Thing 17: Claymation

So I know this isn't on the list of 16 Things but I am going to continue posting things that I am learning in class on this blog. This week we had to create a claymation or stop-motion video. I decided to go with something that I would be teaching at the beginning of the year. In science we always start the year with tools, safety rules and the scientific method. I found this short song from Shake-n-Learn Science about the scientific process. I was able to make my figures to go with the video and it was really easy. I think the most difficult part of the whole process was figuring out how many pictures to take.

I had so much fun with this I am planning on doing it with my kids during the first few weeks of school.

16 Things Final Evaluation

1. What were you favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
I think one of my favorite things was creating and using this blog.  I really enjoyed going through each "Thing" and talking about what I learned.  I have also really enjoyed visiting my classmates blogs to see what they were learning or finding for each topic.  Another thing I have really enjoyed using is the RSS feed.  I don't use bloglines because I didn't have much luck with them, but I am using Google Reader.  I have downloaded an app for my phone and my computer so I can easily keep up with whats going on in education in the US & Texas, technology, some others.   Hopefully I can add to this list so that I can stay up to date with current events.

2. How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
I am really interested in checking out the 23 Things website and completing some of the activities that we didn't complete in this class.  I think there are tons of tools out there to discover and I am sure there will be plenty more made over the coming years.

3. Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
I was surprised at how easy it was for me to talk about what I was learning and thinking.  I don't usually like to write, but this blog has really been an awesome experience.  A few times as I was looking over my blog and posts I would ask myself "Am I being to long-winded" - but I really had a lot to say because I enjoyed this so much.  I hope to continue using this blog to complete the other 17 things from the list....to bad I can't change my blog address :(

4. What could I do differently to improve upon this programs format or concept?
I would have liked to have the Things spread out over the course of the class and maybe incorporate more of the "things" from the original list.   You also might want to check some of the links on your blog because a few of them are broken.

Thing 16: Facebook

Well I have been using Facebook since 2003...so I feel like a veteran, but it seems like every time I log on something changes.  I love Facebook!  I love being able to see what my friends are up to and what is going on in their lives.  I also like being able to connect with people I haven't seen in a long time.  I am actually friend with a group of girls that I met at Young Life camp when I was a junior in high school.  Something that irritates me though is how open some people are about the personal business.  Its like verbal vomit and I don't want or need to know that much about them (and these are adults).

As for using Facebook with student or parents - I don't necessarily want my current parents/students to be able to see all of my personal business or pictures.  Not that I post anything inappropriate on my page but I would hate for something to be misconstrued into something it isn't.  I have friended some of my former student parents that I formed a close relationship with.  I like to talk to them and keep up with some of my former students.  I wish I could create a "teacher" account where I could be friends with some of my former students.   I would love to be able to keep in touch with them and see what they are up to.  But since some people have inappropriate relationships with students this isn't really publicly acceptable.

Thing 15.5: Twitter

I have actually used Twitter before, but mainly for personal use to follow my friends and for celebrity gossip (don't judge me). But this summer I was thinking this would be a great way to keep my parents updated about what's going on in my room. I could tweet my homework, reminders, or ask for donations for science experiments.

                                  http://twitter.com/MsSavvyScience

The following are some people that I am following on Twitter

• educationweek - Education Week, American education's newspaper and website of record. http://www.edweek.org
• educationnation - Examining and redefining education in America this September. http://www.educationnation.com
• USNewsEducation - U.S. News and World Report: Education news and rankings http://www.usnews.com/education
• EDPressSec - Official twitter account for Department of Education Press Secretary Justin Hamilton http://www.ed.gov
• usedgov - News and information from the U.S Department of Education. http://www.ed.gov
• TheScienceGuy - Bill Nye, Science Educator seeks to change the world. http://billnye.com
• weirdscience - Science, space, energy and robot sharks with lasers. Hosted by the Wired Science team: @betsymason, @9brandon, @davemosher & @astrolisa. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/
• Discovery - News and much more from Discovery Channel U.S. Press info at press.discovery.com http://discovery.com/#mkcpgn=twdsc1
• ScienceChannel - Thought-provoking updates, insider news and more from Science Channel. http://science.discovery.com/#mkcpgn=twsci1

Thing 15: Things like Skype

I use Skype to chat with my mom and some friends at home.  I actually just used the video feature the other day to show my mom the room I just painted and some decorating that I did over the weekend.  Since she lives in Colorado we don't get to see each other very often.  So this was the best way for me to show her what was going on at my house.  I also use it to chat with my friend who lives in Indiana and see his beautiful 1 year old daughter.

Recently I found out that we are allowed to use Skype at work, which surprises me.  Next year since half of my team will be inside and half will be outside I think it might be a great way for us to communicate with each other since we won't be able to poke our heads out in the hall anymore to chat.  We wouldn't necessarily use the video feature, instead we could use the chat feature.

One way that I think Skype could be used in the classroom is to do video conferences with it.  If you have a friend at another school in the district or even a pen pal in another state Skype could be an easy way for two classrooms to communicate with each other.  

One thing that I also use that is like Skype is FaceTime on my iPhone and I have used it on my computer.  The only thing that is limiting about FaceTime is that you can only talk to people with Mac products.  But the other day two people in my graduate class were talking about a program called Tango.  The difference between Tango and FaceTime is that Tango allows you to call people with different devices.  

Thing 14: Podcasting

My first experience with podcasting was actually this year. I started going to a new church and they record all of their sermons (which I'm sure it not uncommon) and post them on iTunes and on their website as podcasts. So when I have to be out of town or am unable to make it to church I usually listen to the sermon to make sure I am caught up before the next Sunday.

I think podcasts would be a great way to communicate information with parents from events like open house or TAKS night. Since they can't always make it my partners and I could record our presentations and post them on our school website (or the website I'm building for my classroom). Then parents can listen and email us if they have any questions.

I would say that I could record my lessons but I don't think that my 5th graders would listen to it if they were absent. That might be a better idea for high school teachers.

As I was looking for information on podcasts I came across The Education Podcast Network. It is an effort to bring together into one place, the wide range of podcast programming that may be helpful to teachers looking for content to teach with and about, and to explore issues of teaching and learning in the 21st century.

I decide to subscribe to a podcast from NSTA called Lab Out Loud which is a biweekly podcast on science teaching, science news, and anything else with “science” in it.

Thing 13: Using YouTube

This is the video that I created for our multimedia music video project.  I was pretty overwhelmed when I first started making the video, but then I got in the grove and really started having fun.  It was super easy to create an account and upload it to YouTube.  Hopefully it will show up on the Gaggle version so I can share it with my kids next year at the start of school (If not I can always pull it up from my trusty dropbox).

Thing 12: Discovering YouTube

Basically it was love at first episode. Here's how my love of Glee started. I was watching something on Fox one night, probably American Idol, and was too lazy to get up and change the channel when the show was over. So I was sitting there on the couch and Glee came on. I had heard about the show before, but had never watched it (I was sure it was going to be stupid). Boy was I wrong. The first episode I saw was Hell-O. The reason I know this was the show is because season 1 was broken into two parts, and this was the first episode of part two. After watching this episode I had to see the others. I got online and watched episodes 1-13 to catch myself up and haven't missed a single episode yet. Some might call this obsessive, but I don't see anything wrong with it.

Thing 11: Web 2.0 Tools

Wallwisher - is an online notice board.  Its ideal for making announcements, keeping notes, posting ideas, questions or reminders.  Basically anything you would write on a sticky note you could put on a note at wallwisher.  I had to use this site after a math training one time to post two things that I learned after the training was over 

Dabbleboard - is an online whiteboard that will help you visualize, explore and communicate ideas

Thing 10: Online Productivity Tools

I have actually used Google Docs a few times at work since we were introduced to it in class.  It was a great way for my team and I to work on plans for our school wide theme for next year. 

