Thing #18

In today's world, educators have to understand social networking and how it works.  Why? Because as educators, I think it's important to say on trend with current events and what is popular with students.  It can make what we teach more interesting in the classroom if we can use references like Facebook and Twitter.  We, as teachers, can't live back in the world of candlelight, Little House on the Prairie days. We have to stay current to be able to keep in touch with our students. 

Also, social networking sites help us to connect with other's in our field and that is priceless.  We live in an age where we can connect with teachers from all over the globe, why wouldn't we want to take advantage of that?!? 

I can see setting up a Facebook page for your classroom as just another way to keep in touch with parents and students about current assignments and homework.  However, I do not see a need for teachers to have twitter in order to communicate with their students.  I think that almost crossing a line that teachers should never cross.  We are not their to be friends with our students. We are there to be educators.  I think Twitter is more of a "friend" site than a way for teachers to communicate with students. I think Facebook is a much better way for teachers to communicate with their students if they want to do that on a easy social networking site with little to no fuss. 

Thing #17

What I like about the social bookmarking idea is that teachers from all over can collaborate on topics.  Much like our Diigo page, I think it's a great way for teachers to communicate with other teachers. 

For me, it's almost like, "Don't reinvent the wheel."  If a teacher has already found a way to make a dry topic fun and has shared that idea, PERFECT!  We, as teachers, are no longer confined to just communicating with fellow teachers in our schools, we can communicate with teachers from just about anyplace with a Internet connection. 

From my personal blogging days I found that I am not a huge fan of Delicious.  But I do like Diigo. 

Thing #16

Fellow teachers (especially those with a smart phone),

Did you know that you can sync your smart phone with your Google Calendar?  Super duper easy! I have had this feature on my phone years ago.  You can also sync Outlook to your smart phone (but I like the flexibility of Google Calendars and the user friendly aspect). 

I end up not using the "to do" feature because I use my phone for that, but I could certainly use the "to do" feature on the Google Calendar.

In case you can't tell, I prefer the Google Calendar above all the others.  When I first got my iPhone, I downloaded all kinds of apps to help me keep track of my time, and nothing was as easy as the Google Calendar.  It's like Google was made just for smart phones!  (Now I think you can even sync your the photos you take with your phone with Google+, but I haven't played around with that yet). 

If you want to be able to edit your calendar from any computer and your phone, Google Calendar is your best bet! 

Thing #15

Ok, so... I know we had permission (and I think it even may have been required) to change someone else's work on the wiki page, but I just didn't want to do that.  I hope this doesn't cause me to fail this assignment!  As soon as I logged in, I had free access to change pretty much anything I wanted! It was almost too easy! But, I just couldn't bring myself to change someone else's work.  Funny though, I wouldn't care if someone changed my work, I mean that is what is that page if for... to collaborate, right?  Oh well.  I went ahead and just created a page about what we did back in Thing #8 because that has been my favorite thing yet.  Feel free to change my page and/or add whatever you'd like. You will find that is super easy! 

This could be fun for students to collaborate on assignments. I liked that you could make your own page, that way if students needed a bit more one on one, a teacher can have them have their own page and she/he can work with them while not taking away from the other students.  Really, the possibilities are endless for this.  Plus, parents can chime in and offer help or ask questions as well.  I like this idea.  Very cool. 

Here is a link to my wiki page "Making Posters"

Thing #14

I used mind map (I didn't want to wait the day to get an invitation, I'm impatient like that). 

I used it to help me study for my biology test coming up. Mitosis vs meiosis.  As you may or may not know, mitosis and meiosis is all about cell division.  It's not the most exciting thing to study nor easiest to understand (especially when you have been out of high school for 200+ years such as myself).  So, this flowchart really helped me to see side by side how different the two are.  

Mind map was super easy to use and I like that, if you wish, you could share your chart with someone else.  This could really make studying between two people easy.  I could see myself using my mitosis vs meiosis flowchart with another student and quizzing each other on the different phases of cell division.   

Thing #13

Hello Fellow Soon To Be Teachers,

It's been forever (it seems) since I last posted.  It's a shame, really. This is one of my favorite things to do, but it seems as the semester progresses, the workload doubles or even triples in some classes and I can't seem to ever catch up.  Am I the only one who feels that way?

I digress.

 

Ok, in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I am not a fan of Google Docs.  I don't think it's easy to use.  I have played around with Google Docs in the past and I just don't "get it."  I suppose someone a bit more tech savvy can fully understand how to use it and really use it for it's purpose... to collaborate on projects.  Personally, I am pretty old school in this department and use Word and just track my (and others) changes.  However, that isn't feasible if I want to share with the masses (i.e. students and parents on a blog). 

I played around with Zoho and really like it! It was more user friendly for how my mind operates in "tech world." 

Below you can see that I uploaded my PowerPoint presentation for our Education class and if I did everything right, I'm hoping that you (yes you!) can even make changes to the presentation. 

This is great because I plan on using PowerPoint A LOT in my classroom and I can easily upload my presentations to my blog and students and parents can ask questions right from the PowerPoint if I don't make something as clear as I should.

I can totally see this being a very useful tool in keeping kids and parents on the same page as far as what we are all learning in the classroom.