Thing #23

YAY.... I finally finished something I started...

1. My favorite part of this experience has been reading other blogs and having people comment on my blog. I even made new friends!!

2. This process showed me what I know about 2.0... what I don't know... what I want to know... and how much there is to know. Very eye opening study!

3. Well honestly the most unexpected outcome of the process was that I stuck with it and finished. I am a strong beginner but a weak finisher. There were things I learned about myself and my procrastination issues. I have set some personal goals that I think will help with this problem.

4. 23 Things was the best summer program I have ever taken. My time was always well spent and I feel that I have learned something that will help me be a better teacher.

5. I would most definitely take another program like this one. I truly hope another one is offered next summer.

6. Infinity Learning

Thing #22

Nings... once again I sit before this computer and am amazed at where technology has gone. I loved TeacherLingo. I got on the Lesson Plans portion and got several great ideas for my math students. They were very hands on lessons and ones that I have never heard of. So, I will check this site often to get ideas.

Again, social networking is this generations way. It is the way they roll as they would say. MySpace and Facebook do have their problems but if used properly it is a way for people to keep in touch with a huge amount of people. Our job force is dependent on networking, this generation will be way ahead of the game as far as I am concerned because networking is a part of them just like checking email... GREAT Thing!

Thing #21

Ok I'm feeling like my SPED students once again. I followed all the directions but my podcasts is lost in syberspace along with some other Things this summer.

My middle school students use this all the time. I intend to get one of the students I tutor to tutor me so that I can use this. My 5th grade niece even told me she could tutor me on this Thing. She sends me her "movies" all the time. How do you think I feel now...

I do think this is a great tool for students and teachers. I can see projects being podcast, I am going to talk to our campus Math Ciss and see what we can come up with for a tech project with my 8th graders in

Thing #20

Also one of my favorite Things we have done. I feel that our district should be a little more lenient with us being able to use YouTube in the classroom. I chose Mathematics & Art as the video to share. I would love to show this on the first day of class to show my SPED students that math is not just about adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. Math can be art!

Thing #19

WOW... looking back on my notes this Thing was my favorite!! Finally something I was already using. But I found MORE...

Catergories:

Fun- Hairmixer is a blast. When you want a good laugh do this and laugh at yourself...

Health- iMedix is a wonderful site. I have been sick since May and have used this site often to look up my symptons and see what I should do that I was already doing.

Guides and Reviews- I use Citysearch all the time. Just moving into the city two years ago was overwhelming. So I started using Citysearch to find the things I needed to change from Humble to Houston. The rating are always very appropriate.

Maps- My husband is in the land development business and he uses Google Earth often. It is pretty fascinating.

Social- My daughter is addicted to Facebook. I can see why since she can stay connected to all her friends from high school, college, and other areas of her life through the same system.

School- I will tell my friend that teaches SPED LA about One Sentence which you will find true stories told in one sentence. and Comiqs which you take your own photos + doodles + your story = your own comic strip.

Thing #18

Wow It has been a while... I took off from course while I was teaching ESY and shouldn't have!

In the age of financial cut-backs I truly think we are going to be forced to try new "free" things offered for us.

Google Docs- I think this would be wonderful since teachers could collaborate together while working on the same idea, rubrics came to mind.

OpenOffice.org- Definitely an alternative to Micro Office which is expensive. I think this is the wave of the future...

Thing #17

FRUSTRATED IN MID-TOWN... I thought I followed all the directions for Rollyo's but still can't get mine on my blog. Will keep trying but I'm getting mad at myself and when that happens things really start to fall apart. :(

I can see how Rollyo's could make my life easier. I did my search on teaching students with autism and found wonderful new ideas.

Thing #16

Wiki such a cute name for such a powerful tool! Once again I am made aware of how much I don't know about technology. I think I have hit the too much information for this little brain of mine point... so many ideas are swimming around in my head about what could be done with this concept. With my SPED kiddos it will take some creative thinking to use this in my classroom and have control over the usage but I am going to come up with something because it is such a great idea to have kids of different levels collaborate and spring board ideas off of each other.

First and foremost I want to all say that one of the articles I read with this thing should how staff development should be being delivered. The district spent all this money for us to have lap tops and what better way to see their payoff than to utilize them in our staff days. Collaboration and interactive are the buzz words of education right now... lets stop talking about it and start using it to the fullest!

