Thing #4

Commenting on other people's blog is a great way to share you own thoughts on the subject the writer is talking about. I think that when you are able to comment you are able to express your own feelings, which I think is the best part of blogging. Commenting on other's blogs also lets the blogger know that they are writing about something that is important. It is important for people to get feedback in everything they do. As a future teacher and maybe coach, I think it is really important to get feedback with evaluations, parents, tests scores, or even with a game score. In this profession it is important to know and want to learn and grow to better yourself as a teacher. When somebody comments on my blog it helps to give me another prospective of things and not just my own. I have chosen several classmates blogs to follow. 

The first blog I decided to follow was Ashlee Boyd's blog. I was really interested in reading what she had to say and we had the same thoughts on several different points. http://ashleeboyd23things.blogspot.com. 

I also chose to follow Cherie Manske's blog. http://23thingsjanell.blogspot.com. I think she had very good insight on the Things we have done so far and I think her work will be useful to me in the future. 

Anita Taylor's blog was another blog I decided to follow and comment on. I think she very insightful and will make a great teacher so it will be beneficial for me to follow her blog. http://ataylor29.blogspot.com. 

I chose to follow Derek Carroll's blog as well. The easy thing to say is that he commented on my blog and that we have had a class together so I decided to do the same, but as I started to look at his blog I noticed that he had so many great ideas. He will make a great teacher. I look forward to seeing more of the ideas he has as this project goes on. http://jcapsu44.blogspot.com

Last but not least, I chose to follow Shelby Burkhart's blog. I had a class with Shelby and I realized how enthusiastic about teaching she was. She has many great ideas and I look forward to seeing more ideas as she blogs more. http://burkharts23awesomethings.blogspot.com

I chose two blogs to follow that we outside of our class project that I think will benefit me as a future math teacher. I commented on these blogs because they both had so many great ideas for teaching math lessons and I wanted them to know that people appreciate them posting it. the two blogs I followed were "Math Teacher life" (http://www.educatorlife.com/mathteacherlife/) and "Love2learn2day"(http://love2learn2day.blogspot.com). Both of these sites will help me as a teacher and I look forward to getting to use some of their ideas in my classroom one day. 

Thing #12

Google is probably one of my most used sites. I use google to search for things all the time. However, I did not realize how many other things Google has to offer. I explored almost all the extra things that Google did and I was amazed. I think that Google had designed all of these tools perfectly. Although I liked all of these tools and think they will all be useful, my favorite two tools were the Google Calendar and Google Translate. I think both of these website will be the most useful in my classroom. With Google Calendar, I want to make a calendar online with the classwork and homework we did that day so students and parents can look at the calendar instead of emailing me. It will more convenient for everyone. With the translator I think it would be useful to talk to parents. Depending on where I teach, I could possibly have parents of students that only speak another language, this is where the translator would be useful. I think that it is very easy to use and would be a great way for me to communicate. I think it is important to make sure that a language barrier is not a problem no matter where or who you teach. Education is important for everyone and its important to give all students the same education.

Thing #11

I thought the easiest website to find new RSS feeds was the Edublogs' award winners. I really liked this site because it was organized and easy to use. They had different categories for the blogs so you could just search through the subjects that interested you. Also with this site, I liked how it had a top three blogs for that topic. When I first looked at it, I knew that those three blogs would be a good resource so I clicked them first. Overall, this site just had it all together. They knew what they needed to have a good site. I also like the Google Blog Search. This site was also just very easy to use. It was easy to search for a particular subject blog being that I use Google all the time. I didn't really care for Topix.net or Technorati. It just seemed too confusing. I looked at it and couldn't easily figure it out so I gave up. I am going to go back and try to figure it out. Hopefully with a little time, I will be able to figure it out. by using these sites, I found a lot of good teaching blogs that would be useful to follow for future reference.

Thing #10

Using an RSS for this Thing has shown me a new way to keep up with all the blogs that I am already following on Blogger, with just one click. Using the RSS to help keep up with the blogs that I want to follow is very useful and it will be useful when I am planning for a class. I added several math teachers blogs to my Google Reader so I could get different ideas on ways to teach a lesson.

As a student and future teacher, I could see this technology to be very helpful. I think as a teacher I could use this to have the students keep up with their morning work. It would be easy to keep up with all of my students using RSS. Also it would be very useful in planning. I think it is important to share ideas with other teachers so this would be useful to keep up with different teacher's blogs.

Thing #9

I chose to explore Image Chef for this Thing. I really enjoyed this website. I think that this would be a website that I could use in my classroom to post due dates or rules. Both of the pictures I made I could use in my classroom. I made these pictures in particular so that I would have something to follow as an example for the future.

I also chose to explore Smiley Generator. I think this would be a great site to put inspirational quotes up around my classroom. I really enjoyed this site. There were many ways of customizing your own smiley. I could see myself using this a lot.

Thing #8

I really enjoyed using these websites. I looked at all of them and liked some more than the other but overall they were all really neat. I could see myself using some of these mashups in my classroom. The two sites I enjoyed the most was Spell with Flickr and the Jigsaw Creator. I made a lot of different pictures on these two sites. I could not figure out how to upload the picture from Spell with Flicker so I just chose to put one of my Jigsaw puzzles on my blog instead. I would love to figure out a way to use this in my classroom, but for now I will continue to use it for my personal life. As far as sharing pictures, I think it is just important to be cautious when posting pictures and don't post anything that you wouldn't want others to see. 

