Great Book

I loved this book! It has taught me so much and I'm glad our group chose it to read. I've already started a lot of the tools it mentions so that I'll get used to them before the school year starts back!

Social Bookmarking

I had previously set up a delicious account, but I decided the benefits were better with Diigo, so I opened a new account with them and exported my bookmarks from delicious into Diigo. I couldn't believe how simple it was. Diigo even asked me if I wanted to import my bookmarks that I had saved on my computer, I said yes, and just like that, my bookmarks were in Diigo. Then I started editing the tags, like the author suggested. I loved that I could see how many people had bookmarked that same page and that I could see what else they bookmarked. I even found some of my sites had feeds that I then subscribed to. Wow! I've learned soooo much in the last few weeks with this book. But it's sobering to realized that I am only beginning to understand a very small portion of what this web has to offer. I can't wait to read about Flicker and the other stuff.

Fun With Flickr - Chapter 7

What is amazing to me as I read this book is the depth of free resources on the web, most of which are web based. You don't need any special software, just access to the internet. Flickr is another one of these great resources. The collective image resources of millions of people are available simply with an image search inside of Flickr. The annotation feature is a really neat way explain different parts of a photo. The ability to leave comments and connect photos with other people offers a social aspect to Flickr. Tags allow people to search and find exactly what they are looking for.

Some disadvantages - (1) it is possible students could come across some inappropriate content, (2) picture overload, (3) those posting photos have to take the time tag their photos with appropriate tags, (4) copyright issues.

Something the book didn't mention - a good complement to Flickr is the free photo editor called GIMP. You can download it from here: http://www.gimp.org/

Tiny URL

This book is filled with links that have tinyurl in the address. After becoming curious enough, I checked out wikipedia, and found that this is a site that was created in 2002 to help shorten very long url address. What a wonderful idea! I hated those times in the computer lab when I asked the students to enter a web address that was very long. Unless they were advanced typists, it took a while and quite a few "error, website not found" messages that required me checking to see what was entered incorrectly. Of course, you could always bookmark the site on every computer or on your website, but this would still work, and give the students practice of entering in the address. I plan to use this site in the future when I have a website to share or research. It would be much easier to have them enter a short address than a long one. Follow the link to see what I mean, or read about it on wikipeida. http://tinyurl.com.au/

RSS Feeds - Chapter 5

I have known what an RSS feed is for several years but never thought about how useful they might be and how easy they are to set up. After reading Chapter 5, I set up a reader in my gmail account using 6 or 8 of my favorite news sites that offer feeds. I have found it very useful. Now, I do not have to check several sites for news, some of which may have been updated, others not. All I have to do now is open my reader and my news is there. This puts everything in one location and I only get updated information. What a time saver!

Obvious advantages for students are to gathering feeds to research topics, keeping tabs on your favorite blog(s), and, a feature I haven't tried out yet, setting up a feed for a web search (as newer search data comes in, you are fed the changes to your reader). The author describes how he uses feeds to monitor the work on his students blogs.

The only disadvantages I see are: 1) not all sites have RSS feeds and 2) if you add too many feeds, you can hit information overload very quickly (I started small).

E-Portfolios

I decided to post a new blog instead of just commenting, that way I could use the WYSIWYG features like changing the text color. You don't have access to those in comments, wonder why?

Anyway, this book really made me curious about e-portfolios, so I googled it. I found this link http://www.coolmath.com/continuing-ed/e-portfolios_templates.html that gives templates for covers and work pages that you can download to use with your students. Then, I read over the "about" link in the sidebar to get more clarification. I have to admit, I was so amazed at the cute templates that I had to see if it would work. After successfully downloading it, I managed to open it with Microsoft Word by right clicking and telling it specifically which program to use to open (before it would just open the webpage b/c that's how you have to download it). I even changed a few things. Here's where I got stuck. So, after you get the images/work scanned into the page using Word, do you have to upload it like we did our appstate webpage? If so, who would host it? How do you convince your director of technology to host an e-portfolio for every student in your class (or district)? It makes more sense to use a site like blogger, but the templates were almost perfect and much more appealing. Anyone got any ideas? Check it out! They are really eye-catching!

Welcome

We are graduate school students at Appalachian State University. Our group, App to the Fifth Power, is taking a class called Telecommunications in Technology. We are going to discuss a book by Will Richardson called Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms.