Discussion Starter week 4

The mashups that are being done are interesting visually, but seemed to be somewhat difficult to master. I see now that mappr is owned by a design company, and Montagr made my head hurt :-)
I did find an interesting site: Spell with Flickr, which allows you to spell a word and then it takes flickr photos and puts them together for a mashup.

Another site I found interesting is Splashr, which allows you do a visual venn diagram on your desktop.


However, for the most part, the day to day use in elementary school seems to be limited.

The 23 things have sure been interesting so far, hasn't it? One frustrating thing though, is that many of these web sites are filtered or blocked in the district in the interest of increasing time on task and the like. I came across an interesting article, called "Teachers to Tech Support: We are not the Enemy", an educator who has been both in the tech department and a teacher feels that we are being blocked from a lot of the Web 2.0 tools for little justification. Thoughts?

Discussion starter for Week 3

Well, the time is going so fast! Mid June already. Ugh! I have always liked June as my favorite month; and it always goes sooo fast.

I used the Bloglines web site; though it was fast and easy to use, I found that the sheer quantity of feeds could drive a person crazy. I picked 4 feeds: The Quad City Times. School Library Journal K-8 news, The Frugal Traveler and of course, Dilbert!
Kind of funny, the top 1000, and how they go up and down.

Topix is a newsreader I have used when I want to see what people are thinking of from my old college town, Erie, Pennsylvania. But be careful, it has a lot of topics on there that are controversial and really scares you as to what people are really thinking out there.

Discussion Starter for Week 2

What was the highlight for you this school year? For me, it was watching my daughter progress from an unsure 4th grader into a confident well-liked fifth grader. Since I began work at McKinley, it made sense for me to have Lillianne around so I could keep an eye on her. I was pretty confident that she would do ok, but you never know. Well, last week she performed a skit to show what she had learned (a great way to summarize the year beyond the usual awards assembly) and I was wowed. She had to work with 8 other kids on a 2 1/2 minute routine that had used the skills of cooperation, perseverance, and all those other life skills we like to talk about.

Another highlight of the year was working with the TAG teacher and 5th grade TAG students on researching and sharing what they learned about McKinley School for the 70th anniversary of McKinley's opening. The kids pored through hundreds of web pages, probably thousands of photographs and primary documents; old PTA yearbooks we got from the DCSD museum, as well as books that had the history. It was neat!

Have I joined the 21st Century?

Well, it's only a decade into the new millenium, and I have created a blog. Not that I didn't want to earlier, you understand; it just was that I never saw the need. Having taken this class will no doubt elevate my prose to great heights... or not....

The neat thing is that I am one leg up on my daughter, who although she is on Facebook, I am reasonably sure that she is not on Blogger! Score 1 for Dad!

I am also greatly in favor of this avatar thing; I can look young and vibrant even when I feel neither!