Thing 23: Final Thoughts

My favorite "things" that I know I will continue using are:

• Facebook - granted, I already used it before taking this class
• My Blog - I am toying with the idea of maintaining a blog for my classroom, but haven't figured out how that would really differ from Edline, so am still thinking that through. I have though, talked some friends into blogging about their upcoming cochlear implant surgery and their experiences while studying abroad in Munich, so should I have some sort of experience that I feel people would want to know about, I am happy to have the know-how to start blogging about it.
• Del.icio.us - will be one of the first places I search for things on the web
• Library Thing - I have 3 friends! :) and love having a place to find book recommendations
• U of MN Assignment calculator - love it!
• online document collaboration - if I can talk my teaching partner into using it too.

Thing 22: What Did I Learn Today?

I believe that one of the most valuable things about working with kids is they keep you up to date. They make it almost impossible not to stay current in pop culture and technology, or at least current enough to have heard the buzz words - new musicians, TV shows, celebrity gossip, and new web-based tools. Completing this class has given me the confidence and the curiosity to take the next step and actually get online and TRY these new tools.

I was pleasantly surprised at how relatively little trouble I had while trying the tools within the 23 Things on a Stick curriculum. I have learned that getting in there and trying a new tool is relatively painless and does not commit me to "having to use it" if I don't like it. Not trying it does not help me learn anything and may keep me from finding something that I find really valuable. One of the biggest barriers to doing this is the lack of time, so I like the idea of setting aside 15 minutes a day to keep up to date.

Thing 21: Other Social Networks

Visit 23 Things on a Stick

For this "thing", I joined the 23 Things on a Stick Ning group. I also joined the Classroom 2.0 Ning group.


Visit Classroom 2.0

As I stated way back in "Thing 2", I feel that much of the hype about Library 2.0 is directly applicable to our classrooms, and I began this journey hoping to find new tools and new uses of old tools that I can use with my students. From the few minutes I spent poking around on the Classroom 2.o Ning site, I am confident that I will find ideas, answers, and inspiration here.

Thing 20: Social Networks

After about 2 years of saying I'd never join Facebook or MySpace, I had to eat my words in early June. Several of my friends had already joined Facebook, and eventually I caved. I am glad that I finally did join, as I've been able to reconnect with some people I have not had contact with for YEARS! In addition to finding and communicating with old friends, I have joined a couple of groups - "Minnesota Football Fans", "Vikings Fans", and "Delta Gamma-Lambda Chapter" - and taken a quiz to find out which Disney Princess I am (Belle). I believe that Facebook is the fastest growing social network because you have more control over who does and does not have access to your profile, making it feel more private and secure.

Thing 19: Podcasts

For this "thing" I created an account on podcast.com and subscribed to the "Dave Ramsey Show" podcast. I took Dave's class "Financial Peace University" this past winter, but have only been able to find his radio show broadcast locally late Sunday nights, which is not a time I can listen. I miss his wit and common sense, so am happy to have this "Tivo"-type technology for radio.

Thing 18: You Tube

I don't automatically think of You Tube as a source of relevant content for my class. I am not one of the millions of people who browse You Tube for entertainment purposes, and I certainly have never uploaded video to You Tube. But, I was able to find some content on there that is suitable and entertaining for my class, as shown above in the claymation on Punnett Squares.

Thing 17: ELM Productivity Tools

Where was this when I was in college & grad school? Electronic Library for Minnesota (ELM) eliminates the need to actually "go to the library" for research! In college, I found Walter Library so big and intimidating, that I actually would go back home to the Burnsville Library where I was comfortable, when I needed to do research...lucky for me I was only about 25 minutes away. :) Now, I have access to all of this from my own living room - wow! The folder tool is cool, no more useless printing of materials you "might use, so better print because you'll never find it later". I will definitely refer my students to these online databases when assigning research projects...seems much more reliable than google searching. Thanks for opening my eyes to what we have available to us in Minnesota!

Thing 16: Student 2.0 Tools

The Research Project Calendar is a very cool tool that could make both students' and teachers' lives a little easier. This tool helps students break projects into smaller pieces and gives deadlines for each piece to keep students on track. While I believe that most teachers do this already, the calculator will help them to know that their deadlines are realistic and achievable. The calculator can also be used as a teaching tool to help students learn the skill of breaking a problem down into smaller pieces. The steps of the process when broken down seem to compliment the "Big 6" process that our district embraces, too. As a middle school teacher, I intend to share this tool with my team. I think it would be really powerful for our students if we can all "speak the same language" when assigning larger research projects. It might even help us to make our students' lives more manageable by allowing us to lay out all of our projects and make sure the timing of our collective deadlines is manageable and age-appropriate. I can see this as a tool that my entire team can embrace and utilize without much effort. I also appreciate the teacher tools embedded in the tool.

