Thing #23 Old Dinosaur with lots of New Tricks!

What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
Successfully creating my blog. I had tried once before very unsuccessfully. I like this description of a blog:

“A site one establishes for the purpose of putting one’s thoughts online for the edification or amusement of visitors, who may leave pieces of their own minds before departing.”

Discovering what others had found and were experiencing along the way by reading their blog entries, and then leaving a little piece of my own mind...

Playing with the online image generators

Discovering educational videos on YouTube

Using Flickr to share photos with friends and family

The entertaining and succinct Common Craft guys

How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
While in graduate school (online), I had a mainline to the latest and greatest through my coursework. Participating in 23 Things was like being back in school with the bonus of no grades! I’m a hands-on learner, so 23 Things was the perfect learning tool. What's next, Kickball Captains?

Were there any take-aways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
I was amazed at the depth and breath of this online adventure.

Actually understanding and using the 2.0 web tools my children use and talk about and understanding and using 2.0 web tools my children have not heard of!

Learning more about my SBISD colleagues. It’s amazing what you can discover about a person from reading their blog.

What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?
Possibly offer smaller parts of the whole at a time by dividing the 23 Things into thirds and offering 6 hour credit segments.

If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you choose to participate? Absolutely!

How would you describe your learning experience?
Hands-on learning of relevant and, best of all, applicable best practices and cutting edge technology for use with students and the faculty in my library.

Thing #19 Web 2.0 Awards List

Wow! What a selection of online tools! After browsing quite a few of them, I explored Comiqs. It’s a lot like Image Chef, but with many more creative possibilities for classroom use including creating a comic strip with more than one panel. Just like Image Chef, the created images could be used for story starters, creative writing activities, or just for grins. A big plus is that this site can link to Flickr for easy photo uploading of personal photos or photos from the creative commons area. Unfortunately, I came across a random picture with a highly inappropriate expletive in the Comiqs photo gallery. Definitely a problem with students, but with teacher supervision can be overcome.

Thing #7 Cool Google Tools

Google Alert
This is a smart tool for teachers and students to use to receive notification about new information as it becomes available. Students and teachers tracking news about a current event such as the current NASA Phoenix Mars expedition would be able to easily keep up with the most recent discoveries. As the search results change for a previous search, the Google Alert proactively tells the user when new information is available. Since students cannot have school email accounts or check their personal email accounts at school, using this tool may pose a problem for that learning group.

Picasa Web Albums
I was quite surprised when I logged in to Picasa Web Albums and found the pictures I had uploaded to my blog already in my web album! Even the title of my blog was imported as the new title of my web album. Kind of scary (how much privacy do we sacrifice for convenience these days?!), but very handy. It’s a similar sort of web-sharing that I found when using Yahoo’s Flickr and exporting pictures to my blog.
One interesting feature in Picasa is the Organize option, which lets the user see every picture/image on the computer/laptop hard drive. The feature lets the user rename and move pictures around for easier access later. I saw pictures and images I had forgotten I had saved over the past few years. What a great tool.
One drawback I noticed was that because Picasa and my blog are linked, if I delete a photo in Picasa, it automatically deletes it in my blog. Not a good thing for one who has a history of deletion blunders. Also, I found Picasa much less user friendly than Flickr when searching for community shared photos.

Note: I looked at several of the Atomic Learning videos for several of the Google Tools and liked the quick and easy explanations. Some were much better explanations of the tools than the Google web site tutorials!