Week 8, Zoho and Library thing

I am so excited about both of these 'things'!!!
My favorite thing about Library Thing is the recommendations option. The Beverly Public Library has, or used to have when I had more time to read, a binder in which you could look up books or authors and see recommendations based on those preferences. I used it all the time, but it is much easier to use the website!! Love it!
Zoho is wonderful! My friend and I were just discussing how it would be great to be able to create a document online so that we could access it and not have to worry about carrying (forgetting) a flash drive, or emailing it back and forth. She was referring to Googledocs before I knew we were going to be looking at this for this class. I'm going to try that one too.

Week 7

Rss feeds are a great tool, and I see lots of potential, but sadly, all I could subscribe to were weather sites, Beverly Citizen (thanks Collsy) and Salem News. I don't check several sites a day to see if there is anything new, but hopefully I'll become more informed by checking my new Google Reader. I'm a little confused though, because I did an 'add a subscription' search for weather in Beverly but when I click on that subscription it doesn't give me current Beverly Weather. I don't think I found what I wanted. I'll try again another time though!

Week 6, response to readings

I vacillate between the desire to grow with technology and the feeling that I should hang on to tradition. I want to keep up with technology and prepare my students, but I still believe that 'top down' education is necessary. It is what gives students the basis from which to create, produce, extend etc. I like the analogy that one of the authors used about the lecture hall and the hallway. The real learning happens when the students can discuss the concepts, work with them and make them their own. The web 2.0 world gives people a forum for collaboration, participation and creation but the traditional classroom setting, with teacher guiding and instructing, wading through the 'flood' of information and gathering the relevant into a smaller tidepool, gives students the opportunity to examine without being knocked down by the next wave of information.

Week 6; Technorati

I did a search on "number theory" to see if I could find any ideas on teaching concepts like prime, odd, divisor, relatively prime, etc...
I searched the "blogosphere" and found a blog about a site designed to find primes; cool.
I couldn't find a 'keyword' search in the Blog Directory, and none of the titles had anything to do with the concept I chose, so I didn't find anything on number theory there. Same with Popular Tags, although I did find Julian Smith's 25 things I hate about Facebook, which was very funny, so not all was lost.
articles later...

Wk. 6, Delicious

I'm in NC at my friend's house and her husband will freak if I download anything on his laptop, so I'm afraid to sign up for a Del.icio.us account, but I will when I get home for sure! When I explored the site, it was a little overwhelming, and I thought the popular bookmarks weren't very interesting. I don't quite get how it works but I'm hoping to use delicious to store and organize sites that I find helpful or interesting so that I can get to them whether at school or home.

Week 5, little late

Warm weather has arrived, and I'm finding it harder to do school work. Getting ready to go on vacation next week, so I should really be trying to get ahead, ha.
Putting an image on my blog from an image generator was easy, but I wanted it to be on the side of my blog, and it got cut off. I tried making it smaller, but that didn't help. It's there though!!
My mind is boggled by the Web 2.0 awards list. It is awesome that there are sites that organize everything on the web. I thought you had to use search engines like Google to find what you're looking for, but that can sometimes be frustrating and sort of needle-in-haystack like.
I hope to be using Rollyo, del.icio.us, backpack to be more organized in my teaching. Finding good websites for math, and saving them in one place = huge time saver.
I'll have to look at urbanspoon, because it has my name in it and last.fm because I love music, but usually not mainstream stuff. Last, and totally least, hairmixer, because that's just silly.
Ok, this was fun.