My Reflections on this Course

Wow! I have learned so much, and like with a huge meal, I now need the time to digest everything. I am glad I have a few more days before I return to my hectic schedule as a specialist to spend some time looking and thinking and updating. Let's see what all has gone on in these 3 jam-packed days.

Blogging...I had blogged in my yahoo account but didn't realize that there was a blogger on Google. I've used Google docs at home a bit but hadn't explored the other aspects. Besides the gmail account that I have which I really like, there seems to be a lot more to explore. Now I have an official blog for school and am playing with the possiblity of a personal blog.

Tags, Folksonomies & Technorati...Tagging I've done before on FaceBook and I had taken a course on Delicious in the past so I was familiar with social bookmarking. I hadn't realized that sites like Wikipedia, Delicious and FaceBook could also be described as folksomomies so that was something I learned. I haven't had time to explore Technorati but it is cool to have a search engine for blogs.

RSS & Newsfeeds-I thought I knew about RSS because I had put it on my pages of my NetStart Gold website thorough the district, but this was so much more than that. I've learned about Google Reader and its so much easier to keep up with current events now.

Photos & Images-I now have a Flickr account and I've saved the bookmark for Webshots in my Delicious account. Hopefully in those remaining "off" days I allude to above, I can explore that also. I haven't taken many pictures because I wasn't sure how to get those pictures off my phone and into something...but with FaceBook I had been doing mobile uploads and I have a nice if small (about 100 pictures) collection in my Facebook that I have downloaded from my computer. So this part was good. I never did get the sites for playing with the images to work at all, so that was a bit disappointing. I have friends that have "enhanced" their pictures and I really wanted to put my face on 7 of 9...not because she is so beautiful...but because I always wear my bluetooth, I've joked for a long time that I am 7 of 9's twin...and I'd thought it be fun. Oh well, maybe I can figure it out later.

Wikis and Online Production Applications & Tools...I'm hoping to get my teachers to use the wiki I and Anne collaborated on in the Klein Private Label. I'm also going to get my own private wiki also. I'm not sure right now how to use the Wiki to get the students involved but I'll keep working on that one. Probably need to go out and see how other folks are using it and I haven't had the time yet to do that. I can't get to Google Docs from a Klein computer. I'm not sure why they block it or stop it (says internet explorer cannot display the page) but Anne also said that she can't get to it.

 Podcasts, Video & Downloadable Audio-I didn't realize that "podcasts" are actually the old "webcasts". I thought I couldn't listen to them because I didn't own an iPod. I've actually *been* listening to "podcasts" for some time but they either weren't labeled as a podcast or were labled as a webcast. Vodcasts are all over the place on so many websites...some of my favorite places to watch vodcasts are weather.com or any newssite. They just call them "videos". Again, I didn't realize that here I was watching a *vodcast*. Ebooks I've been using for a long time. I've gotten a number of books that way such as Origin of Species & Descent of Man by Charles Darwin.

All-in-all, it has been worth 3 days of my life to take the class.

 Now its all up to me to see what I will make of it.

Wikis-Thursday morning

Anne and I are collaborating on the Biology PLC wiki that I've created for the biology science team. I'm excited that this may be a way for them to collaborate without necessarily having to take a special "face to face time" in order to plan or share best practices or share teaching tips.

Image Generators

My basic comment is "Boo". I went to the site from Klein web 2.0 and it opened in another window.

I downloaded my photo as requested and another window opened where it had the photo and it said to choose a fun tool. So I chose "Body Switcher"....which opened in another window.

Then I chose the body...which opened in another window...and it was asking for me to upload my picture....so I uploaded my picture (again) and it took me back to the first page...in another window.

At which point I said "forget about it". Not worth my time to play their games.

Uploading photos

Well I only had a couple of photos on my phone so here is what I've got. I have some off beat hobbies, one of which is researching the use of cosmetics throughout human history. This is a picture of my set up to make the eye cosmetic known as kohl in antiquity.

My flickr photostream can be viewed here: Flickr  There you can see the entire process up to making the actual kohl.

RSS Feeds-AM Session 3

I found this morning to be very interesting,. I've used RSS feeds on my school website so followers can keep up with changes that I make to it. But even though I have had gmail for at least 2 years, there were a number of features like Google Reader that I hadn't used before...just like I hadn't used the Blogger before.


I can see how I would use it personally to keep up with current events. I will need to think on how the students can use this. Can they get RSS thru their Gaggle? I don't think so since outside email is blocked. I'd like some thoughts in comments on how we can use this for the students.


A link that I "refound" and have now saved in Delicious is this one: Concise Learning

I learned something about Delicious this morning

First off, I *finally* remembered how to get to my other Delicious account. I had originally set up an account using my Yahoo account.

Now this issue is that I have two accounts. I looked for a way to merge them but there apparently is not a way to do that. Luckily, all I had done with the one that I set up yesterday was to import my favorites list into Delicious.

Then I had a quandry. Many of those are "personal", like my Bank's website or my web-based blood glucose log. I can, of course, set these as private, but that seems just wrong somehow.

I could import my favorites from my computer *again* into my Yahoo log in...but I don't think I'm going to do that. Instead, I'm going to just open any link in my favorites that I *do* want to save in Delicious and just do that with the tag/save feature on the Delicious toolbar.

Does anyone know off-hand if you can delete a Delicious account? Now that I've remembered the Yahoo account log in I could just delete the other one. If I get time today, I'll double check the help section to see if I can do this.

Something I discovered about Mobile Blogging

I don't know if it is just my phone or what but yesterday it seemed that my phone just *ate up* its battery yesterday. The only thing I did differently yesterday was to do the mobile blogging. If anyone else trys the mobile blogging, I'd love your feedback as to if this is just my problem or is something that has to do with the app.