Thing #7

I had a hard time choosing just on picture to put on my blog. I have never used Flickr before so I got a little caught up looking at the pictures. I probably sent way too much time on this website tonight. I had so much fun using Flickr. I was a little confused at first, but I just started clicking stuff and easily figured it out. I made an account at first then I started exploring. I went to the Last 7 days Interesting page to search for a picture, which was a mistake because I had a hard time choosing but oh well. 

As soon as I saw this picture I knew it was the one I had to use. This picture reflects my life a lot lately. The picture is call "A Time to Reflect" taken by Doug Wallick. My favorite place to go when I have a lot on my mind is to the lake just to sit and think about life so this picture hits home. ]
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dwallick/6390235775/in/photostream/

"Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand."

-Chinese Proverb

Thing #6

For this "Thing" I choose to use YouTube. I saw YouTube on the list and decided to use it mainly because I have been listening to and watching videos on this website while I was blogging. I use YouTube at least every other day. It is a great sharing site.YouTube has millions of videos that you can watch to learn just about anything.

As I explored I found a few different videos that were pretty neat. I found one school's YouTube channel where they post math videos that they make in their math class. This is the link to their channel, http://www.youtube.com/user/WSHSmath. Okay maybe I am a nerd but I thought this was pretty neat. They take newer songs that the kids can relate to and make a math song out of it. I found several other videos where other schools have done the same thing. I think this is a great example of ways that teachers can let their students get involved in teaching. The students in the videos all looked they were having so much fun. Learning should be fun so that was very cool. Also I found that on YouTube you can create an account for your school that lets you search through YouTube for education videos but it is more filtered so you don't get videos that are not there for education purposes. Here is the link to where you can go to create an account for your school or class, http://www.youtube.com/schools.

I think i could show some of these videos in my classroom as the beginning to a unit or something. I think it would get the students interested in the lesson and may even spark some creativity.

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."
-William Butler Yeats

Thing #5

The first website I looked at was What is Web 2.0? When I first got on this website I watched the short video that they have on the page. I enjoyed this video because they talked about how much the Internet has changed in the last 10 years. The video shows how the Web looked 10 years ago and what you could do with "Web 1.0" and then they showed how much the Web has changed with "Web 2.0" now. With the addition of the writing aspect on the Internet, it has opened a whole new range of things that we can do. Without this new "update" on the Internet I wouldn't be able to be blogging right now. We also wouldn't have Facebook, Twitter, or any of those other websites that many of us can't go a day without.

I also looked at Web 2.0 Is the Future of Education. I thought this website was good because it had all kinds of links to other sites that could be beneficial for teachers. I looked at a few of the links and the one that stuck out to me the most was call "Formative assessments delivered on Apple and Android tablet, mobile devices". First of all the title of the article stuck out to me, but the rest of the article was shocking to me. The article talked about how a company had released a program that allowed students to be able to take assessments on an iPad, iPhone, or other type of electronic device. I know that technology is changing and is being used in the classroom but I didn't think that it would be necessary to have students do tests on the devices.

Both of these websites have just proved that technology is becoming more apparent everywhere. Technology is a great learning tool for students. Technology is no longer the future, it is the present., no matter what age now, want to use technology in everything they do so why not include it in the classroom as a learning tool so the students can have fun while they learn. I think it is important for students to look forward to coming to school. If they don't enjoy learning why would they try? I think that is what School 2.0 is about. Its finding ways to make school better and going for it. As the years go on we will see more and more change in the schools but like the Internet, it can only get better. I look forward to seeing where technology takes us in the future.

"There can be infinite uses of the computer and of new age technology, but if the teachers themselves are not able to bring it into the classroom and make it work, then it fails." – Nancy Kasselbaum, U.S. Senator

Thing 3

Blogs can be very useful in a classroom. I think I would use a blog in my classroom for two different reasons. I would create a blog that all of my parents or even students could follow that i would post what we did in class that day on. I think this would be useful because parents like to see what is going on in their students classrooms. I think this would create less confusion then getting emails and phone calls all the time. Also this would be helpful to my students if they are absent they can check the blog and see what homework they need to get done so they do not get behind in class. I think I would also create a separate blog to post ideas for lessons. this would benefit me and other teachers to get ideas for those hard to teach lessons. I think that these blogs would be very beneficial to my classroom and I look forward to getting to create a blog (or two) for my own classroom.

"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." 
-- Henry Brooks Adams

Thing Two

For my blog I decided to use my name as my posting name. I decided to use my real name to keep it simple. Also I think that using your real name for this blog lets the whole class who you are. It will help to familiarize us with each other in the class. I also just chose to keep the title of my blog simple. I chose to just use the title of the assignment as my blog title. When I was setting up my blog I wasn't trying to be to creative because I just wanted to get it set up. I didnt think setting up the blog was to hard, considering this was the first time I have ever made a blog. I thought it would be hard but I thought the whole process was easy. The hardest part of setting up my blog was getting the avatar on my blog. I had some trouble at first with it but once I got home and tried on my computer, I got it fairly quickly. I choose to make my avatar simple. I am a very simple person and I don't need much to make me happy. I think my avatar reflects this because I just have a simple outfit and my hair up.

"Education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it."

Marian Wright Edelman