Celebration of Lights

Celebration of Lights
Originally uploaded by Dave Harvey Photography

Hooray!

Exploration 17: Reflection

Whew! I made it! (Okay, not quite by the end of "summer" but almost...)

This has been one of the best professional development 'classes' I've ever had! It was absolutely wonderful to learn about all of these awesome web tools that I knew nothing about. I may not have mastered them all but at least I now have some idea about them. I would really like to choose one or two and take a class and/or experiment with them to learn more...hopefully something will be offered this year. Now that I've done the initial self-exploration, I think it would be really beneficial to work with someone that knows these tools to try to learn more.

I think my favorite explorations were blogs, flickr, wikis, and google docs. I'd probably really enjoy LibraryThing, too, if I got to know it better. All of the explorations were worthwhile, though, and I am glad that they were all included.

Thank you, Kristin!

Oh My!

Okay, that is embarrassing! I clicked on one of the links in my post and it worked! My voice - on my blog!

Exploration 16: Podcasts

Today I explored podcasting which was a great experience for me as I have had little to no experience with it so far..in spite of it being used so much at Beverly. I feel glad to have at least gotten my feet wet. I was able to create an account with Gcast, record a podcast, and listen to it on my computer. I was not able to add a link on my blog, however, although I tried. I THINK you go to http://www.gcast.com/go/FO1OSPRZD to hear it, or perhaps www.gcast.com/u/rf04bps/main. I thought I gave it a title (Reading Fluency) but then it looked like it came up as rf04bps's podcast. I DON'T KNOW!!! This is when I started feeling like I usually do....HELP!

Anyway - it was fun learning about podcasting.

Exploration 15: TeacherTube

I previewed TeacherTube today... which is a pretty cool site, although I had some trouble with it. Luckily I have been to the site before and know that it is not always as difficult as I found it to be today...there were really long waits for it to find videos for all of the topics I tried, and it took a really long time for the videos to load fully. I was able to watch a student-made video about recess and an interesting video about guided reading.

I think this site has wonderful potential. It is an awesome resource for teachers to learn about many different topics, from other teachers, and also it would be very motivating for kids to be able to put together videos that would then be shown on TeacherTube.

Exploration 14: Gliffy

Today I learned about Gliffy. I was able to create a diagram - a floor plan of my room at Beverly, but had trouble finding directions on how to manipulate the items I put on the floor, i.e. how to rotate things. It was still pretty fun and I think if I were able to read up on how to use it more efficiently and/or had someone teach me how to do it better, I think it would be useful for making up flowcharts or diagrams of important content from nonfiction books I use with my kids. These would make excellent study guides.

I also tried to put my floor plan on my blog, but wasn't able to figure that out either!

Google Docs in action!

New computer!
Originally uploaded by MeFind