Stepping Stones to Web 2.0

Wow!  What a journey.  I thoroughly enjoyed this course.  Some of the “things” were not new and others were new and “rocked my world.”  The habit that I picked as the most important was habit 7.5 – to play.  Unfortunately, I did not spend as much time as I would have liked playing with the web 2.0 tools.  However, I was able to apply much of what I’ve learned.  I will have the upcoming Christmas break to play with the web 2.0 tools more.

My challenge now is to share all that I have learned!

I am familiar with CR20.  I first learned about it in another ning.  I am currently participating in four (now five with CR20) nings.  So far I find it a great concept in theory but am having a hard time being a regular participant since it feels so disjointed from my gmail/google reader. For example, I received a message from a fellow ning member.  I received notice of the message in email but then had to sign on to the ning to respond.  Since the transition is not seamless I find myself putting off responding and then I forget until days later.

I think part of the challenge in staying engaged in these nings is having other members who are actively posting to the ning.

I do find the content on CR20 very interesting.  I have not yet found the need to be active in that community, though.

Dave Warlick’s blog about developing curiosity piqued my curiosity. In his blog he talked about origami DNA. Origami DNA is the procedure of folding DNA strands to form very very very tiny structures.  As I read about origami DNA in wikipedia I couldn’t help but wonder what would be useful applications of such a procedure.  I searched the internet and learned that the most promising use of this process is medicine distribution.  The DNA structures could be used as cages to deliver medicine to the appropriate area in our bodies.  WOW!

Wow! Very cool. The nice thing is that one could create a pageflake for each class, subject, hobby, team, etc.

I especially like the anything flake…sky’s the limit!

We recently deployed Google Apps and are now attempting to move teachers toward Google sites so students can see all their class sites in one place. Pageflakes and other landing pages solves this problem…sort of.

If there is to be any collaboration where the student is not simply viewing but actually collaborating, it would be good to have all classes on the same site so only one login is required.

Our school recently deployed Google Apps. I enjoy “cloud” computing as I’m a mobile person and like working at Starbucks, in our living room, from my iTouch at the airport, etc.

At our school, we used Google docs to edit a document on our Schoolwide Learning Expectations.

I can see a team of students using the presentation tool to collaboratively prepare a slide show. This sure beats having to assign one person to be the keeper of the presentation and responsible for all updating.

The form tool would be great for young students who are learning about collecting and analyzing data. All students can input data and the teacher (or students) can graph the results.

My only disppointment with Google Apps is in it’s limited functionality as compared to the Office versions. It reminds me of the old Microsoft Works package. Thus, I have not yet been able to get rid of Office since there are times when I need the sophisticated functionality of Office applications.

I have yet to find a topic that is NOT available on YouTube. A teacher needed help with her flip video camera. Rather than just doing the work for her, or holding her hand as she did the task, I wanted to give her a link to a video that showed her how to do what she wanted to do. I found the videos I needed on YouTube. Here’s one of them:

I will embed the videos on a help website so they can refer to it when needed.

Argh!  I’ve always said technology can be messy and boy did this thing prove that right.  First, I tried four times to do my “bare bones” podcast.  I thought it would be an easy task.  For some reason, I couldn’t get vocaroo to work.  The playback sounded fine but when I downloaded the voice track, the wav file was blank.  I finally gave up and had to do the recording using garage band.

Then, to make matters worse, my PC was infected with a virus while on zamzar.com.  That’s always my fear when working with free internet tools with lots of ads.  Our tech guy said the virus probably came through one of the ads.

As if that wasn’t enough, my mac was infected as well.  Fortunately it didn’t kill my mac.  I was able to clean it up.

Lessons learned: 1) IE is much more vulnerable to attacks than firefox.  2) you get what you pay for. 

At any rate, here’s the podcast player so you can hear my podcast.  Just look for “debbie’s post” in the list of posts.

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I previewed a podcast on Technology Planning in the TechPodZone as well as Super Why! The podcasters in the first one were a bit too informal for me. Super Why was good.

I currently listen to podcasts but I do not have them automatically download to my iTouch. I like subscribing to podcasts via my reader, though.

Interesting website.  If I owned a lot of books, I can see myself using this to organize my own collection of books.  However, I am a library person so I borrow most of my books and leave the organizing to the librarians.  I do like the book reviews and book counts.  When I’m considering which book to read next, the count could be one measure of how good the book is…or at least how popular it is.

One of my functions as IT Instructional Coordinator is to help other teachers integrate technology into their curriculum.  The different sites we’ve been introduced to via the 23 Things are great resources to help teachers in my school.  That’s why I decided to start tagging all the interesting sites we come across in this course via delicious.  Here’s my delicious page.