Thing #23: Yeah! I finally made it!

I liked just about everything! Some of it was really, really time consuming and I got a little frustrated, but it turned out alright. It was fun to set up my blog and avatar...adding pretty colors and cutsie stuff and fun names. I really enjoyed playing with mashups, Flickr color pickr, Picasa, Google tools, Mosaic maker, ya know the fun stuff.

I have finally learned some new technology that I'll be able to use personally and professionally. It'll be nice to incorporate it into my lessons and I think students will be impressed and interested. The learning doesn't end with Thing 23. I'm sticking with this and I'll keep practicing and playing with all of the Things.

Some of the Things were kind of hard to get through, but it could be due to my lack of knowledge. I found that if I took frequent breaks I was more successful.

The Common Craft videos were awesome. I would have been lost without those. I'll definitely refer to their site for future reference. Bruce's video was also excellent.

I would totally participate in another program. I feel much more computer savvy and look forward to improving upon it.

This journey through Library2play inspired Bird Girl to stretch her wings and fly confidently through the techno-universe.

Many thanks to everyone involved in this project! The entire time I was thinking to myself, "I can't believe how much work and time went into this!" and "I can't believe how they even comment on how we're doing. They must not have any time off this summer!" And I have a whole new appreciation for frogs!!! I look forward to keeping up with the goings-on at Lily Pad Playground. Thanks VWB!!!

Thing #22: Nings

Cool! I just wish I had more time to be an active member of Teacher Ning. The fact that it was categorized by grade level really cuts down on search time. When I searched tags for reluctant readers, dyslexia, and learning disabilities many choices popped up. Seems like I'll be able to obtain some useful information and possibly some new strategies to use with my students. My Space for teachers! :0)

Thing #21: Podcasts and Audiobooks...

Here's my Photostory of Washington D.C. during the Christmas Holidays. It could use some improvement, but I think I did alright for my first time.

Thing #20: YouTube, TeacherTube, & Zamzar

I found some videos about dyslexia on YouTube and TeacherTube. The first is a montage of famous dyslexics and what their teachers said about them. The video second is about reluctant readers in high school and how to find material for them. I think their mostly trying to sell a program, but the lady in the video gives some great ideas for helping struggling readers.

Thing #19: Web 2.0 Awards

I wish I had more time to explore all of these sites. I’ll come back for a deeper look later, but for now I found Lulu to probably be the most useful for my students. How fun would it be to publish some of your writings? As we all know, it’s hard to motivate struggling writers so I think they might respond to being able to publish their work, even if only for themselves, especially if they can do it on the computer. Google maps and live maps would be cool for world geography. I played around with some of the others just for fun. Hair Mixer was fun! Picnik and Splashup to store and edit photos. I liked Picnik almost better than Picasa. Last for music and videos was fun to browse around in too.

Thing #18: Online Productivity Tools

I think I prefer Google docs because I can get to it from any computer. Students can use it to work on resumes or do a group edit of a document or many other things. I’m going to spend some time playing around in Google docs some more. I like that others can editing, like a Wiki. I am looking forward to using it more this coming school year.

Thing #17: Rollyo

I'm having fun with this Thing! I decided to create a Rollyo for bird research. It is very necessary to have a Rollyo for this subject because I've found that if you just "Google it" you can come up with thousands and sometimes millions of sites that are totally unrelated to what you want your students to read. For example, if we're researching birds and a student types in Blue Jays, Orioles, or Cardinals, Google will bring up baseball and/or football teams. Then you must weed out thousands of sites to find the "bird". Here is a link to the Rollyo that I created.

http://rollyo.com/sealion84/rileybirds/

I owe this ease of this Thing to Bruce Goodner's video. Thanks Bruce! You always know how to break it down for us!

Thing #16: Wikis

OMG! I love the Common Craft video. I think they did an earlier video for one of the Things. Lee LeFever has a great way of explaining/teaching how to do seemingly daunting tasks. I didn’t realize that Wiki could be edited by ANYONE or that anyone could start their own Wiki page. Oops! I was thinking Wikipedia. Anywho…Wikis can be used for so many different things. Our team meets only once a month so this would be great for communicating. I’ll have to share that idea with them before school starts. I can’t wait to show my students how to do this, they probably already know how. What a great way for someone with poor handwriting or below average spelling skills to express ideas. I teach dyslexic students! It would also neat to try with parents.

Yeah! I did it! I added my thoughts to the Sandbox…very cool.

