Reflections

What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?

LiveBinders, Animoto, and Edmodo were probably my top three favorites.  The first and the last being applications I will definitely use within the classroom, and Animoto being just a really neat application that I hope to find more uses for.

How has this program affected your lifelong learning goals?

It has definitely inspired me to keep up with the new applications, tools, and technology the ever changing Web provides. 

Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?

I have found out that my beloved Google Docs did not actually disappear after I left college, it's just now in the form of Google Drive.  And I really like my new "Delicious" bookmarking tool rather than the bookmarks that are stuck within one browser.

What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?

Maybe instead of working through all of these 23 things, pick 12 or so to work through.  Many of these I was already familiar with, but about half I was not and did learn an extensive amount of new information.

How will what you have learned influence your practice as a teacher?

I will likely use the Web and the tools discovered here within a classroom and use technology much more than I otherwise would have.

How do you plan to keep up with new developments in web 2.0? Recommend a way that you have found to be useful.

RSS feeds!  It's amazing. I now know what that stands for too! 

Thing #23: Creative Commons

I found this creative commons attribution on this link from Thing #4.

This license is for attribution, non-commercial, and share alike.  Meaning a person must give credit and indicate any changes made, not be used for commercial uses, and distribute any contributions under the same license.  Creative Commons is necessary to teach our students so that they are prepared for managing materials within the working world.  In familiarizing students with this concept, they may be required to use creative commons licenses within their school products.

Thing #22: Live Binders

Click here to open this binder in a new window.



I made three (3) binders to help my students review for their final exam.  The binders are labeled Periodic Trends; Classifying, Writing, and Naming Bonds; and Classifying Reactions and Predicting Products.  This material is what has been covered since I have started long-term substituting.  I still need to add material from before I began, but I think this will be an excellent tool to help them study.  I also could use this site to have each student maintain their own binder of materials throughout the course or have them build a livebinder for a particular project.

Thing #21: Animoto

I made this video in Animoto as a 2013 Year in Review.  This site was really easy and fun to use, and I was able to share my video on Facebook.  I noticed when you add text it limits the number of pictures you can add to the slideshow, so I wasn't able to get all 10 pictures on the video.  What a cool site! I will definitely be using this one again.

Thing #20: YouTube

My husband had just gotten home from his deployment and I took this video with my phone when he went to let our dog inside.  Chief had not seen him in six months (he's a year old now) so the pup was pretty excited.

Here's the link in case the embedded isn't working:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XfQHliQqnQ&list=HL1386363945&feature=mh_lolz.

At first I uploaded this video to YouTube through my other gmail account, however I had trouble relocating it when clicking the add video button in making this post.  When I signed in to YouTube on my phone through this account and uploaded the video, I was then able to add it to this blog.

I am a frequent YouTube user in the classroom.  It is amazing the dramatic increase in student attentiveness when you give them a video to watch.  One of my favorites to show is one of the Crash Course Chemistry series and it does a great job of telling the story of Mendeleev.  This is a video that may be embedded on a class webpage when covering this unit on the organization of the periodic table.


Teacher Tube is another site that I have seen other teachers use.  One of my friends had her class record a song, rap, or video pertaining to their unit topic.  One of her student's made this rap about metallic, ionic, and covalent bonds.  This site would be useful for these types of projects since at many schools YouTube is blocked from student computers.

Thing #19: Social Networking

While working through this Thing #19, I stumbled across Edmodo.  After watching the demo video on the front page this site seems like a very practical tool to use within a classroom.  I love that you can keep a class calendar, submit assignments, and communicate with students through the site.  The interface appears to be very similar to Facebook and an app is available for mobile devices.  I am excited to use this site in my own classroom, and I think my students would enjoy using it.

