Diigo looks really interesting!!  I love the idea of being able to highlight, add notes and save the sites.  I have always wanted a way to mark articles or sites for reading later too!  Certainly, this looks very useful. I am not sure if I should transfer all of my delicious and web bookmarks or just start a new set?

Thing 8!

Ok, so I don't always go in a straight line!

RSS feed at first feels ''awkward", some blogs and sites I visited don't seem to have RSS. But after I subscribed to a few I can see how this would ease the regular browsing! Perhaps there would be fewer tabs using this tool. On facebook there are now so many 'lists' or subscriptions, I wonder if RSS will continue to be popular?

Thing 9

I enjoyed exploring these tools this week. My top two are Wordle and Wallwisher.

I used Wordle last fall in my LA class. Students wrote a personal essay about someone they admired in their life. We used it first by pasting the entire text into Wordle to analyze word usage. Then, they created a cover page for their paper using common words in the paper. The Wordle cover page was stunning. A number of students gave their paper as a holiday gift.

A couple of new ideas came from this exploration: using it for weekly spelling words or creating a TA list for the classroom door. I will continue to use it occasionally to analyze writing.

Playing with Wallwisher I imagine using it for some of the formative assessments I ask students to think about. They are often in small groups and need to discuss and summarize their ideas about a scientific concept (such as: What is a Scientific Theory?, or a definition of Matter after grouping various things.) This is done to examine misconceptions and attempt to get the story straight. It would be fun to have each group add their thoughts via stickies on the Whiteboard through this website. The discussions could be very interesting. I think I would try it first in a small group setting to iron out any issues, such as anonymous posting.

Thing 7: Creative Comons

I spent some time cruising through pictures and music on Creative Commons and find it interesting. I am a private person and still can’t quite imagine just ‘posting’ all of my pictures on a venue for the world to see. Which in turn is perhaps why I don’t find it terribly interesting to look through other folks images. Learning about copyright law was very worthwhile as our world becomes ever more connected through the internet.

If I were to share my own images, I would in all likely hood license them as:

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

My reasoning for this comes from a personal experience. In the summer of 2008 my husband received a phone call from a friend in New York City saying they saw his picture on the side of a bus as an advertisement for the upcoming marathon. We thought they must have been mistaken since we knew nothing of it. After doing some searches and receiving more calls, we determined that it was indeed him! Though it was exciting to know that his picture was plastered all over New York, he felt awkward and invaded. He had run the 2005 and 2006 marathons and the picture, slightly manipulated, was from the 2006 race. We believe the photographer who took his picture, sold it to the advertisers promoting the race. In the end, he did get some fun swag from the marathon committee after we contacted them and it was exciting to walk around the city seeing pictures of him everywhere! Yet, the whole experience left us feeling as if there was no privacy.

As for student use, I whole-heartedly agree with All I Ever Needed to Know (I learned in Kindergarten): I do not believe we should get into a habit of promoting all students to copyright all their work all the time. While I believe some students may have ideas, products, creations that are truly innovative, most of what is produced is part of the "learning process" and wouldn't seem to me to rise to a level that requires additional protection. It also may promote a false sense of import to the creator that is unwarranted. I believe our culture promotes too great a sense of self-aggrandizement and copyrighting everything would accentuate that trend, which I believe contributes to degrading our sense of community. I would rather the focus be a more equal balance between individual and cooperative group sharing.

*the images for creative commons licensing would not transfer from my word document to this post???

To the left is a NASA image of the eastern hemisphere. It is hard to believe there are close to seven billion humans inhabiting this beautiful planet!

Here is the western hemisphere in late January 2012. These images reinforce in me,

why teaching is so important; part of our role is to guide our fellow inhabitants to value and safeguard our home.

To lighten my thoughts, I started looking at spring flowers....can't imagine why?

What does this image bring to your mind?

Flickr....

As I randomly started to browse the site I came across these recent images of the Earth. The first two were taken between 7,000 and 8,000 miles above the surface. I found them to be mesmerizing for the color and textures!

After, I found this image taken in 1992 of the Earth and the moon. Try this link to see this image from the Galileo spacecraft! http://www.flickr.com/photos/oursolarsystem/5200182332/

Now, I need to figure out how to add the first pictures to this blog!!

Blog Exploration

I first went to technorati and found a blog about life long learning and teaching(surprise?) http://teachingislearning.com/. This person is teaching in Japan and exploring his/her own philosophy of education. There is an interesting post about a recent Newsweek article discussing the benefits of writing by hand vs typing. Apparently, brain scans show that handwriting engages the brain more than typing. This is something I have wondered about as our students spend more and more time creating on a computer and less time with pencil and paper.

Below is a piece from the site:

Great teachers love to learn.

We seek new knowledge, new ways of thinking, new points-of-view in many areas, and we apply these to our classes. We do not seek to teach our students--we guide our students to learning, to create a love of learning, so those we teach will learn to teach themselves.

This blog is about developments in education throughout the world, learning to learn, and most of all, the love of learning.

“I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.”
--Socrates

I then looked for blogs about teaching science on google. I found little of interest and several folks ranting. I spent about an hour searching and scanning with nothing of note to share. In fact, it was more of a turn off for me. Perhaps I need to use different search terms?

Life Long Learning

I am a true believer in life long learning. There is always something new to discover both personally and professionally. My biggest challenge may be actually using the technology in effective ways in the classroom. My end goal is to slowly build a tech toolbox with effective activities for the classroom. I am not yet ready for Habit 7 (Teach and mentor others), in fact I need the Teaching first, later I will mentor!! I am ready to learn!