Thing #15: Web 2.0, Library 2.0, & the Future of Libraries

Today's school librarian is definitely not the school librarian of the 70's & 80's. A long time ago, librarians were the little old ladies that stood at the counter and stamped the date in your book, that's just what I thought when I was little, please don't take that the wrong way. Over the past few years I've observed the day in the life of a school librarian. S/he has to know how to do everything!!!!!! The entire school depends on this person for technology and information. The role of the librarian has become very important to the success of our students. I've learned a great deal about technology from my high school librarian friend and I'm excited to see that she is always learning new technology so she can teach it to me, ha! The student video was enlightening. It was interesting to see their views about how they spend their days and how they obtain information.

Thing #14: Technorati

I’m so glad I had the video to watch. The girl did a nice job explaining how to search for things in Technorati. The YouTube video was “no longer available”.

I have used tags before and didn’t really realize it. I just thought they were keywords to click on to find more information about the stuff I like. I guess that’s what a tag is! :0)

The Tag, You’re It to Advertisers article was helpful and easy to understand, thank goodness, because I was getting confused.

I tried to become a member of Technorati, but when I put in my access key that they emailed me it kept going back to the main registration page. I’ll keep trying!

My search using “School Library Learning 2.0” was confusing because it kept pulling up blogs with each individual word, not the complete “School Library Learning 2.0”. I need to work on that.

While playing in the Top Blogs area, I learned that Boing Boing won the Lifetime Achievement and Best Group Blog awards at the 2006 Bloggies ceremony. Who knew there was an awards ceremony for Blogs? Wow! It’s a weblog of cultural curiosities and interesting technologies. It's the most popular blog in the world, as ranked by Technorati.com. And there was a disturbing news article, “Trolls Among Us”.

I can see that I need to spend more time in Technorati land to fully be able to use it with my students.

Thing 13: Tags and Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking will be convenient for students to be able to enter preselected sites for projects. I have already bookmarked some of my favorite author’s websites, especially Stephenie Meyer with the 4th book in the Twilight series coming out today, yeah! Tagging is fun. I always wondered what a tag was. This will also come in handy for student research on the internet.

Thing #12: Creating Community Through Commenting

Two points that I think are important are to thank the commenter and to reply to those that comment on your blog. I love how Blueskunk put it… “If you are a blogger and receive a comment, I've always thought it polite to say thanks to the commenter when possible. This is not a universally practiced - or endorsed - practice. Somehow, I just think if a person has given up a chunk of life to read and craft a response, I should be grateful.” And Will Richardson’s thoughts, “While every blogger likely lapses - from time to time - into a nonproductive "blogging funk", is it possible that in ignoring the comments of one's readers, a message of elitism may be exuded (particularly to that timid teacher that may have just posted the first comment in his/her entire life)?”
Since blogging is new to me, leaving in-depth, meaningful comments definitely does not come naturally. Yes, I can comment how pretty or interesting something is, but to really express my thoughts about a person’s post or blog will take some getting used to. I posted comments like the Discovery Activity instructed and I found two blogs that were interesting to me. Marianne Williamson’s blog and author Robert B. Parker’s blog.

Thing #11: LibraryThing

I created a LibraryThing account and a list of way more than 5 books! I added my Book List to my blog and I joined the Crime, Thriller, & Mystery group, the Read YA Lit group, and A Pearl of Wisdom & Enlightenment group. Since I have many reluctant readers and students that just haven’t found that “hook” to get them interested in a certain author or genre, I think that they would enjoy exploring the different groups on LibraryThing. The forums/discussions among members about the kajillions of books out there could really encourage students to want to go ahead and pick that book up and read it. Oooh! I know…the student could find a book or genre that they find interesting on LibraryThing and then we could locate that book or books in the school library and do a little shared reading. I love that idea!!! I’m definitely trying that!!!

More Thing #10

I can't stop making things!!!

Lucky as a jigsaw puzzle and my boyfriend's dogs as a postage stamp. All from www.bighugelabs.com

Thing #10 Playing with images

This is more like it! The fun stuff! Here's my dog Lucky on his first magazine cover. http://www.fakemagazinecover.com/





My Alma Mater mosaic.


My football jersey with Dallas Cowboys former tight end, Jay Novacek's number. http://www.imagechef.com/

These are from www.imagechef.com.




Bye for now! I've got some more playing around to do to add to this Thing!

Thing #9: Locate a few useful library-related blogs and/or news feeds

How to Create Your Circle of the Wise: How to pick the reads in your RSS is very informative. I think I was just trying to add as many impressive sounding blogs that I could find! But, would I actually read them? Probably not. So now I’m taking Cool Cat Teacher’s advice and only adding a few quality blogs that I know I’ll read. I think I like Google Blog Search the best so far. For some reason I can’t open Feedster, but I want to check that out since I’ve heard that is a fav of many other bloggers. Edublog is great for award-winning educational feeds. And… OMG!!! I just read that VWB’s A Library By Any Other Name won the 2007 Best Library/Librarian Blog. Congrats!!! No wonder I’ve been learning so much from her blogs. My brain is kinda fried right now after many hours of searching RSS feeds. I did find Houston news feeds and dyslexia feeds that I added to my blog list.

