Thing 11 : Community

What do you like / dislike about leaving comments?

When you leave a comment on blogs it does help you to feel connected to other people because it opens the possibility for a conversation. It is an interactive form of reading. That makes it fun.

How did you feel when you received your first comment?

It was nice to know that someone out there was actually reading what I was writing.

Why do you think commenting is so important in online communities?

Because it provides an opportunity to share ideas and we become less isolated because of it.

What might this mean for students who share their writing online?

I think if they know others will read what they write they might put a little more effort into it. In this case, peer pressure is a good thing.

The links below would be good to share with students. I think guidelines like these are helpful.

Lifehacker's Guide to Weblog Comments

How to Write Intelligent Comments on Blogs

Thing 10 - Embed and download video

This video is called Self Portraits by Philip Scott Johnson [500 Years of Male Self Portraits in Western Art]
It's a wonderful piece of art history and a very good example of a well done morph. It was super easy to embed this video on my blog. Too bad I still won't be able to access it on the district network.



This video shows balloon sculptures done by Jason Hackenwerth. I met him up in Traverse City last week at the Traverse City Film Festival. His pieces were truly amazing!

I was able to download videos using Keepvid with no problem. I'm still a bit unclear about the difference between embedding a video and uploading one onto my blog in terms of fair use practices.

Thing 9 : You Tube

What do you like or dislike about YouTube? Did you find videos that would be useful for teaching and learning? Is YouTube restricted in your building?

Thanks for showing me the variety of things available on you tube. I knew there is a wealth of instructional videos but I hadn't realized what an archive it was for historical TV and film clips . I really loved the Women in Art morph. Lovely. As with Flickr, I really wish we could access it freely in our school district. It is such a tremendous resource. Of course I'm aware of the vast array of material on it that is not appropriate, but I wish teachers could at least access it. In Dearborn, we can upload you tube videos onto our district's video site, but it has to be done from home, and it is kind of cumbersome.

Thing 8 Fun with images in Flickr

In the same post in which you placed your creation, briefly describe your experience completing Thing 8. Which of these tools intrigues you and why? Was it easy, frustrating, time-consuming, fun? Share some of your ideas for using the images you can create.

All the photo tools I tried were fun, I like the trading cards. I think this would be a fun project to use with my students creating trading cards of their favorite books and writing mini reviews of them to trade with others in the class. It was pretty easy to do as long as the picture was already turned the right way - at first I used one that needed to be rotated, and the editing capabilities are limited (including size of font and layout).





The pop art option was very easy and so was the ID card. I had trouble uploading the fake magazine cover. I got an error message that said the picture was corrupt. I'll have to play around with that one more another time.