Thing 15: Online Games

I lost interest in video games when the joystick controller was retired...I miss the days of Ms. PacMan, Frogger, and Donkey Kong! Atari really was the only game system I had any success with, therefore any interest in. Newer game systems have too many buttons to keep track of, and I don't have enough interest to figure out how to use the controllers. (the only exception to this would be Guitar Hero, now that one's fun! :)) As games went online, I didn't follow them. So, for this "Thing" I chose to see what kind of games I could find online that were more related to my curriculum. The best of what I found so far is NASA Kid's Club, which offers a number of educational games geared towards kids at various levels. My favorite game that I played here was called "Buzz Lightyear in Orbit" which has you complete 5 missions to prepare Buzz Lightyear to go to the International Space Station. The game also offers educational worksheets, teacher & parent activities, etc.

Thing 14: Library Thing

Library Thing is a very cool site where you can catalog your books. As an avid reader, I had a lot of fun entering and rating my recent and favorite reads. I am glad to have had the opportunity to get started on this. I am always looking for book suggestions and think I will find some great ones here. I added a Library Thing widget to the right side of this blog to show a sample of some of the books on my bookshelf.

Thing 13: Online Productivity Tools

I chose igoogle for a start page, mostly because I already had an account with google. It was fun to set it up, choose a theme, and add some gadgets. Some of the gadgets I added will certainly not make me more productive, but it was too tempting to not add the PacMan game. :) I also set up a google calendar, which I am going to try to use as my main calendar. In the past, I have used my Outlook calendar at school, and my MSN calendar at home. Most of the time I send the appointment to whichever calendar I am not sitting at, but don't always remember, making it confusing. I like that you can access the google calendar from anywhere, and that you can share it with others. I also looked at some of the tools for creating lists, but have a really hard time giving up my paper lists. I find it almost therapeutic to physically cross something I have completed off the list, and don't have access to the web except when I am at the computer. This wouldn't do me any good at the grocery store unless I print out the list anyway (and I LOVE the pad I found that breaks your grocery list into departments of the grocery store!) I am challenging myself to try these lists and see how it goes....we'll see.

I was thinking about which tools I could use in the classroom with my students. The one that jumped out as useful was the online calendar, but that seems useless due to the calendar feature on Edline.

Thing 12: Do you Digg?

Before this "thing", I had never looked at any of these sites, and didn't know about the ability to submit articles to them. I explored all four sites listed: Mixx, Digg, Newsvine, and Reddit. My opinion was that Newsvine seemed the most respectable, probably due to its focus on stories from the media. I did not create an account. I don't tend to get my news online, so didn't think I'd actually ever use it. I did read an article on the New York Times site about osteoporosis drugs causing bone fractures, and submitted it to Newsvine. The process was easy and painless.

Thing 11: Tagging and Del.icio.us

I created an account on del.icio.us. I have never used anything like this before. It was one of the "buzz words" that I associate with the district's technology presentation last fall that I never got around to trying. I remember thinking that it would be a handy tool. Now that I've gotten my hands into it, I see that it really is. I used to cut & paste links to websites into emails that I would send myself back and forth from school to home and vice versa. This tool would make that entirely unnecessary. I don't use my favorites very often, because it seems like what I end up with is a long list of websites, none of which I can even remember what made them a "favorite". When I tried to "organize" my favorites, they would become hidden in folders , especially if it was used for more than one purpose, and I had no way of remembering my own "organizational system". Delicious also eliminates that problem. If I can give a site multiple tags (which actually make sense to me) and search by tag, I think I am on to something here. :) The thing I liked the most, though, was searching within delicious, to see what other people had saved and tagged as good websites. In less than three minutes, I found an excellent article, which I can use in class the first week of school to introduce the Scientific Method unit. Last year, I was searching high and low for anything usable, and eventually gave up. This is a tool that I intend to continue using, and will encourage students to use it as well.

