Is this the beginning or is this the end?

This has been a very interesting journey through the program and I have learned a lot.  Hopefully, from some of the Things that I found useful can benefit me when I start my career as an art teacher.  During this program, I had a lot of challenges and that could be because I am rarely on a computer.  I feel like I learned more if I am in physical activities.  I especially like to work with my hands.  I really enjoyed making mosaics through the computer and it can be useful for my as an art teacher.  The Thing that I did not like so much was Facebook and Twitter.  In fact, I did not even try it because I feel like it is very misused by millions of people.  It could be very useful, but there is always someone who will take something good and turn it bad.  However, I did like Teacherpop because it is for teachers only and it is only owned by Austin Peay.  I may refer back to Teacherpop because I can find other teachers who may have ideas for lessons that I could never think of.  Now the question is:  Where do I go from here?  I may find more experience exploring the Internet.

Thing #23

    The Creative Commons is a very good website and it teaches you that a person's work may or may not be shared.  It depends on the person.  Creative Commons gives you the option to copy someone's work or edit their work to make it your own.  I think that Creative Commons is very helpful for teachers because they often want to use someone's work as a lesson for a class.    

Thing #22

Livebinders is another great way to store all of your favorite websites.  I have found many education websites and art websites and even art education.  The title of my binders are Art, Education, and Art Education!  Teachers could use Livebinders to store the websites that could be useful for their students.  Teachers could find their websites easier and give students educational online activities and games to do.  I strongly think that this could be very helpful for teachers.  The link below is to one of my newly created binders.


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Thing #21

Since I did not do Thing #18, I could not do Thing #21 because it required signing into Facebook.  My reason for not having a Facebook is in my post Thing #18.  I do not see how the website Animoto would be useful for teachers.  I did not do this Thing, but the assignment did not sound like it would be helpful for students.  I think that it could be fun to use for posting in your blog or on your Facebook page, but it doesn't seem to relate to school.  It would not be useful for me personally, but it could be useful for others.

Thing #20

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkWGwY5nq7A

The above link will lead to the video that I picked from Youtube.  It is a Rascal Flatts music video.  I picked this video because they are my favorite country music band and this is one of my favorite songs.  I like Youtube.  It is very simple to find the videos that you are looking for.  If you type in the key words in the search bar it will give you accuate results.  I believe that teachers could use Youtube to let students watch an educational video that relates to a lesson in class.  When I took art appreciation three semesters ago, one of our assignments was to watch a Youtube video about the art in India.  The only thing that I don't like about Youtube is that sometimes a video will not show.  Usually, when you find a video, it will start on its own, but I have searched for some videos that did not show up at all.  I wonder if it is because the video was not posted correctly.  Otherwise, I like Youtube and I will very likely use this website to show educational videos to my future students.

Thing #19

I strongly am against social websites, but I did sign up with Teacherpop.  I felt more secure with this social website because it is only for Austin Peay State University preservice teachers or for inservice teachers who had graduated from Austin Peay.  I also felt more secure with this social website because after you sign up for an account, the administration will decide if you can become a member in this online community. I believe most socail websites do not do this and I believe that more social websites should.  Teacherpop is a social website for teachers only and with this social website, teachers can gain new ideas from each other. I am not a member of any online community, but I may refer back to Teacherpop to help me with ideas or new assignments.  I can gain new ideas from other teachers and learn more about what I should do as a new teacher.  I can only try my best in my profession so that I can help children to learn.

Thing #18

For Thing # 18, I decided not to use Twitter or Facebook.  I understand that I may not earn full credit for this assignment and that I could use a false name as a personal profile, but I still feel completely uncomfortable using any kind of social website.  Twitter or Facebook could be useful for a community, but I feel like it is heavily misused.  You could find the latest news quicker and keep in contact with people you know, but people sometimes use Twitter or Facebook to manipulate others or give information that is unnecessary.  I heard of teens bully other teens through social websites such as these and it is becoming a growing problem.  Bullying has been a problem for many years, but it is just that bullying lasts way longer on the web than it would in person.  At least when someone is being bullied in person, it goes away within a little time, but the web keeps evidence of bullying posted all the time and more people on the web can see what is going on.  Plus these people can pass the news to other people.  I truly  believe Facebook and Twitter can be used for the greater good, but some people today wants to take something good and turn it to bad.  I guess you can say that I am against the social websites for that specific reason.

