Summary

The 23 thing project is quite interesting, challenging, and enjoyable. Learning about the availability of Web 2.0 productivity sites and being able to apply this new technology to improve classroom projects and assignments is an invaluable asset to me as a teacher.

This class definitely provides a push for class room bound educators to keep up with the latest developments in learning technology. I consider this project to be a high quality educational project that can be replicated in the classroom.

I have certainly learned quite a bit in this class so far and I will be able to utilize this in my classes.

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I'm not sure what is going on with the system, several items that I posted yesterday and viewed online are gone today. I enjoy using TeacherPop in professional communications with other teachers. This web ring allows for both formal and informal communications between teachers as well as a storage portal for videos and photos.

Flowgram

I finally followed the right instructions and was able to post my first educational flowgram. I find it hard to believe that Flowgrams are free. I believe I would pay a subscriber fee, but I am not complaining about the price. This two week process has been quite a memorable learning experience. Flowgrams are an excellent multimedia tool that is easy to utilize in the production of quality educational content in the classroom.

The Flowgram is the more effective teaching tool when compared to the visual PowerPoint presentation that I created last week. I certainly enjoyed the no words rule, it provided the opportunity to think outside the English language box. I carefully chose images and symbols to convey the best meaning possible; however, adding narration increased the likelihood of retention. I chose images that improved the vitality of the message by portraying the content. The Flowgram development website adds a second dimension for learning, and that is audio. Some people learn better when they see and hear the message together.

I teach a business communications class, and assigned my students the task of creating a Flowgram for a fictitious business of their choosing. I will find out next week how well I communicated the assignment.

I will be using Flowgrams in class and online in the near future. This is certainly a Web 2.0 feature of great potential to benefit educators.

Thing 23

The creative commons is a not-for-profit chartered group that allows artist and publishers protect their intellectual property that has been posted online. The originator ownes the work and creative commons provides basic copyright protection, but allows for usage in a non-profit. educational setting.

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I visited the YouTube website and viewed videos concerning Web 2.0 applications in education. I have used YouTube and iTunes in my classes to supplement educational materials in the classroom.
The YouTube video I watched was titled Collaborative Technology and Engaging the Campus 2008 Panel Session: Learning 2.0: Making Sense of the explosion of Web 2.0 tools and their relevance and consequence in Higher Education Panelists

Thing 21

I have toured the Animoto website and started the video clip, but I am having some technical problems. I used my digital camera to create a 30 second video clip, and uploaded it to my computer. The Animoto site recommends that all video clips be resized and gives several free resize programs. I have tried to download one of them but cannot complete the task due to insufficient memory. I tried to upload directly to the website, but the video is in api format that is not compatable with Animoto. I am continuing to work on that problem.

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Podcasts and Flowgrams are quite similar and are beneficial in education because it allows for a multimedia approach to learning. These programs allow for images to be displayed with other forms of input to be added including narration, sound clips, and music.

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Social networking is a growing phenomana worldwide, I have friends who are active in several different social networking sites.

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Social networking is changing American culture as well as those of other countries. The positive side of social networking is the virtual nature of the beast. People can easily meet and exchance information, create a virtual persona, and be creative. My school blocks all access to MySpace and YouTube.

The downside to social networking is the tendency of some people to attempt to use this technology to exploit others, gain illegal contact, and over represent themselves. It has led some to observe that the photos posted to these accounts are inappropriate and simetimes illegal. I read recently of a 17 year old boy who was convicted of engaging in child pornography because he posted a photo of his ex-girl friend on the web after they broke up.

I have discussed this behavior in some of my college writing classes. I observed that society is changing because what parents may deem inappropriate, such as nude photos being posted on the web, teens find socially acceptable. The social web sites allow teens to escape social censoring as occurs at the movies for self-imposed rules of society. Most of my students agree that social websites allow for activities that were disallowed a few years ago to transpire up to several millions of times per week. It can be argued that the Web is their electronic source of self-worth.

I set up a MySpace account several years ago, I also have a Twitter account as well. As a male teacher, I do not have students as friends; although, several female instructors have established MySpace accounts and use them to check in on students and to be available. I have no interst in such contact because I believe that it could lead to misunderstanding and allogations of unfair or unethical communications between males and females. My wife is very uncomfortable with this idea as well.

Thing 17

The use of tags to create a learning trail is a useful idea for Web 2.0 users. I logged on to the class portal page at Del.icio.us and explored some of the articles and features. I signed up for a learning blogsite for a student development class that I teach.

Of the sites visited for this activity. I preferred Del.icio.us over Furl and Ma.gnolia due to my experiences with del.icio.us. I like the lay-out of the site. Due to the ease of understanding site instructions, I believe that students will enjoy the use of digital online technology to locate research and educational information for use in learning.

Parents may have to learn yet another skill, but should benefit from the process and be able to relate to their child or children better.

Educators will benefit from this technology by giving their students two vital lessons in one class. This is a good learning activity in which the students can learn by a hands-on approach, and explore exciting topics that are current and relevant.

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I went to the Zoho site for project management and signed up for one free project. I am setting this project for completing my capstone project for the instructional technology project. Major activities include producing a quicktime video, developing a mobi educational website for cell phone browsers, and developing a flash plugin for my wellness education site.

Thing 14

For the relational programs, I chose Gliffy and Bubbl.us. I perfer mindmapping over flow charts. Both programs could be useful in classroom settings. Flow charts like at Gliffy help teachers or students define a distinct set of steps and options to be considered along the conceptual pathway. I teach a business communications class, and can use gliffy to demonstrate concepts such as how business decisions are made.

