Thing 14

I decided to compare Gliffy and bubbl.us for Thing 14. I will be honest and say that I went with Gliffy because I did not feel like waiting on a request from flowchart. Gliffy was really easy to use, and I found it to be straight forward. I think that for my students I would choose Gliffy over Bubbl.us, because bubbl.us can be a little confusing if don't play around with it first. with Gliffy it was really easy to make a flowchart. Besides flowcharts you can also make many different types of charts on there as well. I will be honest, I only choose bubbl.us because I thought the name was cute! Like the name sounds bubbl.us deals with bubble charts. You can do tons of different things to the bubble charts like change the color, the font, delete bubbles, edit the text, etc. I think flow charts will be great to use in my classroom to show things like "events leading up to the Civil War", among other events!

Thing 13

I checked out both Zoho and Google docs. When I first signed up for Zoho I was totally confused! It took me a few minutes to figure out how to navigate  the site and figure out all that it could offer me. Once I figured out everything Zoho was a wonderful tool to use in the classroom. It will allow me to make an excel spreadsheet without having excel on my computer....that's something I wished I knew about back in high school! Google docs was very similar to Zoho, but for me it was easier to use because I am used to Google. With Google Docs students could work together on a project in class, or if they didn't have them they could go online and finish the project then send it to each other.











https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1BN9E5RmcaXBFlmVlNz2qrBkDHiAMogfPHZa0p4P5qvI/view-form

Thing 12

The two google tools I decided to explore was google translate and google calendar. I used to use google translate all the time back when I was in French III honors in high school just to make sure I translated the sentences correctly. I think google translate is a really cool program that could be really helpful in the classroom. I remember when I was a senior my theater teacher adopted a girl from Albania, and she only spoke Albanian. Google translate would be a great tool to try to communicate with students like Albana (the girl from Albania) until they learn English. Google calendar is really cool! I am the type of person who wants to be able to stay on top of things, so I put all my things to do in my IPhone calendar or write it down in my schedule. Google calendar even lets you print off your calendar, which I think is really cool.

Thing 11

Searching through the different tools to look for RSS feeds was interesting. http://www.topix.net was horrible in my opinion, from the very moment I clicked on the website I was confused. For me topix was very difficult to figure out how to use. http://technorati.com wasn't that bad compared to topix. I read a few interesting ((but random)) blogs off of technorati...one day when I have more time I will have to go back and explore some more! http://www.google.com/blogsearch was the easiest to use in my opinion. Then again everyone is used to the google layout! I found a lot of interesting blogs on google about history teachers in both middle school and high school! I will use both google and technorati again in the future! As for topix, well I am going to avoid that site like it is the plague!

Thing 10

I really like that RSS and newsfeeders are easy to use! They are a great way to keep up with blogs that are most important to you and you want to read everyday. This is a great way to help cut down on time to find the blog you like and scan through it...it's all where you subscribed to them :). I love this, I didn't know about it before today but I think it is awesome. I subscribed to a bunch of cooking blogs because I love cooking! I think this would be a great tool in the classroom to subscribe to other teachers/parents/principals to help keep up with what is going on in the school. Another way to use this is to have all your students in your class subscribe to each other, that way they are always connected with you and their peers!

Thing 9

I really liked the imagechef website. To me it was the most user-friendly. I created a scrapbook page because I love to scrapbook in my free time. The picture I chose was a picture my boyfriend's mom took of me and Zach(my boyfriend) when we were doing the clothing closet at Mission 615. This is a great tool to play around on when you have nothing else to do, when you want to make easy scrapbook pages, just add some "dazzle" to your pictures. This would be a thing if you didn't have a huge class to make them special happy birthday/honor roll/special student/etc pictures to showcase on the bulletin board. This is also a great way to show the class pictures of historic sites (for history teachers), so they can get a visual image of what you are talking about looks like!

Thing 8

I really enjoyed playing with spell with flickr. I think that in a classroom this would be a great tool to make posterboards to get students interesting in learning! Students don't want to stare at plain gray walls all day, that makes them feel like they are in prison! By making your walls colorful you are creating a welcoming enviroment where students will feel confortable and want to learn. I personally don't like to share a lot of photos online if I can't mark them as private or just share them with my friends on facebook.

Thing 7

In the past I have used photo hosting site before such as photo bucket and Instagram. I used photo bucket mainly as a way to find "cute pictures" to put on my myspace page. I never shared any photos on there, but I have shared photos on Instagram. I use Instagram mainly for the photo editing options; I do like how flickr has photo editing options. I think this would be a great tool to use in the classroom in art, but I'm not sure how it could be used in English or History.... I really don't think I will personally use it. It really creeps me out that even though I uploaded the pictures from my mac that it still said what day, where, when, and what type of iPhone I took the pictures from....I don't like that at all!

This is a photo I took outside of the hotel I was staying at in Orange beach, Al over the summer. I love the beach, it's so gorgeous to just watch the ocean bring in the tides and the sea shells!

, a photo by polarbear777 on Flickr.

Thing 6

When I went to go2web20 I didn't just choose one website to explore. I decided to explore what websites they have on their site enrich my experience.

