Thing #11 Library Thing

http://www.librarything.com/home/elholmes

Okay, I am realizing that my numbering on my "Things" is way off. Wow, Library Thing is pretty awesome, but to be honest, it is also a bit overwhelming. I liked the idea of of as an organizational tool for both my school and home library. I don't like the idea of having to set it up, even though it does most of the work for you. The real application that I can see for its use in my classroom stems from a semester long project that my students do in Psychology class. Over the years, I have created a data base of books that they can choose from to read for the project. I can now see that I could use Library Thing to list 200 of the books for the students to choose from and look more in-depth at. The list is longer but I can stand to weed out some of the older editions and some the more boring selections. To be honest, I would probably put a student aide on this project and then link it into my Blackboard site. Happy Thanksgiving my lovely classmates!

Thing #13 Tagging Love

Oops...I got so excited about Del.cious that I skipped number 11. Anyways, this is going be THE tool that I take from this class and incorporate into my daily usage. I am the queen of bookmarks and I am so very excited to have a handy way to manage my bookmarks and to connect to others and their systems. This is so exciting for me to find something that will really help my students and myself to connect others and their ideas about what are the really effective websites that are out. Thanks Carol for giving me this tool. I just spent an hour uploading and organizing my websites.



Rock on my techno geeks!

Elaine

Thing #11 Rollyo

My friends, I am on a "roll-yo." I know, I know, I am not punny. Whatever. Well, my next visit on the techno dream tool box was to the Rollyo site. I chose to create an Asian Art website list. I teach Asian Humanities at Fort Collins High School and we do several projects pretaining to the arts of China, Japan and India. I could see using this tool for younger students to refine their research techniques. I would also link this type of thing to my Blackboard site to help my students seek the sites that would most helpful to them in order pin point their searches and especially to help them seek information that is most viable.

Below is the link to the intial list of sites that I created.
http://rollyo.com/eholmes/asian_art_sites/

This stuff is fun, isn't it?
Thanks,
Elaine

Thing #10 Fun With Images

I chose to mess around with the "Hockneyizer" photo option from the FD Toys site. There are some many different things that we could mess with here. I chose to have fun with a picture of my beloved mother, my precious son and one of his best friends. This site could be cool for students to create portfolios with as an end of the year project.
Below is a link to the website where I create my picture collage.

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/hockney.php

Thing #9 Newfeeds

Well, hello virtual world. I have been getting behind on my beloved coursework. Darn teaching career getting in my way again. Anyways, to the point. I messed around with the various newsfeeds offered for this assignment and I found that I liked the the Topix site the best. I found it very easy to navigate and it had a bunch of local links that I appreciated. I found it to be user friendly as well. I thought that Syndic8 was not as user friendly as the other offerings. It was a bit too much for me. I also really liked the Technorati site. It was easy to navigate and I was able to connect to several blogs here. I don't know about the rest of the class, but I am reeling from the amount of blogs out there and I am wonder how to sift through all this information to find the ones that will be most valuable to me in both my career and my personal life.