Thing 10: Wikis

"Wiki, wiki, wiki" was the mantra following the district kick-off last fall. Scott McCleod's presentation was great, and left us with a taste for technology. Following the presentation, it seemed as though the answer to any question was to "make a wiki!" As a grade-level team, we did use them for collaborative planning for student recognition events and also for potluck/party planning. I never found a great chance to utilize one with my students, however. This year, I am thinking about setting up a wiki for my students to collaborate on the "submarine project", which requires each student to build and present their own fully self-operational device that will float, then sink, then float again (or vice versa). It is the most challenging, open-ended, and time consuming project of the year, and providing them a place to collaborate might be helpful. The project also requires students to keep a log of their work, which might be a good use of a blog...hmm, might have to think about that one.

Today, I did edit the 23 Things wiki, but until then had never edited an "official" wiki, such as wikipedia. As a teacher, I am not against the use of wikipedia for research projects, but do feel that students treat it differently from more "official" sources. I feel strongly that sources need to be cited correctly, and should never be copied word-for-word, or "cut & pasted" into students work. I had two instances of plagiarism this year, both from wikipedia. Neither student thought their actions were plagiarism because it was "only wikipedia". I had to disagree.

Thing 9:Online Collaboration Tools

I sent an email for permission to edit the Declaration of Independence in both Google Docs and Zoho Writer, but have not received a reply. I looked at both, and think they both look fairly user friendly. I like the feature on Zoho Writer that allows collaborators to provide comments. These tools would be handy for students when working on group projects, and would eliminate the need to print and turn in papers/projects on real paper, is the teacher is able to access the document. These tools would also be handy for job-alike collaboration when creating curricular materials.

Thing 8: Share your slide decks, photos, or presentation slides

I used Zoho Show to embed one of my PowerPoint presentations that I created this spring for my class. The presentation was used to review Mendel's experiment with peas, in this case showing the seed color trait, and also to introduce the concept of punnett squares. I imported an existing PowerPoint into Zoho, which I did not see as an option on any of the other sites. One thing I did not like about Zoho is that I was unable to figure out how to do what PowerPoint calls "animations", having things appear on the slide when you want them to. In this presentation, in particular, those are extremely important. When I present the first slide in class, it starts out with just the original set of pea plants at the top of the slide. As we click through the presentation, students think through where the genetic material for each successive generation comes from, illustrated by arrows and new plants filling into the slide. Without those, students would be totally overwhelmed with the amount of information and would probably zone out. Giving them all of the imformation up front conflicts with the inquiry theme of our Science curriculum and eliminates the opportunity for students to figure it out themselves, thus gaining confidence in the material. I do like the idea of creating and saving presentations online. It would eliminate the need for jump drives and the problems of having multiple versions in multiple locations and not being able to remember which one was last updated.

I created this filmstrip of the 2007 Gopher Football Season using Picturetrail. I found Picture Trail to be fun and easy to use. I liked it better than Flickr. I would definitely use Picturetrail for my personal use. It lets you be much more creative with your photos, something the scrapbooker in me appreciates! I think I could use this as a teacher tool, too. I show my students a lot of pictures of different scientists, landforms, genetic traits, etc. In the past, I have cut and paste the photos into PowerPoint slides, but think that creating a "Flick" with Picturetrail would be more interesting and better hold students' attention. Another feature of PictureTrail that I liked was that you could easily add captions to the photos. Adding captions in PowerPoint requries inserting textboxes, and making sure the font is the same on each slide, which is a time consuming process. With a Picturetrail "Flick" you can label all of your photos in one place in under a minute, or use the captions to add the words to your favorite fight song! :)

I made two attempts to create a database on Lazybase which would hold data about sceintists - date of birth, family background, date of death, scientific discoveries, impact on society - all the required information for the Scientist Project students complete in my class. I thought it would be great for me to have all of the required informaton about the scinetists commonly chosen in one place because I cannot memorize it all, and often find myself googling scientist while correcting projects. Unfortunately, I found Lazybase to be pretty frustrating and not intuitive. I couldn't find any sort of help documentation, and gave up after about 1.5 hours so don't have anything to post here for you to see. Is there a better tool for this?

Thing 7: Web 2.0 Communication Tools

Of the communications tools covered in “thing” 7, I use email the most. I currently have two email accounts – my school email and my personal email (oh wait, I had to set up a new yahoo email account to use Flickr, so I guess you could say that I technically have three accounts, but actively use two). Email can be a big time sucker. It can take up to 45 minutes to type out the perfect message that could have been said in under one. I do use email a lot, both personally and professionally. I definitely think it has its time and place. There are things I like about it, like automatic documentation, especially when communicating with parents. But, it is not the be-all and end-all of communication, and sometimes I resent that I am included on emails that have absolutely nothing to do with me or any action I need to take, as I feel like it is a waste of my time.

