Thing 18

Rocks And The Rock Cycle

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I liked the above presentation about the Rock Cycle because it covers rocks and the rock cycle which is a unit for Science. I felt that it contained alot of useful information and visuals to help the students understand the material better. I feel that Slideshare could be a very useful tool just like You Tube in the classroom. I like how it has presentations that have already been created and allows us to either use the presentation we find on the site. I also like how we can create our own presentations and share them with our fellow teachers. Outside of the classroom this could be a useful tool because of how you can create a photo slideshow to share photos with family and friends. I will definitely be sure to use Slideshare in my classroom.

Thing 17

I explored http://flashcarddb.com/ I found it to be a great website, where you can create your own individualized flashcards. I feel it would be a great way to help my students learn new vocabulary. You can set it up so the students can study the definitions and then click show answer and see what the word is. Also, on the site students can review the words and have to remember what the definition is. The site also allows you to give quizzes to the students as well and let them practice their understanding of the words. It will even give them a percentage of right and wrong answers for both the study and quiz parts. I think this is a very useful tool which will work well in my professional life.

Thing 16

How might you use this tool in your personal and professional life? What issues come to mind about using this tool with students (ie, they need email addresses to log-in)?

I think in my personal life I might use this tool when I am traveling and do not want to have to worry about losing a flash drive, I can just create my documents and save them to Google. In my professional life I feel like I could have the students work in groups on a paper or project using Google docs. I like how they can all be able to write and or make changes to the document at the same time. I also like how it allows students to be able to save their work on Google and not have to worry about forgetting to bring their thumb drives. The one issue that might come up is that possibly not all students have email addresses. However, if we could think of a way to give them school email addresses like we get in college, then we can make sure they have access to email. I like working with Google docs, the only thing that I do not like about it is that everyone can make changes to the document (meaning accidentally delete something). Otherwise, I think Google docs is great.

Thing 15

RSS is becoming a bit easier to understand, however I still feel like I am able to to quickly go in and search for what I want as opposed to reading all of the feeds, because I know what information I want to get. I understand the benenfits of using RSS because its supposed to put everything we want or need to have in one convenient location. But, to me it is too much going on. I do not remember to check my feeds regularly and no it has not yet become a habit. I will try to start checking it more regularly.

Thing 14

My Delicious username is: http://delicious.com/dvokal

I think that social bookmarking can be a valuable tool in my teaching by allowing me and my colleagues to share useful resources quickly and efficiently with one another. If one of us finds a great website to use in class we can quickly add it to Delicious and then tell our fellow teachers to look on our Delicious website for the tag/link to the site. It can also be useful for our students if they missed seeing a video we can send them the link to our Delicious site and they can find it and view it. We can also fill our Delicious site with extra help websites for our students to use. I think Delicious is a great way to enhance my productivity by adding in the right tags I can eliminate the search time to find what I am looking for in my normal favorites file. I will also allow me to have everything at my fingertips as well as my students.

Thing 13

I have always used the bookmarks/favorites tab to organize the sites I want to remember or frequently use. After seeing tagging, I now will use tagging to keep track of my favorite/ most frequently used sites. I like how you can assign it a tag and then be able to quickly click on the tag to find the related sites, as opposed to the favorites menu where you have to create individual folders and then search through the folders to find your desired website. I feel that ease of use is a major advantage to using tagging. I also like how it is easy open up the tagged sites and search by an individual tag. I can't at this time see any dissadvantages to tagging. The most important thing to think about when assinging tags to bookmarks is what to name the tag or under what tag does a certain page fall into.

Thing 12

I picked "This Day In History" widget because I enjoy history and learning about the past. I thought this would be a fun way to keep me coming back to my blog each day to learn what happened in the past. I am starting to feel pretty comfortable with embedding code. It is not as hard as I thought it would be. I do not think that relationships built online are strong as those built in person. Online relationships can be nice for people who have had friends move away and want to keep in touch with them via the internet, however you still have that personal connection from knowing them in person before they moved. I think that Facebook and other social networking sites are so popular with kids today, is because of how easy they are to access and send information to their friends. I remember growing up the biggest rage was Instant Messanger. Now not only can you instant message on Facebook, but you can also view pictures and other information about the people you are chatting with.

Thing 11

I found leaving comments to be fun and enjoyable. I like how you can leave a quick note (almost like texting) to someone. I am always intrigued when I receive a comment, to see what it says and who published it. I feel that commenting is so important, because without leaving comments you would not be able to have the online discussions that blogs are supposed to encourage in online communities. I like the idea of students sharing their writing online. I feel this could be a great tool to have for students to get their papers proof read. By having their papers online it allows many people to offer students feedback on what to change and how to make their papers better.

Thing 10

Here is a video that I was shown at conference on student behavior.  I thought this would be a great video to share with everyone, about why its important to look beyond the students behavior to why they are acting the way they are.  I hope you enjoy this video and find it helpful.



Video is published by Fellowship Bible Church in Little Rock, AK.

Also, I was able to download a video using Zamzar.

Thing 9

I like YouTube it contains many useful videos to help us with our teaching.  There are many videos that you could use, but maybe you only want to use a short clip of a video, more likely than not YouTube has the short clip.  There are many videos on YouTube which are useful, you just have to sit down and sort through them until you find a useful resource (This is when you don't have a particular video already in mind).  The one bad thing about YouTube is that sometimes there are issues with video's taking forever to load and can make for some frustrating moments when you have a class full of students and the video keeps freezing.  All things considered I really enjoy using YouTube in the classroom and will continue to use it in my teaching.  At the beginning of the year it seemed that YouTube was restricted, but by the beginning of Novemeber or maybe even a bit before it has seemed to be working just fine.

Thing 8

I enjoyed using the Memory and Sudoku games, they were fun and easy to work with.  I also liked the site where you could create different magazine covers that is a neat way to create someting personal for someone.  I also thought that map creator was a good idea, especially for Social Studies classes.  However, I did not like how I had to individually save the letters for my above creation.  Otherwise this was overall an interesting thing to check out and it definitely introduced me to some new things on the web.

Thing 7

I uploaded some of my photos from my trip to Washington D.C. during the winter of 2010.  I thought that these photos of D.C would be school appropriate and help to show how humans have interacted with their environment (Human Enviornment Interaction, which is one of the 5 Themes of Geography). 

I think that Flickr could be useful in a handful of ways.  First, it would be a great way for us to assemble images and present them to our students.  Second, we could possibly give quizzes using slideshows on Flickr as the slideshows plays through we could show them images and have students identify the location by the image in the picture.  Third, some of my students have expressed interest in creating a powerpoint or picture show of the year, this would be a great way for all of the students to be able to access the photos without any cost.  The problem as Pete mentioned in his post is that we will probably need to get waivers and permission slips signed so that the students images could be posted online.  The last way Flickr could be useful is that we could assign students a photo project and they could take photos around town of different things and then post them online for us to look at and grade.

Thing 6

I chose this image in honor of Bowl Season and my hopefully successful completion of this task after I spent two hours trying to figure out how to get an image off of Flickr.  I am not positive that I like Flickr and I find it a bit confusing especially when it comes to the licensing issues.  I think it could be a big headache if we try to have our students pick images from this website if they run into licensing problems.  Licensing issues aside Flickr does have a wide variety of images.

(I do not own this image and nor do I claim that the author of this image endorses my work) Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/avinashkunnath/