Thing 5

I will not be around my computer next week so I am going to thing 5 now. What I liked about wiki is that you are able to collectively discuss plans and ideas to meet the common goal. I liked that you can use it in the classroom to encourage student involvement with notes, ideas, projects, and even test. To me, blogs are more for social communication and it is harder to discuss and make plans. You post an idea and people comment back, then you have to go back and change your idea. With wiki you can post your idea and have it changed as you go along from people editing it with their comments. Wiki is a faster more effective tool to use in group planning, projects, and classroom information. Students can benefit from using wikis by learning and teaching other students. They can use wikipedia to get information. They can share their ideas and information and keep building on that idea with information from others.It can be a constant learning and teaching process that can be fun along the way. The wiki I liked the most was the 2nd grade wiki. It was a neat page full of color and information. It used the mushing we just learned about. I liked that it had all subjects listed and you can check them all out. It was kept current even though it is summer. I like that the students posted stories or things that happened to them and drew pictures of themselves. It is interesting and it would capture the interest of the students. I did not like the wikinomics. For me it did not capture my eye. I felt it was a little bit difficult to read or understand. I guess I like colorful fun looking wikis. I think wikipediahas a place in the classroom if it is used properly. It is a great learning tool that the students can gather good information. On the other hand, if the students misuse it or don't understand how to use it, it cannot be a good thing. The teacher would have to set guidelines when using wiki and wikipedia. I myself feel like I need to learn more about it to use it properly and effectively in my classroom. From what I leaned about it so far, is that it is a tool to use personally and professionally.

Thing 4

I really liked using flickr. I did not know that there is a website to backup or upload your photos to the web for everyone to see. It is nice that you can have your setting to private or public. I like all of the ideas flickr gives you for editing, posting, making books, and etc. Image generators is a neat way to make everything more interesting. I really liked the mosaic generator. It is a cool way to display photos that have something in common. I like the use of tag words to help you find photos or images. It is very easy to use and it pulled up cool photos. I use the tag word beautiful for my flickr photo and it pulled up many cool photos. I liked the Caribbean photo above for many reasons. The first reason is that is just a pretty picture. The next is that it reminds me of my honeymoon and all the fun we had. The last reason is that I wish I were there now. I can see students using this tool because it opens to door to see photos of places they may never see. Students can take photos of places they been and share them with their friends using flickr. They can create a photo book of their class for memories of that year. They can pick and choose the photos that the teacher or other students have taken to create this memory book. They can use the image generator to add creative touches to their book. I did not know that there was a Creative Commons License. The students need to know this to give them the rights they need as users. They would need to know which photos need to have the permission of the owner to use and ones that they can use with certain limits. The mosaic image generator was my favorite. I did create a mosaic of sunsets but could not get it to copy over to my blog. I also liked the spell generator. It is like the framed picture letters of my last name in my house. It is also neat that you can change the letters just by clicking on them. It would be neat to make a mosaic of the the students doing basketball activities or any other type of activity. Or at the end of the year have each student create a mosaic of themselves to do p.e. activities. They can make trading cards of themselves doing an activity and trade them with their friends. There is so much you can do with flickr and image generator that the ideas or endless. I think it would be a neat hands on activity for the students to enjoy.