I utilized IM and Web Conferencing when I was working in the corporate world. The IMing I did, though, was personal in nature. It is impractical in the world of education as we do not sit at our desks all day, making IM no better than email. Web Conferencing also has its pros and cons. I was in Training & Development, and conducted and attended training sessions via Live Meeting. The big pro: bringing people in multiple locations together without travel. The big cons: you have no direct contact with the other participants. As a facilitator, it is difficult to be engaging when there is nobody in the room with you As a participant, it is too easy to continue other work while “attending’ the webinar.

Text messaging is supposedly irrelevant to my work with students since school policy requires cell phones be turned off during school hours. So, my only real interaction with students and text messaging is when they are breaking school rules, not paying attention in class, or texting each other the answers to a test. My personal use of text messaging is pretty limited, too. It seriously takes me about 10 minutes to type out and send a message. I’d rather just call whomever I need to communicate with.

Thing 6: Online Image Generators

I created the football jersey and the license plate using Image Chef and the trading card of my cat (isn't he cute?) using Big Huge Labs. I can see these tools being useful in the classroom as a teacher tool or as part of an assignment. The trading card in particular lends itself nicely to the Scientist Project that my students complete - researching a scientist of their choice and presenting that person's discoveries and impact on society through their choice of a final product.

Thing 5: Fun with Flickr

snapdragon puzzle
Originally uploaded by micstein

The fun tools available on Flickr again seemed more geared toward my personal use. Since I didn't have a lot of time, I created this jigsaw puzzle out of my snapdragon photo from "thing" 4. One possible classroom use that I experimented with briefly was to create a slideshow of photos. This could come in handy especially during my Earth Science Unit in which we study earthquakes and volcanoes. In the past, I have spent a ton of time searching google images for pictures to show the kids, without a lot of luck and with concern about proper copyright use. Another possibility would be to assign the creation of a slideshow to my students.

Thing 4: Flickr

IMG_1248
Originally uploaded by micstein

I took this photo of snapdragon flowers on my deck because they relate to the Genetics Unit I teach in my 7th Grade Science Class. While Gregor Mendel's famous experiment was done with pea plants, he also studied snapdragons. His experiment with snapdragons identified the concept of incomplete dominance, where red flowers crossed with white flower sproduced pink flowers. I found flickr pretty easy to use. It took a few minutes to set up an account, but before I knew it, I was posting my photo to my blog...pretty easy. The organizational features available in flickr are really appealing to me, mostly due to my scrapbooking habit. I am not sure how to utilize this with students. Perhaps an assignment where they take photos they identify as examples of things we are studying in class and posting them to a blog? Nothing that would require me to do a lot of searching. Something where I can make the photo assignment "come to me" instead of me "having to find it" out there somewhere.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Thing 3: RSS

I set up a Netvibes account for thing #3. I like the tabs at the top of the page and used them to separate my personal stuff from my school stuff. Adding personal feeds was fairly easy, but I struggled to find professional ones. Most of the websites I found when I searched for "inquiry-based science education" or "middle school science teaching" or even "middle school education" didn't have RSS feeds available. I think that I can probably add those when I get to the social bookmarking "thing"? I do think that utilizing a reader would allow me to access more information in less time, once the reader in set up with useful information...something I am still struggling with. But, since I still have 20 more "things" to accomplish, I am going to move on while trying to figure it out.

Thing 2: What is Web 2.0 & Why Should I Care?

I liked Sarah Houghton's definition of library 2.0 on John Blyberg's blog:

“Library 2.0 simply means making your library’s space (virtual and physical) more interactive, collaborative, and driven by community needs."

Isn't that how we should be defining our classrooms? I think a lot of Blyberg's arguments can be applied to the classroom too. As I read his logic, I kept thinking, wow - you could just substitute the word "library" for the word "classroom". We are educating kids who come to us with a completely different experience and skill set than we grew up and were educated with. That alone should give any educator the motivation to want to learn about and utilize these tools. The kids already use these tools. If we want to be able to "speak their language" we need to use them too. If we want them to be able to show us their best work, shouldn't we allow them to utilize their generations technologies?

Thing 1: Create a Blog

Welcome to my blog for "23 Things on a Stick". I am taking this online class to learn about web 2.0 tools that will help me teach science. I am hoping to learn enough to keep me up-to-date with my students and to find ways to incorporate these tools into my job. The purpose of this blog is to document my learnings. I hope you find something valuable here.