Thing #17

Delicious is a very cool tool to use.  You are able to tag your favorite websites and search for more interesting links.  Teachers could use this tool to search for teacher websites.  They can tag the links that they want and refer to them later.  A teacher could go back to their selected websites to gain more ideas about their teaching career.  They maybe are out of ideas and they could use their selected websites to come up with more lesson plans or project ideas.  So, yes, this tool could be helpful for teachers.

Thing #16

The online custom page I used was Zamzar.  It is an online website that converts and stores all of your personal files.  It was appealing to me because it can save your files for you.  I believe if you sign up that it will store your files for a long time, but if you are not signed up, it will only hold your files for a day.  You can also extent the period to seven days.  I did not like the to-do lists.  They seemed a little hard.  I more than likely would not use it, but it can come in very handy for someone who likes to keep organized using technology.  The calenders are very handy because it can keep me on track of my days.  Overall, I would recommend Zamzar to anyone.  It is very organized.  I could use this website.

Thing #15

Wikis can be very useful.  A teacher can use Wikis as an assignment even.  I have this idea that a high school teacher could assign a wiki class project.  Unlike most projects, this assignment would involve the whole class to work on this project. The class can create their own dictionary or encyclopedia for their own use.  For example, the class could research everything about art, or the civil war.  Each student in the class could do research to put the wiki together.  This assignment would teach the students about the topic and how to research.  Plus, the students can learn from one another's research.  So, yes! I think that the Wikis can be very useful to anybody and anybody can use it to gather more information about a topic.  I may keep this idea in mind in case I want to assign a very engaging project to my future students.  I can think of many art topics for the students to research.  An art history wiki could be another idea!

Thing # 14

These can be very useful charts for projects or presentations in a classroom.  I tried Flowchart and didn't like it as well as mindmap.  I tried the Flowchart and it seemed way too confusing for me to put together my chart.  With mindmap, it was a little easier because all of the tools you needed to create a chart is at the arrow any time that you slide it over a bubble.  The bubble lets you decide what colors you want and what text style that you prefer.  You can also make more bubbles by clicking the square in the bubble.  I had more fun with the mindmap in bubbl.us than with the Flowchart.

Thing #13

I liked both Zoho Writer and the Google Docs, except I think that Google Docs have more to offer besides just a document.  It also has spreadsheets, and graphs.  You can even do drawings.  I liked Zoho Writer too, but it was only limited to documents.  For me, it looked like Zoho was created for companies, so I think that this would be super useful for a company to store information.  Both Google Docs and Zoho Writer would be useful in the case that you don't have microsoft word.  The two can save your documents and you can print your work also.  All you have to do is sign up and the websites will keep your work secure.  I think that this could be useful for students who don't have the microsoft software on their computer.  It may not seem possible now since technology is always improving, but still there will be students who are not able to have access to software or technology.  I look at this as a way where a student can store all of his or her school work without having to use a flash drive to continue to work on documents.

Thing #12

The two Google tools that I explored are Google Alerts and Google translation.  I really liked Google translation because this would be very helpful for a language project or paper. I wish I knew about Google translation when I took Spanish class. This, I believe, would help me a lot. I would not fully copy everything from the translation. I just mean that if I had trouble with translating a word, then this would be very helpful. Google Alerts are very helpful too because it can keep you up to date with what you are trying to search for. It will send you a new email if it found any new result for what you request to find.

Thing #11

I really liked Google Blog Search and felt like it was the easy to use. It gave me a great list of very good blogs. I chose Country Music is Love as one of my RSS subscription. I like this blog because I like country music. Technorai was a good search engine too, but I did not like it as well as the Google Blog Search because it seemed like I could not find very good blogs or any that would catch my attention. Some of these blogs I think are not as well known like the ones that I found on Google Blog Search. I did not like Topix.net very good because it would not search for anything that I wanted to find. I would simply type in key words in the search bar to look for interesting blogs, but instead, it did not do anything. I could not find any thing at all. I really suggest Google Blog Search because it seems like it can find any thing.