I had never heard of Zoho Writer before I read Dr. Wilson's blog post.  After browsing around on Zoho the UI is much nicer than Google Docs in my opinion.  It also looks like there are a lot more options when it comes to collaboration with this website.  Zoho has a chat feature for instant messaging and a group chat tool.  I also noticed that it had a wiki with private and public groups.  Books can help an organization take care of their accounting needs and it looks like you can invite people to have access to the account.  I notice there were also places for a calendar, reports, and equivalents of Excel and PowerPoint.  I am definitely going to be playing around a little bit more on this site to see everything it has to offer.

Thing 9: Play with Wiki's

I think wiki's are a wonderful collaboration tool.  I would love to have one for my classroom, but it is all about finding the time to learn how to make it work best for me.  I think right now I am trying to learn too many new things, and a wiki is going to have to wait.  I loved getting on the Technology Poppers Wiki and reading some ideas that other people had.  After I left training classes yesterday I went up to my school and started talking with my current and former principal and a few teachers from various grade levels.  We actually got on the topics of using a wiki for teacher across the district to communicate great ideas or discuss road blocks they are running into in the various curriculums.  It was a great inital idea but I think it would take some work getting it off the group.  Then you would net a modirator to make sure the content stayed on topic.  One of the teachers actually mentioned a website that does something similar to this called Project Share Texas.  This website is a global online learning community where educators collaborate, share resources and showcase accomplishments.

Thing 8: Wiki's

My first experiences with wikis came from a training a did last summer. A teacher from my school introduced us to PBWorks here she had created an interactive website for her and her students to exchange thoughts and ideas about different books they were reading and other stuff going on in their classroom. After the training was over I actually created one of my own, but never took the time to figure out how to use it well enough to share it with my kids and parents. Hopefully I will get some time this summer to work on it.

Some things that I like about PBWorks
- You can set up an account and it's free for academic use by up to 100 students, teachers or parents.
- Multimedia plugins: Embed video & audio in just a few clicks
- Built-in student accountability: See who changed what, and automatically reverse any changes. The page history lets you keep track of who contributed what.
- Workspace-wide access control. Select the specific users who have access, or make the workspace public and available to all.
- Give young students a personal login and password to protect their online privacy.

Thing 7: Image Generators

I actually used Wordle in my very first blog post. I created a "Life Long Learner" wordle when we posted our learning contracts. I love how you can change the font and colors of the wordle to fit your preferences.

I think WordSift is an AWESOME site. I would love to be able to paste in text from my students textbooks and figure out what the most important or most used words are. One of the coolest features of WordSift is ability to mark and sort different lists of words important to educators. WordSift has also integrated a few other functions, such as visualization of word thesaurus relationships (incorporating the amazing Visual Thesaurus® that we highly recommend in its own right) and Google® searches of images and videos.

I aslo wanted to check out Voki and had a lot of fun creating my character. You can check him out here. I was trying to post him to my blog but was having trouble logging into it from the voki website. Oh well! It was still a lot of fun. I think my kids would really enjoy making these in the computer lab next year.

Thing 6: RSS & Newsreaders

So I went to the website Bloglines that was recommended. I really like the UI and how easy it was to add different sites you wanted to follow. I also liked how you could make different tabs, I had one tab for education and news feeds and another tab set up to follow all of my classmates blogs. My frustration came when I was trying to figure out how to share my bloglines publicly. I tried following the directions listed on Dr. Wilson's blog with no luck. Then I even did a little bit of searching around on the bloglines site and looked for some answers on google. I still can't figure it out so I am giving up on it for now.

I have used Google reader before and actually prefer this site because I am already logged into Google for email and my blog. I also like that you can share only the items/article that you find interesting. The other thing I think is neat is that through Blogger I can add a widget to my blog which put my RSS feeds at the bottom of my page

Education Feeds
News Feed
Technology Feed
Texas Education Agency Feed

Thing 5: Mashup

Spell with Flickr allows you to type in a word or words and this site then pulls images off Flickr from the "one letter" group and creates a code for the word you typed.