I have been a member of Pinterest for a few years now and use it frequently for new ideas- mostly crafts and recipes.  Before now I had not considered using it for classroom inspiration.  Other social medias I frequent are Yelp and allrecipes.com.  During college, in 2007, I began an allrecipes.com account and have developed an extensive catalog of recipes and commented, reviewed, and rated several others within this community providing my changes and recommendations on how to tweak a recipe or what went well or disastrous during my experience.  Reading others' comments has actually saved my product several times and created a delightful dish or added a new flare to an old recipe I would not have otherwise thought to change.

Thing #18: Hash Tags and Twitter

I've been pretty successful at avoiding Twitter until today.  I just never really saw a need or use for it given I already have a Facebook.  My first week of long-term subbing, I had written on the board an arrow drawn to the atomic number of an element and wrote "# protons, # electrons" to indicate the atomic number states the number of protons and number of electrons found in an atom of that element.  Immediately I had several students asking me why I was writing hash tag protons and hash tag electrons.  When I explained it was a number sign, they asked me to write "# of..." so they wouldn't be confused.  This experience solidified my annoyance with Twitter, not to mention the graffiti of hash tags on Facebook.

However, I made a twitter account.  I had trouble locating anyone I knew on it, so I am now following the Kansas City Chiefs, the Weather Channel, and Justin Timberlake simply for making this video about hash tags.  When I searched #chemistry I found a lot about the People's Choice Awards.  However, after some digging I did find this article which was very interesting on the use and benefits of iPads in math and science classes.

I believe it is important for educators to be aware and familiar with social networking sites as it is such an integral part of our students' lives.  However, I see their functionality very limited within a classroom setting.

Thing #17: Tagging

I will never again have to use my browser's bookmark function!  Delicious allows me to click a button at the top of my browser and add any site to my own list that can be accessed anywhere.  Furthermore, I can search other's bookmarked pages and add those to my list.  When I searched "educational technologies" I found this site on Project Based Learning, which discussed the use of web-quests.  Delicious could prove highly beneficial as a method for cataloging and searching websites for classroom use.  Through the networking interface on this site, a class could utilize this tool to compile websites while investigating a given topic and share their findings among themselves.

Thing #16: Getting Organized

During college, I used mint.com to help keep track of my finances, which at the time only consisted of my college loans, checking, and savings account.  But, working at an ice cream shop I had limited dollars coming in so I needed a way to keep track of how I was spending my money and a tight budget.  For instance, if I had allotted $30 for eating out for the month, and $100 on groceries, then I needed a way to keep track of remembering how much I was spending.  Mint provided graphs showing how much I had spent during a given period for a given budget, and pie charts showing the percentage I was spending in each category out of total dollars spent.  Mint helped me tremendously during college: I always had food in the refrigerator and a little cash left over for Christmas gifts at the end of the semester.

Lifehacker I found to be quite the opposite: a productivity killer.  Simply because whenever I go there to find some efficient way of doing something, I always end up spending more time just browsing the various articles.  For example: I first started working on this Thing #16 two weeks ago, but am just now circling back around to it because when I saw the link to Lifehacker and visited the site I was sucked into an article titled "How I Pulled Off a 10-Day London Vacation for $700".  Needless to say, investigating this feat was the rest of my evening.

Google calendars - I use them every day and they're wonderful because it helps keep my husband and I in the same loop as to our schedules and family and friend's birthdays.  The calendars even sync to our phones.  Doesn't get any better than that.  As far as start pages, I use the Window's 8 start page that includes weather, gmail, sports, stocks, and photos to name a few.

Thing #15: Wikis

Wikis... a source of information that anyone can edit.  Wikipedia probably ranks as the most well known and utilized wiki.  In the APSU 23 things wiki I added my Thing #14 about flowcharts and mind maps by editing the same page that everyone else had edited.  I found that adding links with this interface, for me, wasn't as simple as on a blog.  However, this tool provides numerous possibilities for the education frontier.

Within the context of a classroom I could create a classroom wiki, and for each unit create a sort of information page that was full of errors and as an assignment have each student to find and make at least two corrections.  Another way a classroom wiki could be utilized is to create a wiki page on a topic and have each student contribute an article, link, or some other form of information to create their own collaborative "online text book" for the topic.