The Bubble.us program helps to show relations between complex concepts. When I teach healthcare, I could create mindmaps to show relationships among forms of immunity. There are several factors that contribute to immune responses, and using Bubbl.us I was able to create a basic interaction chart.

Web based applications are fun and can be used in presentations. One of my earliest discoveries was a free graphing program, Create a graph from NCSE, I have used it in PowerPoint graphs for class projects. It is easy to use and creates graphs at no costs in a variety of styles: pie, bar-graph, X-Y. It is great fun, and can be edited as needed. Students seem to love this great program on the web.
http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/default.aspx

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Schools can use wikis for a wide variete of purposes. One example is the Princton Public Library which is a collabrative activity to inform patrons of library functions and write online book reviews. Library Review offers an index at the beginning of the wiki to allow users to navigate quickly to a specific topic

Another such website is wikipedia.org, which is quite popular as an online information site. One drawback to wikis is that there is not complete control over information submitted, but is a popular way to trade information on the Internet.

I have written over 100 articles for wikipedia. It is easy to use. I wrote both medical and historical articles, including several about famous Clarksvillians. My first exposure to wikis was to wikipedia. I was viewing the Clarksville, Tennessee section and noticed the names of several people that had no biographical information. I had started writing online for a now defunct dot com website profiling the history of Clarksville. I was taking US History from Dr. Dixon at APSU in 1999, and was interested in helping promote Clarksville.

My first submission to Wikipedia was about Gustav Henry, who once lived in the APSU Pace Alumni Center. I was immediately challenged by an online editor who stated that anyone of that significance would already be featured on Wikipedia. I persisted, and was able to provide enough proof to be allowed to finish my wiki submission. Later I wrote about other Clarksvillians like Ms. Runion, founder of the First Woman's Bank of Tennessee, in Public Square in 1919. I also wrote about Tennessee's frontiersman who rivaled Daniel Boone, his name was Kasper Mansker. The famous Tennessee educator, Joseph Killebrew who has a hall at APSU named in his memory is another person I submidded a brief biography about.

One of the longer bios that I submitted was about the major league pitcher, Hod Lisenbee from the area which is now Dover Crossing section of town as US 79 S branches off near the North Clarksville Kroger store. He attended APSU briefly in the early 1920s when it was still a teacher's college. Another athlete that attunded APSU that I wrote about was basketball star "Fly" Williams, whose championship seasons at the university led to the construction of the Dunn Center.

The first wiki that I created as a teacher for use in my classes was Medical Terminology. I did not try to cover every topic, but provided some great references that I had gathered over the years of teaching the subject matter.

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I chose Zoho Writer to create an account, and found this to be an excellent site for producing online word processing documents. The features are comprehensive and allow for numerous presentation formats and the use of color and bolded text.

Also, the Sun Microsystems suite of free programs is very beneficial. The set of programs is called Star OpenOffice, and can be downloaded for quick usage. The OpenOffice suite of programs includes a word-processing program, a spreadsheet program, and a presentation program that have the look and feel of MS Office 2003. The files are similar to the MS 2003 office as well as capable of being saved in MS Word, Excell, and PowerPoint format.

I teach English writing and have several students that do not have MS Office on their computers at home. They are required to create one presentation to be presented via PowerPoint. I had a student that brought her laptop to school, but was concerned that OpenOffice Presenter would not work if she saved to to her thumb-drive and tried to run it from my desktop computer and into the PowerPoint projector. I reviewed her storage options and noticed the Save As command that included MS PowerPoint 2003 as an option. I told her to store the presentation in MS PowerPoint 2003, and it played perfectly.

https://cds.sun.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/WFS/CDS-CDS_SMI-Site/en_US/-/USD/ViewProductDetail-Start?ProductRef=SO9-BETA-MP-G-F@CDS-CDS_SMI

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Google Tools has been a great help to me. I bought a Blackjack II phone and had little exposure to Google then, but soon started downloading specialty Google programs on my cell phone and laptop. I like the free stuff like SpyDoctor, Open Office, and maps programs.

Recently, I was driving to Douglasville, Georgia just recently to attend a funeral. The free maps program acted as a GPS system. As I was driving, I called for the address of the funeral home, and entered it directly into my phone which has a GPS chip. While driving, the Maps program located my current position and provided turn by turn navigation to the funeral home. I was impressed, I have been solicitated to purchase a GPS program and pay an additional $99.00 access fee. Now, I realize that Maps is saving me $99.00 per month.

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The RSS reader is a great technology tool. These feeds can provide specific information about a wide variety of topics. I have subscribed to serveal blogs including the EdTech Journeys. I located this blog using EduBlog's Award Winners 2006 which was easy to use. I tried to use Feedster, but had trouble logging on. It was not as user friendly.

For the motivated teacher, having a set of RSS feeds is like having a research staff that is constantly scouring the net for information. It can be used by students and teachers in forming a collabrative project on a topic of choice, such as the use of Mayo Clinic's RSS feed for health and fitness.

RSS feeds are easy to set up and contain good content, if carefully selected. I found www.ask.com to be an easy to use RSS feed search location. A good RSS feed can serve as a focus site for content. This allows a teacher to assign an online topic and not be concerned about students surfing to unrelated sites, provided they use the authorized RSS feed locations.

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The use of RSS feeds is an invaluable tool for tracking new information and news items of personal intrest. I started subscribing to RSS feeds two years ago, after my wife purchased a computer for me at Christmas. My older laptop was too slow, and crashed often, so it was time for a change.

I chose Google Reader for my choice of readers, and subscribed to several health and education RSS feeds. I like the fact that I can choose specific RSS feeds and receive up to date information on those topics. RSS feeds can be assigned by teachers as supplemental reading for students, and professional development.

Teachers can use this information in wikis and in blogs.