I Did it!

Wow! I just did voicethread and it really was so easy! I can't believe it because as I have lamented in this space, technology can be fickle with me! I love it but it acts up on me and I get frustrated.

I really like voicethread! The pictures uploaded so easily to the site and it was way easy to record too! It really was like sending an email. And I love the feature where you can export it and all of your options are right there! So quick and easy. Wow!

i am so happy I did it and I am also happy that I will be on time with the assignment! :)

I will remove this after you grade it because I do not want my children up on my school's website1 LOL!

Podcast Blues

This week was a mixed bag for me. I had difficulty with several of the podcast sites. And for some reason, it seems like I always have a hard time with the iTunes site. The window will never close for me (it just freezes on me) and I have to work around it. Even when I'm synching music, some of the tabs aren't there at first and I get so confused and frustrated. I don't know why that happens. I go to the help tab but still, I do what it says and it doesn't work. Argh! practive, practice, practice.

I downloaded the newer version (9?) and it seems to be going OK for me and on a positive note, I had no IDEA what wonderful free podcasts they have! I must get a car adaptor so I can listen to my iPod when driving--- for music, books and podcasts.

I'm curious though: I wonder how students would react to the podcasts of educational content? I totally get how they like their music and maybe some of them would like to listen to books and it would great to encourage it with reluctant or struggling readers but I'm wondering if high school students would actually listen to educational podcasts? I know they'd listen to friends and would probably really get into "creating" one.

All this iPod talk this week is making me pine for an iPod Touch! They really are beautiful!

I didn't have time to complete the voice thread/video assignment so I will have to complete that tomorrow and post it. This week had a lot of content and assignemnts and was a bit overwhelming. It was the first week where I really felt both overwhelmed and ineffective! It'll get better.

On a more postive note, the CANTON BOYS HOCKEY TEAM WON THE DIV.II CHAMPIONSHIP AT THE GARDEN TODAY!

It was a great game and well deserved for the team! I'm so glad I went with my family to watch it.

Navigating Teacher Tube

Wow, this was so easy to link to my blog! Amazing! I was wonder though, how I could embeded the whole video so people would just have to press the play button. I have seen this on other blogs and really like it. I'll have to play around with it.

Actually, I should use You Tube or Teacher Tube to find out how to do this! In one of my classes, I wanted to embeded a YouTube video in a PowerPoint and so I searched how to do this on You Tube and someone showed me thru their posted YouTube video tutorial on how do it in three minutes! At the time, I remember thinking I was using YouTube to learn how to use YouTube! So surreal!

I just found the ass video button on the task bar above.....gotta figure out how that works and what it'll do.

These is a very cool video by a history teacher in NY and he has many others simliar to it on TeacherTube.He uses visuals and mnumonic devices to help kids study for the Regents exams but these could be shown in any US History class. What a great way to get kids attention and have them learn something they will likely remember becasue this teacher's presentation is so memorable.

I have no idea how to get rid of this yellow highlighter on the text above!

Easy Ways to Remember Constitutional Amendments

Hello Flickr & Evernote! How Do I Love Thee?

OK, why have I not hopped on the Flickr bandwagon until now? Why didn't I join it earlier?
I think because I had thought it was a public place to share photos, I didn't realize you could set privacy settings so only family & friends can see which is important to me.


I am loving how Flickr allows you to write notes underneath the photo, a huge feature for me as a hobbyist photographer and scrapbooker. That is so cool! Goodbye Kodak Gallery & hello Flickr for me!

Flickr seems to be working with Snapfish as a developer and I am a diehard Kodak Gallery fan so we'll see. It does seem to be that there is always a relationship made between one of this major tools and another company (Flickr & Snapfish, iPhone & AT & T etc).

Oh yeah, I'm suppose to talk about the educational benefits of Flickr! :)

In Richardson's chapter on Flickr, the description on how to find out the origin of where a photo was taken or uploaded was really cool but a bit scary too!

I can definitely see how Flickr can be used in an effective way in our Photography classes we have at my school, where students can share and critique their work. For history related topics, though, you could also do a search of Civil War photos, for example, and great pictures come up. I really think history classes would find it very useful too.

Evernote is another amazing program! Good-bye "favorites" feature on my computer! This is exactly what I need, especially now as a librarian. I can see why Bryan calls it his right hand when searching on the web. This program is so helpful. It may be worth upgrading to the premium account.