• While looking through the various sites I saw Skype on the list. I use Skype to talk to friends overseas, my boyfriend while I'm away and FaceTime isn't working. I think Skype would be a great tool to use in the classroom if you knew a teacher in another country or state. This could let the children see other children in different parts of the world and learn first hand from them about their culture. www.skype.com
• YouTube is a site that everyone knows. I plan to use YouTube in my classroom as a future teacher. One of the "benefits"of being a history teacher is there is so many different documentaries that I could use in the classroom. There is also a need page I found made by history teachers that make song about various history events. www.youtube.com  
• I thought Inslices was a neat site. It allows you to save your favorites sites and organize them while you are surfing the web. I plan to use Inslices to help keep the websites I find useful in organized instead of having a ton of book marks! www.inslices.com

Thing 5

For me School 2.0 means I need to try and stay as on top of technology and education as I possibly can. Since we are in the age of technology one single person cannot keep up to date with everything new that comes out, they just have to do their best. Being a teacher means you need to have a lot of tricks in your bag to conduct your classroom in a serious, healthy, and fun learning environment....one of the main tricks in that bag is the use of technology. When I become a teacher I know there is going to be students in my classroom that will know more about technology than I do, and that is a little intimidating to me.
For schools in the future School 2.0 means to keep taking steps towards the "age of technology." Just Sunday I saw an article that channel 4 shared on Facebook about the best jobs of 2013, or something along that line, but online secondary teacher made the list. I think that within my lifetime a lot of school will go to online learning, or learning on a computer in ever class. Technology is always changing, I know that it will stay in the schools, but that's the only thing I am sure about when it comes to technology.

Thing 4

Commenting is a great way to interact with other people who have the same interests as yourself. Commenting helps build a community because when you interact with people and show an interest in what they say then they will in return show an interest in your. It basically helps makes everyone feel like they are connected in some sense and share a common interest.
In the article "How to comment like a king or (queen!)" I found it interesting that they advised to teach children how to comment. Even with growing up in a "technological" age I never really have thought of teaching children how to comment on a blog. I remember my English honors/French teacher telling us a story about when she was a girl she learn phone etiquette in school. I suppose today's blogging etiquette lessons are yesterday's phone etiquette lesson.
I also found it very important that the article included how to criticize kindly. I find that to be one of the most important rules of blogging. A comment on a blog should not be a total put down or make someone upset. I've read blogs about someone's struggles with depression where someone posts "just go kill yourself already" type of comments. I find that for one to be totally disrespectful to the author of the blog. Comments such as that one is not funny, cute, or cool to make...it can change a life from "bearly hanging on" to death. I know that's a harsh example, but I think that's a great example to make my point.

Blogs I commented on:

• Mallory Johnson's Thing number 3. In comparsion to my thing number 3, Mallory thought outside of the box about how she would use blogs in her classroom. I would have never thought to use blogs for students and each other...that was probably too obviously for me to think of lol.
• Haley Cauthen's Thing number 1. I comment on Haley's blog because like her I am a perfectionalist and doubt work. I can relate to her struggles.
• Markesha McCombs's Thing number 2. I loved Markesha's quote about teaching is a gift that not everyone is blessed with. I think that's a great way to describe teacher's talents.
• Holly Hudson's Thing 1. Holly said she wanted to become more confident using technology. Even though I feel like I know about technology I think this class with help enhance my technology knowledge and make me more confident in front of students.
• Stephen Smith's thing 5. Stephen said he didn't know how well technology would work in a elementary or middle school classroom. I don't know about elementary school but I observed a middle school in October and saw how technology was put to use in there. 
• Calla Carpenter's thing 3. I like how Calla said she would going to try to get parents to participate by giving them every opportunity.  
• Brittany Maybray's Thing 1. I like how Brittany said that if the material was boring for her that she couldn't learn it well. I had the same problem in my English honors classes, one book out of every class would be super boring for me! I want to give my student a variety of subjects to do projects on so they will learn and not be bored! 

Comments:
On Mallory's I commented about how much I loved her idea to use blogs with students. On Haley's I commented that I can relate to her worries about work not being good enough. On Markesha's I comment about how I loved her quote and talked about how I was blessed with teaching history but not something like math. On Holly's I commented about how even though I know about technology I still don't feel confident to demonstrate something in front of students because I doubt myself. I feel like this class will help me with my confidence levels. On Stephen's I commented about how I saw technology being put to use in the middle school that I observed. On Calla's I commented that I too was going to give the parents of my students every opportunity to participate. On Brittany's I commented about how I became bored and did not learn if I had to read something I did not like.

Thing 3

I personally think that blogs are both a great way to keep in touch with students and parents. There is so many things that you can do with a blog to enhance your classroom experience. One of the most obvious answers to me is to use a blog to post homework. A homework blog is a great idea for both students and parents to have somewhere to go to check what is from homework if they lost the paper the assignment was written on. A blog is also a great place to showcase students who have made the honor roll, or just to have a "special student" of the day/week/month. Many times students fail to give their parents notes/letters with special announcements like picture day, field trips, dances, ect. A blog would be a wonderful tool to help parents stay in touch with these types of announcements.