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.