I have to explore StumbleUpon more and that too looks great! It is like your own personal search engine or favorites site! My favorite menu bar on my PC has a LOT of pages on it! This seems more doable.


When I did a quick "stumble" for photography, the first webpage I came too had photos of Star Wars stormtroopers posing in funny position (not R-rated) but very very and humorous! I never would have come across that if I didn't stumble upon it. :)


I am blown away by the sheer innovation of these tools. We really are in the midst of a technological revolution and we're smack in the middle of it! So cool!

RSS Feeds, Google Reader & Delicious Oh My!

Wow!

Google Reader is addicting! I just kept adding and adding the RSS feeds. I really think I may have to delete many of them because I don't know how realistic it is to think I can read all of it but it really is an amazing tool as all Google products are.

There were so many RSS feeds on the School Library Journal site! I think I added nearly all of them but I have to go back and make sure.

What I find with many of these technologies is that I just "jump right in" and really don't read things over carefully before I start. I have to refrain from doing that and really start using the help button and watching the accompanying videos! :) Why am I in such a rush?

I'm still working on getting my delicious toolbar to work correctly. I think I may use my original work account that I started two years ago. It seems like it would be easier. We'll see. :)

Getting the Hang of Things

Phew....technology can be challenging!

I just added the Shelfari widget to this blog which took a little bit of time because it originally went to my personal blog! I finally figured things out.

However, Delicious is still challenging me because it is somehow connected to a yahoo account of mine while the blogger blog is connected to my gmail account and I am getting so confused with what emails I am using and the passwords! Yikes! I am really trying to use my school accounts for school related work and am developing the library blog and tags so I want to keep things separate for simplicity sake but it difficult.

I have the Diigo widget (?) and it is saving for me nicely but the delicious one is not. I have a personal delicious account, a work delicious account and I just set up a library one but I can't seem to get it to work correctly in my toolbar. I am experimenting with Chrome so I am getting to use to that too. Ugh!

But.....I just spent over an hour on Shelfari and I love it! I am part of Good Reads but I think I like Shelfari better. I think it looks visually better. Someone in class had their Shelfari with some great tags, like summer reading, and I want to learn how to do that. I can how helpful that would be.

Tomorrow I am going to explore more with Delicious and Diigo to see if I can get that running better and I'd love to get a widget on this blog too. We'll see....

I am learning more about other programs too, like Evernotes and Tumblr! And I want to know what Digg is too and how that is different from Diigo. I was getting Diigo and Digg mixed up, I wonder why? :)

Deep breathes.

I briefly explored Google Reader and know a bit about RSS Feeds but I really need to continue to explore those apps further.

Wiki Wiki Wiki

I do like saying that word! It has a nice sound to it! :)

I made progress with learning more about wikis by setting up a NEASC wiki so this will be very useful for me right now! I am a co-chair of the NEASC core values committee and we have only been meeting every other month. Next year is our self-study and everything starts and ends with the core values and mission statement so there's lots of work to do.

Having a wiki for this work, I think, will be so helpful for all of us, especially when we have to write and edit it. I am also looking forward to exposing the teachers to this technology too! What a great opportunity to integrate technology in our everyday work. I think many schools still just think of email and websites as technology and don't realize what is out there.

I LOVED Richardson's chapter on wikis!

In fact, I want to copy it and give it to all of the faculty to read, especially several departments who are anti-wikipedia.

The help button was useful on the site but I found myself initially just trying to set up the wiki on my own! Note to self: read and reread or watch and rewatch the tutorial on the site!

After a few frustrations, I started to catch on and have gotten use to using the edit button. There is no spell check as far as I can tell and there is no "undo" button which I really wanted many times! But overall, I think I have the wiki set up how I want it to look with the exception of the left side bars. I have to work on that this week and get to know more of the features.

I'd like to send invitations out to my NEASC group before we return to school next week.

Overall, I had a fairly good experience setting this up. I tried PBwiki one time but I can't honestly compare the two yet.

The wiki address is: chs-neasc-core-values.wikispaces.com

As for blogging, I'm getting better with the image postioning. However, I still have difficulty with the spacing even though I check preview. Visually, it seems off to me but I am working on it.