Thing Seventeen

How can teachers take advantage of social bookmarking websites? Well, for starters, Diigo provides a premium upgrade free of charge for educators:

• You can create student accounts for an entire class with just a few clicks (and student email addresses are optional for account creation)
• Students of the same class are automatically set up as a Diigo group so they can start using all the benefits that a Diigo group provides, such as group bookmarks and annotations, and group forums.
• Privacy settings of student accounts are pre-set so that only teachers and classmates can communicate with them.
• Ads presented to student account users are limited to education-related sponsors.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg!

Thing Sixteen

• Which start page did you choose? I chose to use the Google start page.
• Why did that one appeal to you? I am impressed with the Google's versatility.

• Will you make it your permanent home page? No - my permanent homepage will remain AT&T by Yahoo.

• How can the online calendars be useful to you? I use the online calendar that comes with my yahoo email for keep track of bill payments. Students can use them to keep track of assignments.

• What about the to-do lists? I like to-do lists, but I still tend to keep them on paper. If I had a more portable laptop, I might be tempted to keep my lists on it.

• Did you find a tool that has some uses for you at the school or at home? Remember the milk!
  
• Which tool(s) would you recommend to others? I'd recommend Google's tools because of the versatility.
  

Thing Fifteen

Well, so far thing 15 has been the most difficult to do. I'm hoping this works. At the very least, I am beginning to understand how to use all of these online apps together. Now let's see where I can go from here.

Curriculum ideas for wiki:

Take an area from a chapter in a science textbook and ask students to create a wiki by finding information on the web and adding it to the info they found in the textbook.

Thing Fourteen

I chose Gliffy and Bubbl.us to explore. I chose them because they were easy to use. I have bookmarked them for future use. I am in the middle of several projects for Dr. Mac's class and I can use both of these in the near future. I think the kids will love this because it is so cool! It makes learning fun.

Thing Thirteen

When the laptop I have now starts to fall apart, I plan an purchasing a netbook. I haven't really started shopping yet, so I wasn't sure if a netbook could hold all of the programs and features I might need. I am beginning to understand what web 2.0 is all about. I won't really need a word processing program on my netbook, because I can use Zoho Writer instead. I'm not much of a blogger or really a writer of any kind. It is good to know how convenient and accessible these web programs are for use at home and at school.

Thing Twelve

Since I already have a google acct, this one was easy. I tried to sign up for google notebook, but google recommended that I not do so since they are no longer improving it and will probably discontinue it soon. So I decided to utilize the calendar and the alerts. The calendar will come in handy with bill payments and school assignments. I will be alerted with information on Apolo Ohno, so I am thinking I'll really enjoy it :)

When I have more time and motivation, I'll try Picasa. It looks like fun!

Thing Eleven

In this blog, I'm addressing my search for RSS feeds. I started the search last night, but encountered some technical difficulties, so I have continued the journey today. I'm glad that I was able to access Edublog today. In truth, I am simply overwhelmed by the sheer number of feeds to choose from. I wish I could honestly say I plan to read these feeds every day, but I'm just not sure it will be humanly possible.

Which method of finding feeds did you find easiest to use? Bloglines and Topix
Which Search tool was the easiest for you? Bloglines
Which was more confusing? Technorati
What kind of useful feeds did you find in your travels? Hey Jude and others specific to education
What other tools or ways did you find to locate newsfeeds? Google Blog Search is awesome!