at our next in service day!