Thing 15

I found that wiki's encourage group projects. It supports group projects by allowing people to edit pages and contribute to your own workspace. I feel like wikipedia was a good idea, but has been taken out of context. You can no longer use this site as a source of good infomation because so many people have changed the right information to wrong facts either to be funny or just because its fun to change history. I would use a wiki in my classroom to let students edit each others information. I think it is interesting that you can edit information in the web! It is cool to input your own thoughts.

Thing 16

In this post, I have discovered that, once again, Google is the best thing out there! iGoogle allows for users to customize their own homepage which is useful because not everyone is the same. I organize my things different than someone else does. I had fun looking through the widgets that can be added on. As an educator, this can be useful for fast access to email, weather, and current events that are taking place that day.
As an avid online user, the online calendars are very useful to me. Every new event that is taking place can be added on the fly and accessed later. Also, reminders will pop-up which is always beneficial to all of the forgetful ones out there. This would be useful in my classroom because if the parents used this site, reminders could be sent to them about classroom events that were coming up. Being organized is a huge step towards becoming an effective teacher.
For me, the To-Do lists were great! I can type faster than I write and so listing everything that I need to do online is useful. It also helps legibility.
Hands down, MyStickies is the coolest thing! It allows you to use the internet like a book! This is very useful for research or even just browsing for fun! I think it was a great idea to be able to put virtual sticky notes anywhere on a web page!

Thing 14

In this post, we were to explore flow charts and mind maps. A mind map is like a chart of your own thoughts. The difference between a flow chart and a mind map is that a mind map has one main idea with others centered around it. I created a 'map' of things that i love and connected them. on Bubbl.us. This was a simple idea, but you could use this site to brainstorm ideas for a paper or for a project. I would recommend this site to students who wanted/needed to organize their thoughts. I will use this site in the future for the same reason. I also got to use a flow chart o Gliffy.com. Not only did i find a flow chart, but i also found floor plan section. I find floor plans and interior design SO interesting. In fact, if becoming a teacher had not worked out, i would have majored in Interior Design. I have to say that i played around on the site way more than i did on Bubbl.us. I found it to be very entertaining.

Thing 13

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1t5x02Evr20Rgi5XWEiQEk5DQ3IowGBzHBZyHC_qMCuc/edit?hl=en#
The hyperlink above is an 'about me' that i typed in Google Docs. I perfer Google Docs to Zoho, because as i mentioned in the previous blog post, i am a big Google user. I find the interface simple and you dont have to sign up for an account like i had to with Zoho. I think that as a future teacher, i may have my students work together on an assignment using Google docs. They can see what others are writing if you hit the share button. I think students that share their ideas with one another is a great thing. You are never too old to learn something from someone. Children have gret ideas and this tool on the web can allow that to happen in a fun, easy way.

Thing 12

For this post we had to expolore Google tools. I love Google and i always use it as a search engine. However, i think i will use it much more now that i know all that i can do! The first tool i explored was Google Calendar. I like to be organized and i felt like this is a great way to keep track of my schedule since i am online everyday anyways. The second tool i used was Google alert. Not only ca i use this in my personal life, i can also use it in the classroom. I can set up an alert for the Florida Gators football team, and keep track of lets say a particular science experiment as it develops. That way as the experiment pogresses, my class and i will be notified of any changes that are made.

Thing 11

In this thing, we had to play around with more RSS feeds. Syndic8 was the most confusing. There were so many different sites that didn’t make a lot of sense. I also tried Topix.net. I felt like this one wasn’t much of what I would use because it was about news. I feel like I would only use that every now and then. Technorati was ineresting. It was somethin that i would use personally to kep track of Celebrities and their lives. One unusual post that I found was a blog called Observations of a Brain-Damaged Troll. It was about this guy that talked about issues in politics. One of his posts included ‘Limbaugh calls Michelle Obama fat’. I found this post to be interesting and unusual. I found this on Technorati. In this site, i also found that the keyword search ws simple to use. I typed in 'Florida Gators' and pages popped up about this topic. If you ever needed a particular topic, you could type any keyword and information would come up about it. Another way that i was able to locate news feeds was the tag index. I found it easy to locate ceratin topics by the alphabet. Some useful feeds i found were one about Blackberry. Since i recently got a blackberry, this feed would be helpful to me if i ever have any questions about my phone.

Thing 10

I like RSS feeds because it can help you keep track of what is going on with a certain site. I signed up for the blog RSS feed because it will let me know when something new comes up such as a headline or new blog. I could use this in the classroom to keep tabs on certain sites that update themselves with new information. This would be a good way to easily keep up with the new information. This new technology is a simple solution to keeping track of new information that is most important to you. I created a good reader account and so all of my blog posts and the ones that I have subscribed to showed up in the feed part.