Thing 12

CALENDAR! Oh, crud! I can't get my appointments and such to display correctly, but this is the calendar from my last job. I had it synced with the company's google calendar they used internally and had my own stuff overlapped on top. It was pretty slick having all that in one place. This is an awesome tool for helping students (and especially parents) know when things are due. I can make it public with them and they can use it for their own personal use anywhere they use google calendar. TRANSLATE! I like this tool. It does a mediocre job of translating (it's a machine translation after all!) but it's real usefulness is that it'll try to translate entire web pages for you. There are whole sections of the Internet I can't use because I only read English. This at least gives me a fighting chance. I can see this being very useful in a social studies context. Even then it'd be useful in putting context in some of the literature I might use with a reading lesson if it comes from someplace (or reference someplace) outside of the USA.

Thing 11

Which method of finding feeds did you find easiest to use?
Google blogs

Which Search tool was the easiest for you?
The same as above?

Which was more confusing?
Definitely Technorati

What kind of useful feeds did you find in your travels?
 I particularly liked freetech4teachers.com and thenerdyteacher.com's feeds.

Or what kind of unusual ones did you find?


There are some weird, weird podcasts out there.  If you're a fan you can get the feeds for those, but one of those was painting cats.  (not making paintings OF cats, but painting ON cats)  I don't understand.
 
What other tools or ways did you find to locate newsfeeds?
 I found that I have some luck with regular, non-blog related search engines.  Terms like "top blog for..." or "top post for..." get me some traction.

Thing 10

I should say that the neat thing about using Blogger the way this class does is that it uses the same account for all of Google's services (gmail, picasa, reader, documents, etc).  I think that was a smart choice for this project but I also think this fact should be indicated wherever appropriate in the 23 Things blog.  I don't have much trouble seeing someone creating multiple Google accounts by accident!

What do you like about RSS and newsreaders?
I sort of equate RSS readers to Twitter before there was Twitter.  In a way they serve the same function but for other websites!  I like that it puts news in a one-stop place.

How do you think you might be able to use this technology in your school or personal life?
I think this makes the process of keeping up to date with chatboards and similar places where I would go to further my educational education (or at least get help!) much easier.  If I can set up a couple feeds for things then checking on them becomes an easy process .

How can teachers use RSS or take advantage of this new technology?
Presumably by doing what I described above except with technology related feeds.

Thing 9

I used to be indecisive.  Now I don't know anymore.

Image created with Image Chef.

It's been interesting to see how automation of this kind of process has developed over the years.  Personally, this is something I would normally do in Photoshop or Gimp, but that's because my undergrad was in graphic design.  Not everybody has that skill set.  That's why these image generation sites can be pretty useful.

We live in a world where photo manipulation is pretty acceptable.  I'd go as far as to say it's expected.  Unfortunately the traditional tools by which these things are done aren't exactly user friendly.  Certainly there are lots of people out there with neat ideas for photo manip that could make some awesome stuff with a site like Image Chef.  It seems to me that part of the personal computer movement is making the computer personal.  That is to say, to make the computer accessible to the widest audience possible.

Thing 8

Defenestration
noun
The act of throwing a thing or especially a person out of a window.

When I saw this particular mashup I thought about the reading class I had last semester.  There was some talk about, with very early readers of course, awareness of text.  It's also about learning that there in meaning inherent in text, and that it is not just a series of shapes.  If I was teaching a very young group I think I could find some use for this.

Thing 7

I found it to actually be pretty hard to find a photo on Flickr for which I could get a direct URL to the image.  In learning about Flicker one of the neat things I discovered is that there are some pretty good privacy options, and the Flickr site even protects images frown download if that is what the uploader wants.  That's pretty awesome for the owner, but for the purposes of this assignment it meant most of the neatest pictures I wanted to use were protected.  To get the image you see here wasn't a straightforward process either.  I found an option to copy BBC code, and from that I was able to find and cut out the image's URL.

On a personal note, looking through all this great photography I wanted to blog about reminds me how much I miss using my film camera, the one that's as old as I am.  It went with me everywhere the semester I took photography for my undergrad.  Once you go SLR you just can't go back.  I'm going to have to consider getting a digital SLR now.

At any rate, this picture is by Adolfo Arranz and it can be found here.

Thing 6

Skype!
Voice Over Internet Protocol is a killer technology that, given enough infrastructure and support, could easily replace traditional cellular service.  Let me give you an example.  So long as I am in a wifi hotspot I can use the Skype application on my smart phone to call anywhere in the world at a per-minute rate lower than what my phone service.  I can make the call for free if I'm calling another Skype user, and since the Skype software is free to use...I'm sure you can see the advantage.  All of this completely bypasses my cell service provider.

