Thing #23! Yea!

Answers to questions for final Thing!
1. Favorite discoveries or exercises were the RSS feeds so that I can organize my reading material. I also enjoyed learning what an Avatar was and creating my own personal Avatar!
2. This program has assisted my lifelong learning goals in many ways. I am always trying to stay on top of education and new ways of teaching. This program has offered my endless possibilities for making my classes creative and interesting. I want to get proficient at podcasting and actually video some of my cooking classes! I just need a "catch phrase" and I will be the next Emeril!!
3.The unexpected outcome for me was that I actually knew about the Photo Story program. You always love to hear that you are doing something right! I used it efficiently last year and plan to expand on it again this year along with other "things" that were in this program. I love learning about technology and trying to incorporate it into my classes. The students will teach me the rest of what I don't know!
4. I did not actually learn that you had help sessions on specific dates until the very end of this program. Sending out emails or constant reminders that the sessions are going on would be helpful. I know that I asked Vaughn to help me, but I did not know that there were actual classes held that I could attend with fellow teachers to learn more about what I was doing. It is always better to learn in a social setting!?!
5. I would definitely participate in another one of these programs! After attending the Family and Consumer Science Conference in Dallas, I learned that I was more technologically advanced than the presenters! One of my fellow teachers asked me if I would consider being a presenter for next year since I knew many ways to make their presentations much better already! I felt so sorry for the presenter that actually introduced the Photo Story concept and the poor example she gave! I almost ran up to the front with my laptop and said "Here, this is what it is suppose to look like and this is what your students are capable of doing"!!!! Thanks for having this program available.
6. I would describe my experience as "An incredible, enlightening, educational,journey through the infinite world of technology"!!!

Thing #22

Ning! That's a new word. In this social networking website, I see that it could be helpful since it is on a particular subject or works with a specific issue. In researching the sample websites, I thought that the "Teacher Librarian' website was really a good example of exactly how this tool could be useful. You are connecting other librarians from around that country that can share issues and ideas with many possible answers and solutions. Any group could benefit from subscribing to a NING site and conversing with other like individuals that are experiencing the same problems or successes as themselves. Being a Family and Consumer Science teacher, I feel that I would seek out a website like a NING to discover new ways to approach problems or lesson plans. Also, our particular subject has many issues now, even facing extinction in the classroom, and it would be helpful to discuss ways of making our voice heard in the education world. The Texas Librarian is another good idea since teachers in the same state face the same state mandated laws. I am glad to know about this tool and will seek out a NING that will be useful to my needs. Another great tool!

Thing #21

My students have already been doing PHOTOSTORY. I love this program! My Career Investigations classes worked with our librarian, Cindy Shultz, who taught them the program and about importing photos from FLICKR.COM. The assignment was to create a photo story about your chosen career. The students loved being creative with the music and script. Some students opted to just use music and write their captions in each frame. I thought that this would take awhile for the students to learn. WOW! Was I surprised when they said "we don't like the choices of music, can we download our own music"!!! If you have not used this wonderful tool, please do yourself a favor and let your students show you what they can do! I am uploading the photo story from a student that wanted to be an actress! Great video! Oh! I had the students save these to their student folders and graded them from their folders! Enjoy!

Thing #20 Paula Deen - Cast Iron Molds and Decorative Cast Iron Pieces - Cooking.com

Paula Deen - Cast Iron Molds and Decorative Cast Iron Pieces - Cooking.com

Finally! I have been totally frustrated with this one! I still don't know if I embedded this one correctly! I tried to embed a video from Teacher Tube and it would not work! I have downloaded the AVI conversion download to help with the conversion of the videos to my computer. I do have a very old computer, so this whole process has taken me alot longer because I had to wait forever on each window to come up!!! OK! Now on to the next thing!! I am almost done!!!

Thing #19

These WEb 2.0 sites are tremendous! What a great tool for my Skills for Living classroom. I could video (pod cast) my lessons or demos, and the students could view them if they were absent that day! I could save the really goods ones and share them with my colleagues! I could use these podcasts and even categorize them according to ingredients, specific foods, etc. We could also use this in my careers class to categorize jobs within a Career Cluster. We could even explore this as a job on the web! Great tool, once again!

Thing #18

Oh my goodness! What a great way to simplify your life! I am totally blown away with this online course. Every "thing" is so helpful and basically user friendly. I explored docs.google.com and could actually create my form and follow each instruction to fill it out and email to coworkers. I thought that the automatic summary and spreadsheet calculations were invaluable. This is great for collaboration with working documents where everyone can post their revision and you can come up with the actual finished product. Then, email it to everyone so that they can use it in their lessons or work. Incredible time-saver! No spending hours hunting down everyone for their part of the document! Wonderful!

Thing #17

Good job, Bruce! I got the websites that one of the presenters from the conference gave us on a "hand out" and placed them in a rollyo account. My students will be able to access these websites during our career searches! What a great tool to use with just about every project that you ask of your students! It is also a great assessment tool! You can ask the students specific questions from specific websites that you know they will access. Then, get creative with the assessments! I am wondering if you can add websites after the account is already established? I will have to play with this. New websites are always popping up that will enhance learning. It will be great if the rollyo is a "document in perpetual progress".