Thing #10

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is really cool! I can put my favorite websites together in one account and can view each of my favorite websites without having to constantly type the websites to search for them. Once I log in to my account my favorite websites are right there to the left hand side of the screen. I know that it will help me personally because the websites I chose to subscribe are very informative.  Like for example, most of my websites give tips for healthy living or can give me advice as a teacher.  Also, another thing, this could be helpful for teachers because future teachers could subscribe to blogs of experienced teachers to gain better ideas about how they can manage their classroom and effectively teach.

Thing #9

http://cdn-img1.imagechef.com/w/121007/7618a8378ed8afd0.gif

http://cdn-img1.imagechef.com/w/121007/2a19af17e3ab16dd.gif

I had to stop myself from making any more images...they were just so fun to make! I created these images through ImageChef. While I was making these images, I thought that this would be another great art project for children in a classroom. Since I hope to be an art teacher, I think that this would be very useful for art projects. Students can make there image and then print them so that they can use them to make a collage project and that's just one example. The students could probably come up with more ideas with using ImageChef or any other image making website. On the ImageChef website, all you have to do is choose the shape and colors you want and type your text. After you got everything that you wanted, you can push export and it will you the URL and the html to copy. Then you can copy it to your post.

Thing #8

 

 

 I used Mosaic Maker to create this image and I used the images that I found from Flickr. I give credit to the owners of these images.  Flickr mashup would be a great way to create art using the computer. I plan to teach art once I graduate from college and this would be a great way to teach students about how to make art through the computer. In this case making a mosaic can be an art project and students would learn about this technique of art. In other way, I don't see how sharing photos online is important, but this could be useful in an art classroom.  I know that every classroom is different too. Not all art classrooms would be able to have computers for the  students, but if it was an option, I would use the opportunity to let students create art online.

 

Thing #7

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jasnakomendanovic/with/219898868/#photo_219898868

I give credit to Manon Manon's Photo stream.  I really like using Flicker because you can find every kind of image that you want.  I really enjoyed looking at all of the images that are posted on that website.  It also could be useful for my future classroom because I plan to teach art after I graduate from Austin Peay.  I could ask students to find images that they want for an art project.I like this image because the cross reminds me of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Plus I like the clouds in the background.  I had had a great experience using Flicker.

Thing #6

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13546_109-10236988-29.html?tag=mncol


The above link is the link to information about Firefox. I chose to explore Firefox because I have used it before.  I mainly use it whenever I use a Mac computer.  Firefox is just like Internet Explorer except that it is has open-source code. In other words, if you can't open a web page with Internet Explorer, then you can try Firefox and it will open the web page. That is my main reason why I really like Firefox. Firefox is also the second popular browser to open to the Internet. Microsoft's Internet Explorer ranks number one still. I think it's best feature is it search bar. It finds so many links to help you find the information you are looking for. This would be very useful to students because it can help them with their research assignments in school.

Thing #5

From some of the perspectives I have read, I do not agree with schools fully relying on technology.  Yes, I believe that technology is very useful, but I do not think that it should be used for every single thing.  For example, I think that students could use computers to do research for assignments, like for a report or for a paper, but I don't believe students should use ipads to answer questions on a test.  I have more in mind that in the near future that public school students will be required to have their own ipad for school to do all kinds of assignments. I am just concerned that our society is going to turn so advanced that  whenever an ipad breaks and all documents are lost, the student will earn a bad grade because a bad accident occured. Technology sometimes can have disadvantages. That's why I would not fully rely on it. School 2.0, I think, could be interesting and useful, but it should be limited in some ways. It could be useful for teachers. Teachers could use School 2.0 to record their grades and if they need to send their records to the office, they can send through the computer. This would help schools that have over a thousand students. The students' grades can be calculated faster and correctly through the technology. For another example, students can use their class time to research for assignments. Students could also use iclickers to answer questions that are posted on a smartboard. School 2.0, to me, means improvement in the technology that is used in schools. I think that it could be benifical to the schools.

