Thing #12

I completely agree that commenting can be useful, but needs to have boundaries set in order to get off on right foot. I liked the part on CoolCat blog about "Darth Commentator". When I am going to news sources online, such as chronicle.com, I'll read the comments left after articles. Its obvious that some people get online and leave mean, derogatory comments because they have nothing better to do with their time than to criticize.

The two points that stuck out as most important to me are:

1)Set Boundaries-if you let readers know what is expected of them, and take care of people that get out of line, it can contribute to more meaningful experience for all

2)(this is sort of a combination of two) Ask questions and be open ended about it. Just like we don't want to ask our students plain, boring yes/no questions that don't really broaden their minds, we don't want to do the same in blog comments.

The blogs that drew my attention are, admittedly, more personal to me. One is a blog about a p.e. teacher in the district who suffered a heart attack a little over a month ago. His sister in law started a blog that she updates daily with info on how his recovery is going, with pictures when possible, and its good to see how much caring and support goes on in our world to counteract all the bad things we see in news each day. The other blogs I visit are more social in nature. One is about family/friends of family that was created to help us keep up to date on little kids in the family and how life is going. A third blog I like to visit is a celebrity blog that basically makes fun of alot of the ridiculously dumb things some celebrities do in order to draw attention to themselves. It has no real educational value, other than to reinforce how glad I am my life has taken the path it has (i.e. to be able to actually be a positive role model, and give back to society, and not some publicity-seeking leech)

Thing #11

I felt that LibraryThing is a good resource, especially for students that are given summer reading lists (i.e. pretty much every student in high school language arts classes!). They can use this resource to list all the books they have read, or need to read. With the ability to interact with other LibraryThing users and get different viewpoints on books, and generate discussions with poeple outside their classroom, they can broaden their horizons. I think a good lesson for kids is to reinforce that one book can elicit many different feelings and viewpoints, and that things they like might not necessarily be a favorite of others. In other words, this can help reinforce/promote the acceptance of ideas and beliefs not necessarily our own.

For my teaching situation, in a personal finance class students could be assigned certain books to read, and look them on on libaryThing and get opinions on the book from at least 5 other non-class users (i.e. can't use their neighbors in class!).

Thing #10

I had fun with the online image generator activity. I think the Custom Sign generator would be most applicable for a computer class. The comic strip generator can be good, too, as it can be used for history lesson, or any subject really. It was easy to get lost in all the links, really, and to lose focus. Any activity of this sort given to students would need to be very precise in instructions, and I would need to be sure to keep kids on task, as some would spend too much time looking around. I sure did! I can see this being more useful in libraries and at the elementary and middle school levels, but high school classes could have fun with it too and learn something, depending on how lesson was structured.

The link I used for the image below that I created is http://www.comicstripgenerator.com/maker.asp.

Thing #9

The search tool easiest for me was technorati, as it seemed to be more organized and broke things down into better sections, or groups.

The Edublog award winners was somewhat confusing, until I figured out that I merely had to scroll down to actually click on links to see blogs. Initially, all I saw was the little checkboxes where users were allowed to vote for what they felt was best blog in that category. I also didn't like how it doesn't tell you what level of education the blogs in each award category are geared towards (i.e. elem vs. high school); I had to go to each site to find out if it was more applicable to elementary school or middle or high school, and that gets very time consuming. It would be nice if they organized it further to break it down into age related groups so that we could more readily find blogs that are more relevant to our situation.

Thing #8

I like the RSS readers because it delivers information fast without all the extraneous stuff that comes along with regular websites and blogs (i.e. ads and other eye distractions). Its nice having a choice of what to include and view and cut out stuff we don't want to see.

I know I can use this technology in personal life, as it will make viewing information on the internet that I'm most interested in alot easier to access. I can set up a link to it in my favorites, and then go right to it with one click, instead of having to have multiple favorites. For school, I can use it for education related blogs and sites, and keeping up with fellow teachers so we can share information.

Teachers can use this technology by first having students create their own blog relative to a specific class or subject. They can then use readers to include all other classmates' blogs in the reader, so that everything is located in one easy to find place, and make it easier to keep tabs on everything (I imagine this is very similar to what library2play does, as the "leaders" of this could have our L2P blogs in an RSS reader for more instantaneous access to be able to check and see how we are doing).

Thing #7

Cool google tools...it really is amazing what all is out there that can be used for positive benefits in education.

I liked the Google Earth tool. It would be good way for students in my international business classes to study terrain and imagery of different countries that they might consider "starting" a business in. The 3D tours of buildings allows them a way to see places they might not ever get a chance to. (Granted, that might be more from history class viewpoint, but it would be good way to create bridge between history and business classes).

A tool more relevant to business classes would be Google Finance. (http://www.google.com/finance). Students can use this when studying stock market, and begin to see how an event that occurs in the world (such as OPEC changing price of barrel of oil) can cause changes in marketplace in other countries, and then affect world economy, etc. (for instance, one of the articles on their today talks about how mortgage fraud is on the rise; students would be able to study how that might affect them if they were to be looking for mortage to buy a house).

From stock market standpoint, I liked how it has a table on current trends; students can follow popular stocks, or see which stocks were the biggest gainers/losers for that given day, etc. It also has a chart where it breaks different sectors down, so they can see how, say, the energy industry stocks are doing compared to transportation, or utilities, etc.

Thing #6

I enjoyed browsing around and finding fun mashups. The ones I got most out of were from bighugelabs.com. I think that for business classes, with emphasis on hands-on training instead of just lecturing, the magazine cover and Badge maker would be most applicable. Students could use the magazine cover app to promote themselves in a fun assignment that would require them to talk about themselves and speak in front of the class to "sell" their magazine idea. (Not to go off on a tangent, but this would actually be good for language arts classes, too; its amazing how many kids use bad grammar from their everyday life in their writings and speeches. LA teachers definitely have their work cut out for them!) For the badge maker app, a journalism or business class could use that to create hall passes to use when on official assignments around school. A teacher in any subject, really, could use that app before taking class on a field trip, so that each student has a badge to wear on field trip.