23 Things has been the best time I have ever spent in staff development time.!

Thing #15

I am glad I am not the Librarian!!!

I have always been amazed at our Librarian at MMS but now I have a new found respect for her. Her job is HUGE! I found this reading very interesting and almost profound. Libraries as I know them are a thing of the past... I feel old. One thing that shot out at me was a quote from one of the articles that Libraries should be places of collaboration and conversation. WOW I said that back in college but I was told to shhhhhhh. Now it is a must! Change is good!

I think I am climbing up on my soap box... yeah I am. Why in the world does our district not mandate this type of information to every teacher in the form of inservice days. This type of stuff would benefit each employee in the school district and serve us much better than some of the stuff we are forced to listen to. As you can tell I think the world of our Librarian, she could teach our campus so much. IF we were to learn together it would open up a road of collaboration and conversation between teachers across the entire campus, using the Library for what is should be used for in our day and age of technology. Our campus is very lucky we have so many computers plus each teacher has laptop... learning together would be fun and oh so beneficial.

OK I have stepped down now and am going to bed. Thing #15 was good...

Thing #14

Its late and I'm getting sleepy so this will be short and straight to the point.

After spending several hours looking over all the different aspects this Thing offered I have now come to the following conclusion: "If we as educators don't get on the band wagon with learning everything we can about technology in the classroom we are going to be left behind by our own students!" They will soon be teaching us...

I am truly amazed at the enormous amount of information that is on the web about everything. I just started typing in what ever word came into my head and BINGO there were pages and pages of information, opinions, data, etc about everything I typed in. I got caught up with reading blogs on Yorkie behavior training. My daughter's Yorkie, CoCo is very aggressive and through my searching I found a school here in Houston to send her to. I even tagged several things to go back and read more. As of this moment I am leaving my fear of the unknown behind and realizing that my "unknown" is simply someone elses "known" and it is on the web for me to search and find. Learning is a good thing!

Thing #13

As I sit listening to the thunder holding my Yorkie, Beasley, who is scared out of his mind I ponder on why he is so scared. Then I realize it is because it is an "unknown" to him. He hears the thunder but has no idea what it is... fear of the unknown gets each one of us at sometime. This thought process brings me to this course. I like Beasley am scared of the unknown. I don't use bookmarks nor tags because I have never really understood them... I have always felt if I bookmarked everything I like my computer would crash. I am looking at this concept in a different way now that I have completed Thing #13. Yes, I am still scared of it and not sure in my position how I would use it without spending all my down time setting up bookmarks but I am going to try. I am going to make a stab at creating tags for instructional concepts. I am always coming across an idea on how to teach SPED kiddos certain concepts, then when that concept comes up in my lesson plans I can't find the site again. No more... my sites are now at my fingertips.

Thing #12

Well this "Thing" was both positive and negative for me... :) It forced me to take the time to read others blogs which was very interesting. I felt very intimidated by some blogs. Mine is very elementary compared to many but then I also read the pain of other newbies so I know that I am not alone on this quest of discovery. Reflecting on my feelings of inadequacy while reading some of the blogs made me take a long look at how my SPED students feel everyday of their lives. Feeling dumb is not fun!

Thing #11

OK I have finally hit a rough spot. I have tried and tried to get my library imported to my blog and have not been successful after a couple of hours. I did enjoy using LibraryThing and easily found the books that I used so far this summer in my ESY cooking rotation. I can see as a language arts teacher or librarian how this would be a wonderful tool to use with book clubs.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/conlyn57

Thing #10

This was fun! I enjoyed playing with all the different types offered in the lesson. I could so use these on my math test as places for hints for the students. In the new math books the hints are in cute eye catchy icons... I could use the same idea on test and test reviews.

