Thing 19

Online communities can be a great place to get to know people as well as a great tool to help you keep up with certain interests. I am a member of several online communities including teacherPoP. I enjoy spending time meeting other people and learning more about things I enjoy doing. I found myself drawn to What's On My Bookshelf. I ended up making an account and I plan to go home and start loading books to for other people to trade. I might find some social network sites useful later but for now I am going to enjoy trying my hand at my new online community.

Thing 18

The link to my Twitter is here. I think it is important for educators to understand social networking sites because it allows teachers to keep up with the social needs of their students. We can even see when our students are being bullied in cyber space. I do not care for twitter because it can get too social because of all the silly updates you can get from celeberties.  I do not see an educational use for twitter. I have a personal facebook that I keep very private but I choose not to share the link to it. I enjoy facebook but I do not think it has any educational value.

Thing 17

I do not like del.icio.us. I found it to be a big waste of time. While anyone can now save bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere, it is hard to navigate. I I uninstalled the tool bar after just a couple of uses. I had a hard time finding my bookmarks after I saved them. This is not a tool I can see a teacher using in a classroom. I know I will not use it in my classroom. I refuse to use other social bookmarking sites as well.

Thing 16

The start page I choose was Women For Women. This start page spoke to me because of the classes I am taking this semester. I feel that women need to find their voice and use it to help other women find their own voice. I have already made my new start page my home page. I love having it be the first thing I see when I start up the internet. The online calendars would be very useful to keep in an educational setting to help students know about upcoming events in your classroom. These calendars could also be useful for giving you reminders about upcoming events. I enjoyed using Ta-Da List but it was a lot of work. I will however keep my to-do list on my start page. I like having all my needs in one spot. I used lifehacker.com to help me learn how to make my computer more productive. I liked this tool a lot and added it to my google reader.

Thing 15

I had a hard time with the APSU23Things sandbox. It was more trouble than it was worth. I am sure wikis can be useful in an educational setting. I might even create one for a presentation I have coming up. This idea is awesome. I would love to see this concept come to fruition and be used in classrooms. I also think that looking at other people's wikis can be helpful even if anyone can edit the information. My only concern with wikis is that since anyone can edit the wiki, you might have someone trying to cause problems or mess up something and you end up with incorrect information. I will try my hand at creating one down the road and I just might come to like it.

Thing 14

The first tool I choose was bubbl.us. This site was so user friendly. I had a blast making my mind map. I had a hard time brain storming an idea to start this off with. I think this tool could be useful for planning for a field trip or even what activities we are gonna do next week. This tool might even be useful for brain storming on a paper. I can see myself using this tool in the future.


The second tool I choose to work with was gliffy.com. I hated this site because there was no real guide to get you through your first use of the site. I felt like I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off. I wish this site could be more user friendly or have a tutorial. This site does not have any real educational value that I can see.I will not use this site in the future.

Thing 13

I was not a fan of ZOHO. I found that since I could not post my documents directly to my blog, I had to copy and paste my response into blogger. I do not see how this could be useful in the classroom. I refuse to ever use this site again. I guess it might be helpful in you had no word processing program on the computer.

Here are my thoughts on Google Docs

Overall I prefer googledocs because it allows sharing and editing among groups of people. ZOHO is more difficult to use and sharing is not easy to do. I hope that I have some chances for my students to use googledocs in the classroom.