Thing 13 Social Bookmarking

Share your thoughts about tagging. Is tagging a useful way to organize your digital resources and why?
Tagging is very useful of course for finding resources again. It's nice because it's a keyword search and there are so many possibilities in the way you can categorize them.

What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages?
The fact that there are so many different terms people can use to categorize is both an advantage and a disadvantage. You never know what terms other people might use to classify a topic. I guess that's where multiple tags comes in.

What is important to think about before assigning tags to bookmarks or other Internet content?
I think you want to make sure to use multiple tags so it can be useful as a social networking tool and go beyond using labels only you might think about.

One of the things that interests me the most about all the web 2.0 applications we have learned about so far is the generous nature of all the contributors to freely share ideas and information with each other. It's pretty amazing.

One or two more...

Thing 12 widgets

Review the widget you selected.

I like both the google widgets. They were very easy to embed and it's handy to have a quote of the day and vocabulary word to check or post on the whiteboard daily.
I included the others so I would remember some of the variety of widgets available. The finger spelling widget is pretty cool. I work at a school that includes several deaf and hard of hearing students who use sign. This could be very useful. The Voki widget is just pure fun. I'm sure my students would enjoy this one.

Are you getting comfortable with embedding code?

yes, it's pretty simple once you get the hang of it.

Do you belong to other online communities?

I also belong to Facebook. It's been amazing how many old friends have found me. It's fun even if I don't do a lot of posts, I can look in now and then at what others post. My daughter light heartedly calls it cyber-stalking...

Are relationships formed online as meaningful as face-to-face relationships?

It's hard for me to see it being any where near as meaningful, but perhaps that is just because I am new at using social networks and the practice is not an integral part of my life. I think for avid users, it could be quite meaningful. It's just another way to communicate with others.

Why do you think MySpace and other social networking sites are so popular with kids today?

Using technology to communicate is something that is totally normal to them, since many of them are growing up with it. I sometimes marvel at the need many have to communicate the minutia of their lives and the apparent need to be in contact 24-7.











The definition of the day and quote of the day are google widgets.





Get a Voki now!

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.