Thing #9

Either I am getting the hang of this or the "Things" are causing me to be like a sponge and absorb every thing possible. I could have stayed searching these sites for hours. I have already been looking for over two... Summer school started yesterday. I am teaching in the ESY program. I thought I was teaching cooking during rotations... yesterday I find out I am also teaching academics plus cooking. Know these students are life skills... I have never taught life skills. All of my experience has been in the Resource Classroom. Looking over their IEP's and life task I cried all the way home wondering what I had gotten myself into. Calling my mother, yes I still do that at 51... she listened and then gave her all so wonderful words of wisdom, " Connie, as always you know you will learn many lessons from them, now it is in your hands what lessons they will learn from you. There is reason for everything, make this experience the best you can for your students and yourself." OK I stopped whining and got to work. Which leads me to "Thing #9". I used this lesson to search for quality read-alouds that I can use with my ESY kiddos. I have been teaching only math for the past two years so I am a little rusty on current literature. Not anymore... I now have pages and pages of quality read-aloud titles and lesson ideas from scouring the many blogs sites that dealt with this topic. I found that Google Blog Search and Blogline's were two most user friendly and with the most information on my search. I could not get School Library Blog on Suprglu to ever come up. I was disappointed in that. It has been a successful day and it is only 9:30...

Thing # 8

OK the "Things" are getting more and more fun and very beneficial. I am a news junkie but I hate listening to the news on TV because I believe that the media slants things to their point of view. I have always wanted to say, " just give me a two sentence summary and move on." Now after finding out about RSS and setting up my account I can now simply get the highlights or "needs to know" point from all aspects of life that I am interested in: national news, celebrities, quotes, and stock market. I am not sure how I can use this in the classroom but the Library would be a terrific place to have one computer set up that the students could go and get the highlights of the news from around the world. I found the following quote from one of the Google sites and would like to share it with you. I laughed out loud when I read it because it is so ME...

"I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on!"

Beryl Pfizer

Thing #7

GOOGLE... Now we are having fun! I really enjoyed this "Thing"! I am teaching a class for Paras at the beginning of the school year about the important use of manipulates in math to students with learning disabilities. I was blown away by the amount of research based PowerPoints that I found through Google Advanced Search. With all the information I found my presentation for the summer workshop is already half finished. The amount of new data based information that can be found at the touch of a key is amazing. I need to spend my computer addiction time surfing Google for teaching ideas rather than spending time reading People.com and IM'ing my friends.

I also really enjoyed spending time getting comfortable with Google Earth. My math students would love the Explore the Sky and Fly to Any Place search areas. The more instruction can be personal the better for my students.

Thing #6

OMG... I never knew there was so much fun stuff that my kids at school could be doing that would increase their computer skills plus integrate some basic math skills. Teaching Special Education I am always looking for fun ideas for our "down" time that can keep the kids interested but also have a benefit. I enjoyed looking at all of the sites. The ones most interesting were from Big Huge Labs. I could use the kids pictures from my digital camera and make individual motivational posters and individual calendars that they could use for their daily calendar work. I also like Clockr. I am wondering how hard it would be to mashup their pictures with the clock...humm. They love to see their own faces!!!

Thing #5

I'm getting better! It only took me three tries to get my "math" pic on my blog. YAY for me! I did have some schema for tags and groups but I had never looked at Flickr before. Great site and I will use it next year on the kids encouragement notes that I write them. I wish I could get the pic I used in a poster size for my room. I think I will have the kids pick out a "math" pic that represents their thoughts on learning math and make a poster for each class period. The more can get them to personalize learning math the better the end result.

Thing #4

I'm registered and ready to start blogging!

Thing #3

I now have an Avatar... 10 failed trys to export successful on 11th try. I feel pleased with myself! Wished I still looked like my Avatar... oh well... life goes on!

Thing #1

OMG what have I gotten myself into? Just reading and re-reading Thing #1 has shown me how far removed I really am from the area of tech communication. I don't even know what some of the words mean. I have prided myself on being 50 and knowing how to IM, text, and email... wow I am behind the times. I signed up for this thinking it would be an easy 18 con-ed hours... I'm now thinking it will be more like 180 hours. But I am giving it my all and going to do my best for it to be a FUN experience!

Thing #2

This was easy as if you were to ask any of my students they would say I excel in playtime. I truly believe that an inner child lives in each of us and if that child is not nurtured with laughter and play daily then the child shuts down and zero learning takes place. I will turn 51 next week and I am still as playful today as I was as a child. I could not survive without play and laughter!

But as play is my easiest it also causes goal setting to be my hardest. The inner child in me takes over when I hear write down your goal and set a time to have accomplished it, I hear a dead line and I panic and tend to put that task on the back burner and wait until the very last minute to finish and then I find myself in BIG TROUBLE! And I don't like to be in trouble!