Thing 9 - YouTubin' : a slippery slope for school use

After finally having success at downloading Media Player, I started to look at some of the clips listed on 23 Things. As I have been a choral singer with UMS, my favorite was Luciano Pavarotti singing Nessun Dorma, and that was what I posted my comment on.

I then started looking for clips from The West Wing and specifically the show on the Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, seeing as the holiday is almost here. I found several of these and watched them. I also sent them to my daughter who enjoys that particular show.

I did notice some really foul language in some of the comments, along with what looked like some inappropriate clips that I was not interested in venturing into. I can see where this would be a huge problem for schools to allow into their network, but if some of the really good clips can be downloaded, I think certains clips from this site would not only provide some humor to enjoy with classes (animals are always a big hit), but a way to share interesting videos for educational purposes.

Thing 8 - Fun with imagery

I had a lot of fun looking at all the different sites offered with Thing 8. The montage was fun and I spent a lot of time curiously plugging in different words to see what generated. The Speller was also interesting even though limited.

As you can see, I chose the comic strip generator for my uploaded image. I really like to play around with graphics and color, so I really experienced no problems with this, other than not quite fitting all the dialog inside the balloon.

I will have to play around some more.................

Thing 7: Flikr-ing

I could not open the tutorials for some reason, but did use the "Newbies" guide to do this.

I will be able to use this to upload photos of our students to the school website, which is a great way to show the community what goes on at school. The students enjoy seeing who attended various school events (dances, sports games, competitions, etc.), and it is a nice way to keep a record of the year in pictures.

If I am using my own photos, I don't see any problems posting pictures on Flikr, but I wonder how you can protect your authorship. I will have to look into that in the future.

Thing 6 - Interestingness

I found looking at all these wonderful images amazing, and I spent a lot of time doing so. I even emailed some links to my daughter who teaches environmental education.

I found a group entitled "Too Cute" with pictures of pets and children on Flikr. I liked doing a search to bring up specific topics. Since I am managing our school website and our mascot is a dragon, my search was for photos of dragons. Surprisingly, there were many, from sculptures, to cloud formations, to sea and reptile life.

I can see this as being a wonderful tool one could use to teach in an aesthetic way. In one demo, the person typed the word "geometry" in the search bar, and came up with all types of photos with geometric shapes hidden in the picture. What a great way to teach Math!

I will certainly use this as a source for my school website.

Thing 5 - Subscribing to blogs - Time consuming!

This definitely took a lot more time to become masterful at. At first, when I went to do a bookmarket, my pop-up blocker prevented it from showing on my links bar???? What the heck? It took me awhile to figure out I had done nothing wrong...it was Comcast's fault!

I also found some blogs under a media and web tools search that discussed how digital libraries are the thing of the future with a caveat: students may not use them to actually read, but to interact with the technology! That's pretty frightening. Are hardcovers and pbacks becoming extinct? Will Media Specialists lose their jobs as a result? I still think small children especially, like to actually hold a book and read..I know I do. I just cannot fathom the idea of logging on to a website and reading a novel on a computer screen. Are we encouraging bedtime stories to be a thing of the past?

In addition, I subscribed to some blogs for Media Specialists and some for booklists which I can use in my job.