Thing #8: RSS Feeds

I set up my blog list through Google Reader and added blog sites about dyslexia, learning disabilities, books for young adults/teens, high interest/low vocab., and Houston news. I’d like to find more blogs authored by dyslexia and reading teachers. It will be very convenient to read about my professional interests in one place. Now I need to search for blogs for fun. Someone posted the idea of started on blog for their classroom so that students and/or parents could post and comment about lessons, etc. I love that idea!

Thing #7: Cool Google Tools

I didn’t realize that Google had so many “Cool Google Tools”.
Google Alerts: I set up Alerts for NASCAR, Patricia Cornwell, Sue Grafton, Alagaesia, HBO’s Dexter, and Stephenie Meyer. I’m sure I’ll think of some more to add.
Google Calendar: I put all of the important dates from SBISD’s calendar on mine in addition to student birthdays and NASCAR’s schedule. I plan to add grading period information, progress and report card dates and I’m sure much, much more. Students can use this as a planner to keep up with assignments and test dates.
iGoogle: Love it!!! I couldn’t find a bird theme so I used butterflies. Now I can see the weather, memorable quotes, things to ponder, National Geographic picture of the day, dictionary, facts, my favorite computer game “Bejeweled”, and much more.
Google Notebook: This looks really interesting and useful, but I can’t install the Google toolbar through the browser extension to search for items to download to the notebook. It says I must have administrator privileges. I think I need to call GEEK because I can’t install anything on this new laptop. Students can use this to save and organize their internet research.
Picasa Web Albums: I already have Picasa, but it’s not set to where anyone else can view it yet. I’ve been using this for pictures for about a year.
Google Scholar: I think I could play with this cool tool for hours and of course it would be useful for students.
Google Advanced Search: I now know that I can search for specific formats, like PowerPoints!
Google Earth: Wow! I’ve never used Google Earth. Very cool! I was trying to download it onto my laptop and didn’t realize that it was already on it.

More Thing #6: Trading Cards

O.K. so I'm stuck on this Thing!!! There is so much to explore. I think I need to move on and then come back and play with the many different options. I agree with using Trading Cards for flash cards, vocab., story starters, visualize/verbalize, etc. I'll post new ideas as they come to me.

Thing #6: Mashups & 3rd party sites

Oh so many cool things to do!!! Here's a picture of my dog that I Warholized. I'll be back with more!

Thing #5: Flickr

So this is how the world shares it's photos online. I always thought you had to have your own website to post pictures and create photo albums. I'm gonna have to dig deeper into this. I can actually do something with all of those digital pictures I've taken over the last few years. I didn't realize how many pix would appear when I did a search with the keyword 'dyslexia'. These were my favs. I could spend hours and hours playing around in Flickr. It's neat how you can copyright your images and set it so that only certain people can view them. Talk to ya later...I've got pix to import to Flickr! TTFN:0)

Thing #4: Register my Blog

I guess I'm official now. Let's get ready to blog away! I can't wait to check out Flickr.

Thing #3: Set Up a Blog...and Make an Avatar

OMG!!! This one was kinda hard for me to get rolling on. I realized that I needed to keep the directions open in one window and the actual setting up of the blog and then the avatar and the extra help screens open in other windows. Then, all went smoothly. Now, which "Thing" tells us how we can look as good as our avatars, ha!!!

Thing #2: 7.5 Habits & Lifelong Learning

Hello out there! This is my first post so I hope I do this correctly. I guess if we're being honest, I have no trouble with Habit 7.5 because I like to play! I do have trouble with three of the 7.5 Habits. Habit 1: I sometimes have a hard time setting a time in which my goal should be complete. Being ADD, I have trouble with time anyway!!! And I get distracted while trying to reach my goal. For example, cleaning out my garage. I will have that completed before the new school year starts, ha!!! Habit 3: After reading the 7.5 Habits, I realized that I need to stop looking at an obstacle as a Crisis and view it as a Challenge. Habit 4: Stop the negative self-talk!!! Only positive thoughts will be in my mind and will come out of my mouth! Should that be a goal that I set? And how much time should I allow to complete that goal? Ha! Anywho...I'm excited about the 23 Things about which I'll be learning. I have kind of sheltered myself from advancing technology because I usually associate it with having to buy an expensive new gadget or thing-a-ma-bob. Now my mind is completely open and ready to move into this century!