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.