#16 Minnesota Library 2.0

The University of Minnesota Assignment Calculator is a free tool to use to budget your time when completing an assignment. I put in an assignment due in a month for education and it laid it all out for me, with a printer friendly version. At the elementary level, we do this for the students but I can see where it would be invaluable to students who need a little more structure at higher levels of learning. The Research Project Calculator is very similar but with a more specific focus.

Thing 15 Online Games and Libraries

I approach gaming with a fairly sizable sense of apprehension so it was with interest that I read the online article "8 Games About Video Games Debunked". As I read the article, authored by Henry Jenkins, the director of comparative studies at MIT, I found myself agreeing with some points and disagreeing with others. As a teacher of elementary students, I have seen first hand what happens when some kids are let loose on this level. The author points out that family involvement is imperative to balancing virtual life with real life and I agree with this. I would however ague, that without proper family balancing, the video games take on a higher level of influence for at-risk students. He also points out that while younger students may use these, most of the games are targeted for adults and again, a family's job is to monitor what kids are playing online.

I also took a look at Ohio University's short video about its presence in Second Life. Interesting! Colleges are continually changing to reflect the needs of their learners and it just amazes me how some universities are reaching out in this new form of delivery. I also read the article about its inception/creation and how people all over the world have contributed. Interesting!

#14 Library Thing

The Library Thing looks really cool. In fact, I had just created a list of new books to read at school using Excel but using this would have made it much easier this summer to access from anywhere! I like to read the new books I've purchased, especially the chapter books so I really know my collection.

The Library Thing links you with other lists and it's an "easy Library-Quality Catalog". If you have less than 200 books, it's for free. Otherwise, it's $10 for a year or $25 for a lifetime. I'm going to have to see how much I use it.

I am going to explore this more for our church library.

Thing 13 On-Line Productivity Tools

Number 13 offers many useful online tools. The first one is called a flash countdown timer generator and it will let you customize the information. It's fairly easy since you can just paste the link into your website. I checked out the five calendar selections that you allow you to include a personal calendar of events into it. I am not at this point where I would use it however. I really depend on my lesson plan book which I carry around with me all day and it travels with me from home to school and back. This also has my class lists with me, my seating charts, etc. I am not at the point of replacing it!

The ta-da list looks really interesting when you can share it with others for planning an event. Right now we email lists back in forth or save them to a server at school but I can see this as something usable when coordinating events with my colleagues or even my spread-out family.

Backpack looked really cool but I don't think we're ready to integrate it into my particular education setting. You can do a lot of the ta-da list things along with a whole bunch of other things and pictures to plan an event. Pretty fancy but not for us.

Zamzar and the PDF converter will be handy to use as they convert many things, like Word to a PDF or images, videos, music, etc. to be able to be used on your computer. I'm going to remember this! It would have come in handy a couple of times already.

Thing 12 Do you DIGG?

So, my last entry for this year with Thing 12. I was doing well, keeping on top of things but unfortunately, caught the virus that's going around school - (that's the germ-virus - nothing technological!) so I've been under the weather for about a week and yes, I'm doing my last entry the night before this is due!

Anyway, I went to digg and dug in (pardon the pun). Interesting! You can see what others are reading and share articles yourself. I read a couple of articles, one on the Archie comics, which I read as a kid, but this article was on Archie comics with a distictly Christian story line. Interesting! The reviewer was obviously not a fan of either the faith or the comics. That led me to think about who posts the articles/blogs and then who writes comments? hmmm . . .

The other article was about a swan and a deer in Great Britain. It had 302 diggs and 39 comments and was "made popular" about 1 hour 12 minutes ago. This just illustrates the global world of 2.0

Then I went to Readit but our school has it blocked from view so I went on to Newsvine. They say this on the web site: Newsvine is an instant reflection of what the world is talking about at any given moment. I read an article posted today about the last survivor of the Titanic who passed away today in England.

There's just so much to see on the web. I'm continually amazed. We still get the daily paper but I wonder . . . .

Thing 11. Tagging and Del.icio.us

After playing so much with Flickr and doing the tagging, I felt I had already learned about tagging but as always, there was more to learn! I just added some tags to my Flickr blog. I really hadn't paid too much attention to the labels option at the bottom.



Now the Del.icio.us site really sounds appealing for me since I do some of my work at home on a Windows machine, a lot of my work in my office at school and then again, I have the teacher workstation in the lab and the computer that runs my SMART Board. Sometimes I have found a cool web site and then had to try to find it again since I was on another computer. I think I'm going to like this!

O.K. Now I've created my own Del.icio.us account. I've added all my bookmarks from home. Now I just need to get all the ones from school. I have always had my bookmarks in folders so I don't have to look through them all so the tagging thing is new to me. I kept on looking for how to organize them but I guess if I tag them well, that will do it. I did the easy import - big mistake because I ended up getting a whole bunch of my family's bookmarks as well and had to delete a whole bunch from my Del.icio.us account.

#10 Wikis

The Wiki is a great tool to have kids share. As I was reading the article, I was trying to see how the application could be used for staff as well. I went to the 23 Things on a Stick Wiki but had to request access so I'm waiting to hear back so that I can edit as well. The PB Wiki sounds like the way to go - easy and free! I really appreciate the video clip. I am such a visual learner that it really helps to see some visual and I hope to use that clip with my students yet this year when we're talking about Wikis! I also found out that Wiki is a Hawaiian word for "fast".