Thing 16

This is a pretty neat website. While I do not classify myself as a "reader", I'm trying to work on that! I took the challenge from some dear friends to actually read one whole novel, front to back, in it's entirety this summer! I did it! Woohoo! Not only did I read one, I read 7 novels all by the same author. I've put those books in my LibraryThing library. You can view them to see what you think! In addition, I read the eighth novel this past November while second honeymooning in Cancun. My husband was a little frustrated because all I wanted to do was go to the beach, lay in the sun and read this eighth novel!
As for classroom applications, I can see endless possibilities - especially if you can hook your students into the love of reading. While younger grades probably couldn't build great libraries right away - imagine the power if they kept their accounts over several school years! What a great "scrapbook" of learning. The teacher could have students form groups, make comments, summaries, character analysis all on this one site! Pretty cool. Maybe when I become a reader, I can fill up my library! :-)

Thing #15

Social Bookmarking - not at all what I thought it would be! I thought this was going to be a social activity like Facebook or MySpace! I'm so glad to learn it isn't! I'm happy to have found a very powerful tool! I don't feel super proficient at it, yet, I'm sure I'll get there the more I use it. I can not find where to do the last part of the activity where we are supposed to find our shared tags on our wiki! I'll keep looking! Anyway - thought this was very cool. I can see using this as a classroom teacher like the example by Lee LeFever (BTW - those videos are so cool). Is there a way to hide the tool bar on the top of Mozilla? I don't like having all of these random bookmarks showing - I would rather them be a drop down box if we have to have it at all! Seems like we don't need it if we have a link to Delicious showing!

Thing #7a

I have enjoyed following my RSS reader! Today, my uncle sent me an unusual blog that I have now added to my reader. It is blog written from the point of view of President Obama's teleprompter. While I don't really pride myself on following the political jockeying or even politics in general, the creativity caught my attention, so I thought I would share. I don't understand half of what is written, because I don't keep up with it all, but it is a unique idea!
On a more serious note, one of the feeds that I have starred is from a LeaderTalk blog. It is a blog designed for those in school leadership. It is very interesting and thought provoking. One of my favorite entries is called Leadership Flavor of the Week. Check it out for those of you in educational leadership... makes you stop and think!

Thing # 14

What fun and more fun! This "focused play" was really cool. I tried out several things. First I tried the Letterpop and made my weekly memo using this tool. It was okay, I guess. With some gettting used to, it might be more fun! It seemed a bit constricting with sizes of boxes that I could write in, limited fonts and few pictures/themes to choose from. I think that if you pay for a subscription, you can add more of your own pictures etc...
After that, I went tried making a mixbook. This was a fun site. I started working on a book of our spring break pictures, but didn't finish. One cool thing I saw was that others can add to your book. So my sister or friends that accompanied us on all of the outings, could add their pictures! That is kinda cool. I prefer to use Snapfish or Smilebox for this same type of thing. Smilebox is my favorite because it has tons of themes and allows you to print your books, purchase them or just send them via email for free! It is one place I would highly recommend trying! I'll add a Smilebox Creation to the bottom of the post! Enjoy!
Lastly, I tried Wordle. I made one with each of my kids' names.




It was kind of fun! I can see adding this to presentations and other forms of publications that I have to use!
Thanks for giving us the opportunity to explore some new things! It was fun!

Here is the Smilebox I created! Follow the narration on the bottom left as you click on each egg! Enjoy!

Make a Smilebox greeting

Thing #13

I love the Spell with Flickr Tool! It is so much fun to make unique signs and words! I've seen our preacher at church use these letters for his powerpoint notes, but never knew where they came from! I used them to spell out the kid's names! Aren't they cute! This would be a great way to spice up presentations that I give! I will have to work on the formatting to make them smaller to fit on my blog without going to a second line, but you get the idea!







I also played with the smiley face feature! I created a seasonal smiley that I could add to the bottom of my emails! I've seen several people in the district have these cute little icons attached. I always have a seasonal antenna topper and the kids love it! Maybe I should add this to my emails and make others smile!


Another really fun tool was the trading card maker! I'm not sure what all I could do with this tool, but it was fun to make!

Thing #12

After reading a really good blog post referenced by my friend, techsploringprincipal, called the Beware of the Ants of Annoyance and then the teamwork picture by Macropoulos from Thing#11, I've decided to create a slide show dedicated to the hard working teams of ants that work together day in and day out! So thank you ants for all you've done to inspire me lately!

Thing #11

This year, our campus has chosen the them, "Champions of Success." As we were involved in our first round of testing this week, I was reminded of all the "little" things that got us where we are! We've also chosen to talk about teamwork and everyone doing their part to help us reach that Exemplary Level that we are striving for. So I wanted to inspire the teachers and students this week, as I already spoke about in Thing#10. I didn't have much luck finding a video, but I found a picture that says a thousand words using Flickr.

Teamwork by marcopaulo

The task of these ants was monumental! They had to conquer something so huge, at least 100 times their size. Yet, they didn't do it alone. All of the ants came together to move this moth back to their colony! Amazing the task at hand and the teamwork it took to get it done!

Flickr is a great way to find some amazing resources. I'm always hunting clip art for various things and yet never ever thought to look in such a place - just figuring anything outside of Microsoft Office was probably covered by that C guy and I'd get in trouble by someone for using it!

I spent some time looking at the lesson plans. I had a student this week on TAKS writing that literally sat for more than 9 hours without writing a single thing on his paper because he couldn't "think" of anything to write about. I thought what are we doing to our kids... this writing thing is so hard for them. As I explored Flickr, I saw a really cool link. Story Telling in 5 pictures. Some people are so creative. Here is a link to my favorite story that I saw. Chores. Perhaps it's my favorite because I've spent the better part of my day doing tons of chores - this story makes it seem so easy!

Could we use these Flickr pictures to inspire our kids to write! How amazing it might be!

Thing #10

Creative Commons! What a really neat idea! It seems so "anti -current-culture". You know what I mean? Everyone is out to create something that is theirs to make money and yet it seems to be a whole world of people willing to share? Is that really possible?

The possibilities of this "willingness to share" seem so exciting and such a relief! Now don't tell my mom, but I'm not a huge fan of copyright and often turn my head the other way when copyright issues come about! I understand the need, but it is so constricting! It really gets in the way of school so often! I won't do anything blatantly against copyright, but I don't always check into the "C" of something before using it!

I've never noticed a "cc" on any document, or maybe I have and turned the other way not knowing that I didn't have to! I'll certainly start keeping my eye out for it, now! Move on over Mr. Big C, I've got a new best friend!!

-S-T-R-E-T-C-H- -M-E-
I visited the OER website which I learned was the Open Educational Resources Site. I was looking for some "motivating video" to show my students before TAKS about believing in themselves, and all that other good stuff. While I didn't find anything fitting that specific content, I kept following all these links to great lessons! What fun! The Ooblek lesson was there along with other old faithfuls as well as lots of new ones! I wonder if our curriculum departments have spent anytime here? What a great resource!