Week 5 - #12

I used Rollyo to set up a search engine for language arts lesson plans, something I'm always looking for to help my English teacher library groupies. Also, since I still teach literature and essay writing for our Academic Decathlon team, I'm always looking for ideas too. There are plenty of ways this could be used by teachers as well as students. Maybe instead of providing a pathfinder with weblinks, I could create a focused Rollyo for research projects.

Week 5 - #11 continued

Looking at the 2.0, there are some that I am very familiar with -- Google Maps and Docs, Zillow, Craigslist,YouTube and PBWiki. I was intrigued by One Sentence and at first glance, I couldn't see much use for me, but on second thought, the concept could be easily adapted to several curriculum areas -- English and social science. I also signed up for del.icio.us. It will be great to have access to one set of bookmarks wherever I am.

Week 5 - #11

After a couple of tries, I got the widget to paste to the blog correctly. Love Library Thing, but it will take some times to get my books entered.

Week 5 -#10

I'm having a great time playing with the Flickr toys http://www.bighugelabs.com/flickr/. There are so many applications for these. I made Warhol and Hockney artwork and a name badge from a photo I took at prom last weekend.

I also played with the comic strip generator. I would use any combination of these tools in curriculum. Students could use them to demonstrate understanding of characters, issues and concepts. I'll be looking for a willing victim (I mean "teacher") soon!

Week 4 -- #9

Thoughts on the search tools:

Bloglines -- Lots of interesting stuff -- school library forums
Feedster -- not available currently, but I will check back later
Topix and Technorati-- I like how they are organized by topic and includes news and forums
Syndic8-- So much stuff, somewhat overwhelming, though definitely useful
Google Blog Search -- User friendly like most Google products.
BlogPulse -- I really like the Conversation Tracker and the Trends feature.

Of these resources I will probably use Google Blog Search and / or BlogPulse to find the posts on specific topics. They seem to be among the easiest to use. For exploration, I really like Topix or Techorati. I will probably not use Syndic8 --Too much.

Week 4 - #8

I created my RSS account at Google Reader, mostly because I like Google and use their email and docs a lot. I had several news sources as well as some of the fun stuff, like the Dailey Show and Colbert Report. It's always good to get a laugh! I really liked the book reviews from the Charlottle-Mecklenburg Library. I subscribed to quite a few different genre reviews for teens and adults too.

Besides reading reviews and passing on info to colleagues, one possible way to use this would be to help teachers to incorporate RSS into their own webpages and projects. I could also add to my own book review blog.

The challenge for me will be to keep up with it. I always have the best intentions, but probably won't check it often enough to keep up. I'm afraid it will become like my email with all the listserve messages that I want to read, but never get around to.

Week 3- #7 continued

This a response to a comment about the parent web access I (along with several others) have been working on. Our district uses Aeries Student Management. The program allows parents and students to set up accounts and view information. We allow them to view teacher gradebooks, attendance, standardized testing info, transcript grades and graduation status. This will replace another web access program that we have been using.

We are implementing the program on a trial basis -- 8 teachers and stheir students. Not all of our teachers are using the gradebook feature of Aeries. The plan next year is to allow all parents / students to have access and we will probably add the middle school too.