Skype is also excellent for video conferencing.  With the above kind of technology in mind, can you imagine how neat it would be to video conference somebody in, say, Antarctica as part of a class project? Learning about the Sahara Desert?  See the Sahara Desert! Learning Spanish? Talk to a Spaniard!

Did I mention this is potentially free of charge?

Thing 5

What does "School 2.0" mean to you?
It means students and teachers embrace the many means of information gathering available to us now.  The textbook and the school library are no longer the sole sources of information to students.  It also means a certain interconnectedness in which what we do at home no longer is independent of what happens at schools and things that happen in one place can be shared at another place or time.

What does it mean for schools of the future?
It's well and good to say, "I have a 21st Century Classroom," but not four, five, and six years after the fact.  Things are changing so fast that bureaucracy laden school budgets cannot keep pace with the hardware need fast enough. Sure, web code has gotten more and more robust over the years, but the basic framework for how the Internet runs is exactly the same as it was twenty years ago.  Yet the sheer amount of content we can access through this framework is increasingly more staggering.  If a school is going to make a commitment to keep pace then they need to commit to the money and training necessary to do so.  That last part is important because not every teacher is a native to Internet technology.  Many immigrants that never grew up with it, unlike today's generation of students. It isn't any use to have a classroom set of iPads if a teacher is still struggling with how to check her email.

Thing 4

This is a placeholder.  Nice placeholder, huh?
explain why commenting helps create a sense of community and interaction
Let's be honest.  Writers live and die on feedback and comments give that feedback that anybody who's written anything needs to hear not only to have a dialogue with the audience but to improve one's writing in all things.

discuss two other points from the readings about commenting that you found important 
A common thread I found in reading about comments (more than twice!) is that it seems the general idea is, without commenting, there is no community.  Really, I think that's  the key difference between the web and web 2.0.  It's actually fairly easy to get feedback with the constructs in Internet coding today, when it used to not be.  I think it really took ten years or so for the dream of communication that the Internet promised to really become practical.  Certainly there has always been some sort of messaging on the Internet, but that was nothing more than a digital (albeit faster) version of the postal service.  Today it's live.  It's instant.  It's more like a community.
 
discuss the comments that you chose to make and why you made them

Thing 3

I'm not really going to know for certain until I get the job, but someone about a month back suggested it would be neat to use a blog to journal about my first year(s) of teaching. (This person was a 25+ year teaching veteran)  Honestly, I thought it was a pretty good idea.  Also honestly, I had forgotten about it until I saw the assignment for Thing 3.  This is a good reminder!

I can't say that journaling about my first year of teaching is going to provide anybody any keen insight on the grand mysteries of education.  I can, on the other hand, see it being a good place to get my thoughts in order.  I think better in writing.  Just listen to any conversation I've ever had with you and then look at how I write and you'll see a night and day difference.  I guess it's cheating, but I do enjoy taking advantage of the extra time and succinctness that wordsmithing allows.  It took me about three minutes to compose the last sentence, after all.  I wouldn't have thought to use the word "succinct" if I hadn't had the time to think about it.  Cheating indeed!

I guess we'll see how this plays into writing about my teaching.

Thing 2

As to blogging, I've done this before.  Not with Blogger, but certainly I have blogged using other services.  Other than having to contend with a foreign interface the experience is much the same.  It's somewhat hard to comment on how I feel about this experience except to say that it feels natural because I've done it so much before.  I am, however, pleased to see that the way Blogger is set up is very user friendly.  I can already see from some of my classmates that this blog is something totally new to them, and as much as I'd like to be using Wordpress, I would much prefer the shallower learning curve of Blogger if I were teaching this class.  I suppose time will tell if Blogger has enough advanced features for me to personally continue using it full time.

Thing 1

I think I probably struggle with the very first habit, Begin with the end in mind.  I often do things because I feel they are good ideas but don't know what I want to accomplish with them.  In the wake of that is a whole string of unfinished projects that petered out because I had no motivation for continuing them.

As to the sixth habit, Use technology to your advantage, I think this comes a bit more naturally to me.  It's hard not to think of this habit in the context of this class since, well, this class is technology for teaching.  Technology exists to make things easier.  I suppose there's plenty of argument you can make that says that technology, whatever its intentions, actually makes things more complex, but I think the motivation is still there.  And let's be honest, I'm a lazy git, so anything I can find that will make my life easier is okay by me.