Mitosis clips

Thing 20

I really liked using google docs and the possibilities it offers. I took a short class at school last spring, which was my first introduction to it. It will be a great way for students to work from anywhere and submit their work on time even if the printer is broken, they'er out of ink, there's no paper.... :) It will also offer an easy opportunity for collaboration. We don't have enough computers for each student to work independently in the lab, so it can be diffiduclt for students to fully experience whatever the assignment is. With google docs, they can work from home as well and still work with their group members.
(And all this really sounds familiar; I honestly thought I'd written this earlier! Must have just planned it out and forgot to write it. Sorry!)

Thing 23... the end!

Wow. I can't believe it's already over! (and that means next week is coming... aaaah!) This has been an incredibly valuable experience. I almost wish I could have taken it during the school year and incorporated tools as I learned about them, but then, I don't know if I could have experimented as much because of regular classroom duties. So, I guess it all works out. I am going to go back through the things and make sure I have all the links I want to remember and explore further. I have to start thinking about the first things I do in class and decide which tools I will introduce to my classes this semester. I hope to incorporate a couple in the fall, maybe google docs and wikis, and point students to some of the great things I learned about- social bookmarking, sticky notes, organizational tools... I think I'll find ways to actually use them in the future, but I'm going to try to take it slowly so that I don't get in over my head- unable to maintain projects I've started :)- and so that I don't overwhelm my students with too many new toys!

Thing 22

I looked at creately.com and clipmarks.com. Creately.com allows users to make diagrams, flowcharts, etc. online; collaborate, comment, save in various formats- great tools for students to make concept maps or organizational flowcharts. There's even a section of k-12 graphic organizer templates. The program is web-based, so there's nothing to download, making the tools easy to access. The options for adding, moving, changing colors, and so forth are simple to use. Only glitch? There's a waiting list! So, you have to sign up and wait till they have space for you. Hmph.
I am SO excited about clipmarks! It's about the greatest thing ever. You can select portions of a page, save it, print it, put it on another something (facebook, delicious, twitter, etc.) As are most tools we've learned about, your clipmarks can be private or public, depending on your choice. This is a great way to point students to specific parts of a webpage or mark the section you need to remember. They even mention the ease of selecting the portions you want to print instead of having to copy them to a word document. Who hasn't had to do that to try to save paper?

Thing 21

I really think I could enjoy Pageflakes, once I figure it out! I'd like to make some pages for various topics like the example about Darfur/ Sudan, but I can't figure out how to get news feeds specific to a topic yet. The sticky notes and message board are things I'd really like to use with my classes, so this is just one more chance to tory it. Of course, I'll have to pick one and stick with it so it won't confuse the little munchkins, but that'll come. I created a pagecast to see how that step works; I'm still working on ideas for class. Definitely useful to point students for searches or to help with current event articles. I think it would be a useful place to put together webquests, although I haven't decided- for things I already do- whether pageflakes or wikis would work best.

Thing 5d

Once again, my favorite ideas came from Free Technology for Teachers. This time, it's about several places to do online sticky notes. Three were mentioned with different capabilities, so I'm hoping to explore those and see what works for me. I'd like to play with them enough to make recommendations to students since they would be great organizational tools. One is a sticky that you set as the homepage with up to 3 items. Then, it's the first thing that opens when you get online, so you can see what you need to do. Pretty cool. I marked 2 of the sites in Diigo, but one, Stixy, wouldn't work with Diigolet. Hmph.

Thing 19

Making the podcast was pretty simple. I think the biggest pain for me was the time in downloading and uploading everything. My computer is poky today. I embedded the player on my wiki page just to see how that worked. Not too bad.
I read a Dr. Seuss Book about reptiles for my podcast. I stumbled across a couple books from the Cat in the Hat Learning Library in my kids' collection- the books had been passed on to us from a friend. My son brought me a book about plants to read and, as I read to him, I realized the book had pretty much everything I would include in a lecture about plants. And since it's Dr. Seuss style, it's probably much more interesting to listen to than... well, a lecture on plants. So I started hunting to see what I could find, and there are several science topics covered. I'd love to buy them, but I'll have to find them used somewhere (with no shipping costs!) if I am to get all of the ones I want. Anyway, I discovered that the Gwinnett County Library has a bunch of them, so I checked them out and read some to my students. Remember, these are high school students. They mostly loved it- probably because they didn't take notes- but that was one of the problems. It's hard to substitute something like this for a lecture if they don't remember it or can't look at the pictures. So, unless some kind soul buys me class sets of all of the books, I'll have to come up with something else. I'm leary of scanning everything with all the copyright issues- though it would make it easy to present using an LCD projector! But if I could record them for the students to listen to, maybe that would be a start.
I stumbled a couple times in the recording, so I'll have to practice sound editing to complete the Dr. Seuss project. I've used Audacity a teeny bit, but it was a long time ago. So, on to learn more stuff!