Week 6 - Thing 13

Del.icio.us is something that I have never heard of before. I spent Monday evening, first of all, looking at the tutorial and then I used the SJLibraryLearning2 account to get some experience. I scrolled down to L2 tools and clicked on Web 2.0. I clicked on an article called Scribd - upload and share documents online. 12, 433 other people have bookmarked this so I thought I should check it out. Once again, I had never heard of this and was wondering if it was something like google docs. It seems like a great service that allows you to upload and share many different types of documents. Unlike googe docs, I don't believe that other users can edit what you have shared. But, I could be wrong! :) I did look at the tags and the comments and was made aware, once again, that this is a global tool. Comments written in many different languages were there. I noticed some inapproriate language in the comments section, so this type of service would probably be best used by adults, not students. Through this search of Web 2.0 I also checked out 25 Awesome Beta Research Tools from Libraries Around the World - College Degree.com and Booktagger - Your Online Book Collection. I am always amazed at the wealth of information and resources available online. I can see why there is a need for tagging and for services like Del.icio.us. Imagine how much more is out there that we have yet to find.

The only way that I really learn how to do something is to do it! So, I have created a Del.icio.us account. Since I work in an elementary school, I am trying to think how I could use this to help with research. I already create a page of Internet links for the students and teachers for each research unit and post it on my website so it can be accessed at home or at school. I'm want to play with this and see what this can do for me that I have not already done through the pages I have already created. I also want to see if the district has this website blocked or not. Since I do all of my work for this class at home. I am never sure what we can access at school. I also want to see if anyone can post comments to my page. If they can, there could be a problem with not being able to control the appropriateness of what people say. I'll let you know what I find out!

Week 5 - Thing 12

S-U-C-C-E-S-S! I am so happy that Rollyo was easy to use. We are beginning a unit on the ocean with our primary students so I decided to locate websites on ocean life that they could use for research. I found Rollyo easy to use. I have added the link to the right of my blog page. Is this where I should be putting all of these things? I decided to place it there rather than making it a blog entry. I hope this is right.

My only concern about using Rollyo with students is the distraction of the advertisements going down the right side of the page. Even though we ignore them, they are drawn to them. This could keep them from focusing on the information that they should be using.

This is my last entry for the day. I need to get some rest so I am ready for video conferencing tomorrow. We are doing RAP and the 100th Day of School! :)

Week 5 - Thing 11

I have spent a couple of hours trying to get a widget onto my blog! I went to the Web 2.0 Award Winners and chose to explore Widgets. First, I tried SpringWidgets. I tried to create a customized RSS feed and have it appear on my blog. I tried numerous times but I was not successful in previewing my RSS feed in SpringWidget or getting it to appear on my blog. I then decided to try a different RSS feed site. I chose yourminis. I was able to customize an RSS feed through this site but when I copied it to my blog I was not able to view it. It showed the box but I was not able to see my RSS feed within the box. By this time, 2 hours + had passed and I then decided to see if I could find a way to have my RSS feed appear in my blog using the help within Blogger. As you can see, I do have an RSS feed there but it was not done as a widget. I wish that I would have had someone to talk to this afternoon to help me work through this.

I then moved on to read about Ning. In our school district all of the social networking sites that I am aware of, have been blocked. I was very interested to read about Ning and how it can be used safely by teachers because of the variety of control features. We are not using it at the elementary level, but I must find out if this is something that we are using at the middle school and high school level.

I then checked out my Travel IQ. I should have studied the map more carefully before beginning because it does not give you much time to look and think. I ended up with 144,016 points at Level 5 with a travel IQ of 88. I don't know if that is good or bad but I found the game very interesting and challenging. It did ask if you wanted to add this widget to your page, so I did. It now appears at the bottom of my blog. I couldn't get a widget on my page earlier but there is one there now. So, there was a bright point to the end of my day! :)

Week 5 - Thing 10

I have spent a lot of time trying out differenct image generators. The easiest one for me to use was Image Chef. There were lots of different choices for making personalized images for fun things but I'm not sure how I would use this in a school setting. The image that is shown above (I'm sorry - I got an error message and was not able to post my pictures!) is one that I sent to my daughter, as if it was from her dog, Jack. I also made a license plate from Image Chef which said PSUWed and sent it to my other daughter, since she is getting married at PSU in June. As I said, these were fun things to do! I used the bowl of alphabet soup to advertise the Martha books by Susan Meddaugh.

I spent quite a bit of time trying to create a mosaic using the FD Toys site. I finally did create a mosaic but my concern with this site is that your pictures must have a URL address to be used. I uploaded my pictures into School Center, which our district uses for our web pages. But, when I copied those URLs into Mosaic Maker it would not accept them since the URL did not end in .jpg or some other picture format. I then had to upload my pictures into Flick but did not want to make them public because they included pictures of students at school. I still could not make the mosaic because the pictures were private. I had to make my pictures public in Flickr to be able to make the mosaic. Since I was trying to do one for our Superintendent, who is retiring in March, and many of the pictures were students, I had to scrap that idea. It seems that this site is only good if you are using scenery pictures. I did create a mosaic of our trip to Alaska but I did not include any pictures of family members. It was just landscape pictures. What a long learning process!!

I have used Trading Cards quite often in FD Toys for our 3rd grade state project. The teachers and students were very pleased with the results. I also used Motivator which creates a poster. We tried using this for the states, as well but decided on the Trading Cards instead. If I use Motivator again, I would have the students find a great picture of their state that would make a person want to visit, make the poster, save it as a jpeg and then paste it into word and have the students add a persuasive writing piece to the bottom of the paper.

There are so many other ways to use these image generators. I am just tapping the surface!

Trying Flickr Again!

Originally uploaded by mardombach

This is the picture of Tracy Arm Fjord Glacier that I was trying to link to earlier on my blog, but the link sent me to the page of all of my pictures, not just this one. I hope this one shows up!

Week 4 - Things 8 and 9

I have spent the day learning more about RSS feeds. Hours have gone by as I have used different search tools to find the RSS feeds that most interested me. I used Google Reader as my aggregator and I have 5 feeds at this point in time. Educational Technology and School Library feeds were my focus. There are so many resources it was difficult deciding which ones were most beneficial. I did not want to subscribe to too many because I know that I will not have time to check all of them each day. RSS feeds were new to me about a month ago, so I know that I am just touching the surface of their potential! I tried out all of the search tools that were listed but still found the search in Google Reader to be my favorite. Feedster was a dead link for me and I found Syndic8.com to be confusing. I checked out the blog searching tools as well, but my interest was not in finding blogs at this point in time. I want to continue learning about RSS feeds and chat with others about which ones they find best for professional development.

Trading Cards

I'm actually using the trading cards as a way to present very basic facts about the states. After finishing their research, the students can use google images to find a picture of their state and then they present basic facts that must include something about the history, economics, geography, and government. They have had a great time doing it! I learned that it is best to do the typing in Word and then paste the text into the trading card description area. The students were taking too long to type and we would get "timed out." Some students lost all of their information in the process of logging in again. Things have been going much smoother since we have started using Word to type the facts!