Thing 8

I used slide share to upload a power point slide show. The nice thing is that they have guest accounts so you don't have to login. This presentation is a show that we use with our 1st grade program to illustrate the locations that students talk about during the program. The pictures are a combination of pictures submitted by families and pictures from the web. During a conference I attended we were told that we can put the picture credit in the notes section of power point and I don't know if that will show through. At this site to publish a slide show I do notice that keynote presentations have to changed into pdf format first. This is good to know because our district wants to switch to using keynote over power point. This was pretty easy to link to the blog because there was a link to blogger. If I had an mp3 file saved I could've added audio to my slide show but I didn't have any mp3 files saved on my computer at this time.

Thing 7 continued

I watched a previously taped broadcast on using a google customized search engine. I wasn't able to watch a live one at this time because of my schedule so I watched this one to see how it worked. I liked the idea of the using the customized search engine because it seems like a good way to manage bookmarks to only search within favorite web sites. This would work well if you have a number of sites you check frequently. As far as watching a video conference I like that you can see what the person is doing on your computer so that you can see exactly where they are going. Presumably if this demonstration was live the instructor would likely give the learners time to try or set up some of the things they are teaching at the same time. I was asked to take a couple of these earlier this year for a survey and a design tool however the times did not fit in with my schedule and I thought that the set up was a little too difficult for my area. The one that had a phone connection I believe would have been a long distance call which I did not think the school would appreciate paying for an hour long long distance call to watch one of these. The other problem with some of these is that you may have to download some software and not all schools have easy access to or want you to download software that is not used normally in your teaching day. One thing I thought would be nice is that set up of the one that I watched I didn't have to download anything but as I watched I could see exactly where the person was telling you to click and something like that as a tutorial for students on searching the internet or using word/power point if they missed the assignment. The only thing I wished it would have had was a pause button so I could pause the presentation and try out what was being taught.

Thing 7

I have been using e-mail since I started grad school in the media program. I started that program back in 1992 and I used a computer for all my school work and a little bit for looking up information in a library but I did not know much about the internet or e-mail and especially the use that was set up for home. Since then I don't know how I would do without either one. We use the internet all the time at home and school to look up information, communicate, shop, and play games. Over the years the use of these tools have gotten easier and more user friendly. I am the yearbook coordinator at our school and the first two years I did the yearbook it was all cut and paste. The past two years the entire yearbook is done online. Yahoo got to be my favorite browser so I set up my e-mail and everything through that early on. I now use google a lot more but appreciate the connectivity google and yahoo share with each other. I have gotten to the point at work that I prefer to be contacted by e-mail versus the telephone. I frequently get solicitation calls while in the middle of class so I often won't answer my phone when I am teaching because it takes away from my lessons and I don't always remember to respond to my phone messages as quickly as I should. When using e-mail I can often switch from my circulation screen while I am waiting for the next patron and quickly read and respond to an e-mail. (It is also easier not to be as wordy with an e-mail as when you talk.) I also like the idea with e-mail that I can group my co-workers into groups so that only one grade level would get a message that I sent.
IM My opinions on IM is that it is a great tool to talk like two people would talk face to face. I have done some IM with the people who are connected via yahoo messenger and plan to set up something with the chinese teacher who stayed with me last fall. I like the fact that I can log into my e-mail with yahoo and that if I have someone else in my mailbox that is also using yahoo for their mail that I get notified when they are logged in so that I can sent them a message and we can chat. I have a wii which supposedly is able to go online and contact another person however I can't seem to get it to go out into cyberspace. One thing that happens when I IM is that I spell out everything because I don't have a dictionary for all the abbrviations and by the time I would look them up the other person would get tired of waiting for me to figure out what they are saying. IM is a whole new language. Our school does not allow for IM so I see a need to know what it is and the basics of using it, because my patrons know about it, however I don't think I will be using it with my patrons.
One of my former students who is a daughter of one of my co-workers finally taught me how to send a message last summer. I have owned a cell phone for 9 years and never learned how to send a message. I am very slow but I can do it, where as I know many of my students can send a long message in less time than a teacher can even notice they have their phone in their hand. I have used text message at times to reach my brother because he can't take calls while he is working. We try to encourage our students to leave their cell phone at home, (I am in a k-6 building and we feel there is no reason for them to have their phones in school more from a loosing them stand point and we offer a free phone for students to use in the main lobby,) so I frequently don't bring my phone to school either. I can see that the short messaging would work for a librarian to let a patron know their materials are in or to send an answer to a research question. I know that there are services/software that will allow for sending these short messages so that they can be sent and received without a cell phone as well. I will continue this thing post later.

23 thing card 1

23 thing card 1
Originally uploaded by Jeanne's practice pictures

Here is my other card for my non-fiction section.

Everybody section media center

Everybody section media center
Originally uploaded by Jeanne's practice pictures

Here is the card I made for the Everybody section of my media center. I took this picture to try and learn how to upload to flickr.

Thing 6 part 1

Gooseberry Falls in winter
Originally uploaded by Jeanne's practice pictures

Here is my attempt at a trading card. I can see a lot of uses for this one great idea would be for creating your own flash cards but to have enough it would cost a lot to print out enough for everyone to have their own. It would be nice however to find a way to make your own flashcards and save them on the computer where someone would not have to pay to use that service. I used Gooseberry Falls because we are currently working on Minnesota History with my group and thought it would be a great way to try this to use with a class. I like adding the little icons.

Thing 5 part 4

This could be used easily in a school library by taking pictures of book covers and having kids add information to the cover that they might be interested in sharing for a picture book talk or report. I think sharing photos is fun but I would be careful not to publically publish anything with a person's picture on it without their permission or their parent's permission as well. I would also be careful about teaching students to give credit to the photos if they were to do a project where they got the photo from someone else. As far as adding the stuff I did to my blog I didn't even have to make sure that I copied any code, as long as I was signed in to flickr and my blog under a different window all I had to do was click on the blog this spot from flickr and my stuff was sent directly to my blog. I also now have figured out how to get my rss working and the new stuff getting added to my blog is also going over to that as well.