Flickr Slideshow Generator allows you to generate the HTML necessary to embed a custom Flickr Slideshow in your page or blog. The only thing that I don't like about this slideshow is that it doesn't repeat, once all the pictures have been shown it stops and prompts you to restart it.

Thing 4: Flickr

I caught a crab, a photo by Hailey1018 on Flickr.


So I decide that my first flickr albums would be of some newest hobbies.  I have recently discovered the peaceful hobby of fishing.  My friend Abby invited me down to Sargent, Texas and I had so much fun.  I learned how to bait my own hook and cast.  I had never been so I had to go get a new rod & reel...and of course and cute fishing outfit.  I didn't leave Sargent with a great fishing story because we didn't catch any fish, but I did catch this pretty blue crab and I was super excited about that.  Some other pictures in my photostream are from the ranch where I learned to shoot a gun for the first time and I have been on few unsuccessful hog hunts.


Some features of Flickr that I am interested in learning more about are tags which are labels that you add to your photos to help you find/sort them in the future.  The other feature I am going to be looking into are groups which allow users to share content and conversation, either privately or with the world.  Each group has a pool of photos and videos and a discussion board for members   

Thing 3: Photos & Images

This is a picture of me & my AWESOME team before our TAKS pep rally. Since the test was given on a Monday we invited students and parents up to the school for TAKS songs, a skit, and fear factor types games. Our surprise guest was Twinkie the Kid! One of my teammates younger brother volunteered to dress up in the costume for us. He hand out twinkies and cupcakes for the students to snack on before the pep rally started.

Thing 2: Blogging

I have attempted to start a blog in the past and never gotten further than activating an account. I always hit a road block when it came to the title. The title says it all...and the description of the blog. I could never decide what my purpose was gong to be or what I wanted to write about. I guess you could say I had no vision. Being in this class I feel like I have a purpose for a blog. I think this experience will give me a little more confidence when it it comes to deciding what I wanted I want to blog about on my own. So I am excited to get this blog started!

Since I have attempted to set up a few blogs in the past I was familiar with how to do it so I did not have any problems getting this one created. I love using the backgrounds from www.shabbyblogs.com but often have the hardest time picking which one I actually want to use.

I did use some of the previous students blogs as guides for what to put on my own. On my first post I was stumped on how to start it off. After looking a few examples it came pretty easy. I think my biggest thing is its hard to think that someone else might want to read what I am thinking.

Image from http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2005/06/how_blogging_ch.html

Thing 1: Life Long Learning

I had never heard of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People before starting this class. After browsing through this webpage I am intrigued to read more about it.

After watching the tutorial video I was able to come up with a list of habits
1. Begin with the end in mind - Determine what your goal will be, then develop a plan to achieve your goal
2. Accept responsibility for your own learning - This can be done through trainings, active participation, and asking questions
3. View problems as challenges - Rather than thinking of a situation as another crisis to be dealt with, think of it as a challenge to grow from
4. Have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner.
5. Create your own learning toolbox - It can include books, technology, classes, friends, mentors, and webpages
6. Use technology to your advantage - Work smarter, not harder!
7. Teach and mentor others - When you learn something new, share it with others.
7 1/2. Play! Be Curious! Read!

This tutorial made me think about who I am as a learner. The habit that is easiest for me is definitely "Accept responsibility for your own learning". I love going to training classes and getting new ideas. One of my favorite things is getting to talk with other teachers and pick their brains about what does and doesn't work for them. Every year we are required to take a minimum of 14 staff development hours and I always exceed this requirement. Some people tell me I'm crazy for spending my "free time" in class, but I feel like if I can take away even one thing from the class then it was worth my time.

The habit that is hardest for me, hands down, is "View problems as challenges". I often let problems overwhelm me and get me wound up before I take time to process what is going on. When I finally resolve the problems I am able to look back as see that I got worked up over nothing. I am also able to use those experiences to learn and grow.

One of my goals for the 2011-2012 school year is to set up an interactive parent communication website. Here is the link to my Learning Contract on Google Docs.