Final Thoughts

My two favorite exercise were the mashup and the animoto. I have learned that there are a lot of websites out there to help with incorporating technology into the classroom and to help me as a  teacher with lesson plans. There weren't any unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised me. In the future, I will look back at my blog and see how I can use the websites that I learned about in this program to help with my classroom. There were so many different tools that we learned about that I could see myself using in my teaching. I plan to keep up with technology by staying current with what is new on the internet.

Thing 23

While exploring the Creative Commons website, I learned that if I want other people to be able to legally use my work, then I have to add a creative commons. I will use this in my classroom by putting a creative commons only on worksheets, lesson plans, or any other work that I created that I want other people to be able to use as their own. If I come up with a worksheet that for some reason I don't want to share with others, I will just not put a creative commons on it.

Thing 22

The titles of my binders are Math, English, and Science. http://www.livebinders.com/play/play?id=661609&backurl=/shelf/my is the link to my Math binder. I could use LiveBinder by looking up lesson plan ideas and worksheets. Once I pick a few lesson plans or worksheets that I want to use, I could put them into a specific binder that pertains to a specific subject. I could then use those worksheet and lesson plans and put them in my lesson plans for my classroom.

Thing 21

Best Friends I had so much fun using this!! I played around on the site for at least an hour. It is a great tool to make pictures into a video and have fun!

Thing 20

I really like youtube. I think that it is a great website for many reasons! Youtube can be used for almost anything. You can find educational things on there, music, communicate across the nation, and much more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoyQPEx3xRI&feature=plcp The reason that I chose this link was because it is a video of a dance that I competed 4 years ago. There was a girl that was in Los Angeles and she was in the dance, but she had to learn it in a short period of time. We decided to post the video on youtube so that she could learn it while she was away. I thought that this was a really neat idea and an awesome use of youtube. I could see youtube being useful for my library website. The school could post pep rallies and different events on there as well as going around the school and taking short videos of each classroom. Kids would love this because they would feel like they are famous for being on the internet.

Thing 19

I am not a member of any online communities. I really liked the crafts link under hobbies. I would use this in my everyday life, as well as in my classroom. I could use it to get ideas for when I want to do crafts in the classroom to incorporate with what we are learning that day. I really enjoyed going through all of the sites and getting fun ideas for everyday life.

Thing 18

Link to my Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/taylor.engel.37

It is important for teachers to know how social networking works because it is a way for them to stay connected to what is going on around them. I did not know that schools had their own pages on Facebook. I thought that was really cool because parents can like these pages and always know what is going on at the school and in the community around them. I liked that almost all of the sites gave me an address and map for where the school was. My Junior High school had the most useful information. Out of all of the schools that I looked up, it seemed to be the one that was updated the most. I couldn't really seeing me using this for my specific classroom, but I could see it being useful for my school to have one.

Thing 17

I thought that Delicious was a pretty cool tool. I like that you are able to share it with other people so that you can get ideas from other teachers. I think it is always good to  be open-minded and willing to see what other people have to say. I could see myself using this for ideas for my classroom. I am the type of person that likes to get ideas from others. It is also nice that you can access this from anywhere and not just one single computer. Teachers could take advantage of social bookmarking sites by putting there ideas out there for other people to use in their classroom. It is also a good way for teachers to keep their classrooms current. They would always have new ideas and know what is the trend and how to incorporate that into their classroom. I really liked how there were tags. That helped my transfer from one idea to another and branch off of that.

Thing 16

For my start page I chose Netvibes. Netvibes stuck out to me because you could make it your own. You didn't have to chose from an example homepage that they had, you could just type in any word and it would create one for you. I also like how it gave you a little tutorial as to how to use it once you signed up. I probably wouldn't use this as a homepage because I already have a set homepage that I don't want to change, but I would probably visit this page on a regular basis.

The online calendar was pretty cool. It already put in national holidays and what the temperature is for the next 5 days. This could be helpful so that when I do my lesson plans, I can have an idea for if I want to take the kids outside one day, or when they will have off school. I also like that this is always handy and right at the click of a button. The online calendar that I chose was MSN calendar.

I think that the to-do list could be helpful, but I would probably not use it. If you are the type of person that is always on the computer and likes to have everything documented, then I think that this would be a good idea, but I am not that type of person. It was cool  to be able to set it up and play around with setting up when different things are due. For me, it was kind of the same thing as having a planner, but I would rather have a planner to write in and carry around with me than a to-do list on the computer.

The tool that would probably be the most use to me would be the online calendar. I wouldn't use this as my calendar at home, but I would recommend it for teachers. I  think it is a great way to plan out what you are going to be doing each week in the classroom.

Thing 15

I always knew that anybody could add, delete, or change things on wiki, but I never knew how it was done. I enjoyed learning how to play around on it and getting a little more familiar with it. As a teacher, I could post a class page and let students and parents communicate with me that way. I could also get some awesome ideas from other teachers on wiki. Wiki was something that I had always known about, but never took the time to work with. Come to find out, it could be really helpful for me in the future.

Thing 14

I chose to us Gliffy as my flowchart and Bubbl.us as my mind map. I preferred to use the mind map because it helped me organize my thoughts better. When I used Bubbl.us, I liked that each level was determined by a specific color. Some of my sections would have a lot more ideas branched off of them than others, and sometimes I would get confused on where I was, so then I just looked at which one was what color. I used this to help me organize my research paper for another class and it was really helpful.

Thing 13

I started out just using Zoho Writer like I would typically use Microsoft Word. Once I got a little more comfortable with it, I realized that you could add shapes and all different kinds of things in there. This could be really beneficial for a teacher like me because I want to teach third grade math and I could use shapes in a lot of my worksheets that I print off and on tests. Zoho Writer would make it easier to compose these worksheets and tests on a regular basis.

The link to my Google Doc is: https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/18HtaftO7k8gaSw1HtljfaOa1_r3XeJK0p_-UEVRjViU/edit my students could use the program to work with new shapes and equations. In the document that I created, I just used shapes, but you can create equations and all kinds of things in there. I think that students would enjoy doing this because for one, they would probably like to change things up from using paper and a pencil all the time, and two because now a days technology is taking over the world. Kids love to use computers and play games, so this would be a fun activity to do with them, while they are learning at the same time.

I think that I would prefer to use Google Doc because you can do more things with it than Zoho. Even though Zoho would be very helpful, it is still pretty similar to Microsoft Word.