Thing #4...*sigh*

I will be honest to say that right now that I am having problems trying to comment on other people's blogs.  For some impossible reason, my security question will not go through to varify that I am what I am and I signed into my blogger.  I may not get credit for doing the discovery exercise, but I can honestly say that I have tried.  It may be something minor that I could fix, but I cannot figure it out.  Hopefully, I can go back later to put comments on people's blogs.  For now, I want to continue with the 23 Things project.  Now with that said, I have read the CoolCat Teacher blog and I have so many things that I agree with.  There were two points that struck me the most.  One was about commenting people to help them continue to blog.  It would make me disappointed too if nobody commented me about I had to say.  If that was the case, I would stop blogging.  Comments give people encouragment to continue to blog.  I also agree with the fact that a simple "yes" or "no" is not enough.  What's the point in commenting?  It would not feel encouraging to me.  I think that it helps to explain why we agree or disagree.  Another fact that really struck me was negative comments.  I know that we all have our own different opinions, but we do not need to be hateful about it.  "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but your words can never hurt me"....whoever thought of this old saying had no soul. I would be glad to take a broken bone instead of having my feelings hurt.  With me, once my feelings get hurt, it sticks with me for a very long time.  It's hard to forget hateful words.  It is the same case with commenting.  We don't have to agree with what someone says, but we don't need to go around and hurt other people with our words. We can simply disagree in a positive way.  We can say,"I don't agree with you, but I have never thought of it that way before".  That's just for an example.
The following people are the people that I would have commented in their blog, but again, I ran into technical difficulties:

• Mary Donahue
• Kayla Crouch
• Kelsi Clark
• Emily Rittenberry
• Jessica Shaw
• Tori Hickman
• Cassandra Silvers

The first five people are from my group (3040-01 class) and the last two people are from another 3040 class time.  I chose their blogs because I really agree with their opinions.  They each have different views, but it's very good to have different insight on what others have to say.  Commenting, I believe, is very helpful.  It can helpful people think more about a topic that they are unsure about.  It can also correct people if they have something wrong. Teachers can use commenting to encourage others teachers or other faculty and staff.

Thing #3

A blog can be very useful for teachers.  If a student's parents want to know more about their child's teacher, they could visit their blog.  The teacher could post his/her past experience in education and where he/she received it.  Parents can be informed on what their child is during in the classroom.  The teacher could also post his/her teaching strategies to give future teachers ideas for their classroom.  An example lesson plan would also be helpful to future teachers.  Teachers could also post example projects for students just in case students are stuggling for an idea for their own project.  Teachers could also list links that they recommend for students when they are doing research.  Teachers can also use a blog to post upcoming events such as holidays, due dates for homework, test days, etc.  These are just some ideas that could be used effectively for a teacher.  I hope too that teachers would be responsible for what they put in their blog (if they choose to use one for their classroom) and not misuse anything that they can put on the internet.

Thing #2

I wanted a posting name and the name of my new blogger to reflect me.  I don't really want to let myself to be known in the cyber world, but I would like for the world to know what kind of person I am...a simple southern girl.  The titles came to me when I was choosing a temple, or background, for my blogger.  It was hard for me to make this blog because I do not want to expose my identity, but it was not as bad as I thought when I was creating my blog.  Plus, I can go by a different name while I am using blogger.  The avatar I have on my blogger goes with the title of my blog and it reflects my personality.  My whole blog is about being simple and I am a simple person.  I wanted my avatar to be more like me because, again, I want to let the world know who I am, but not my identity.

Thing #1

The 7 1/2 Habits tutorial was interesting.  As I watched and listened to the tutorial, I pointed out my weakest and strongest habits.  My strongest habit is Habit #2: Accept responsibility for your own learning.  I take responsibility for my work at school and rarely miss a class because I can get very far behind in class...even for one day.  I am a very good listener and pay attention in class all of the time.  If I do not understand a lesson or a question on the homework, I will ask the professor or someone in my class who understands the material.  Another way that I learn is through hands on activities.  In fact, I am able to remember things a lot better than when I listen.  My weakest habit is Habit #6: Use technology to your advantage.  I have a little experience with technology and have used it for homework occasionally.  Since I came to college, I use it frequently.  I believe technology is very useful, but I prefer not to fully rely on it because it does not always work.  I guess I am old fashioned, but I like everything to be simple.  Technology is very useful though because you can research anything and find so much more than you can from a book...or at least find it a lot faster.