Thing #5 Microblogging

Easy enough to sign into Twitter. I can see how this could get addictive - reading losts of different posts. It was interesting to look at some of my favorites - Astros, President Obama, etc. But, I think that it would also be fun to follow other friends and colleagues. So, school use? Not sure how that would work exactly. Although, there could be uses for this - current events, etc. As I was wondering about this, I went back to the SBISD webpage describing the assignment and noticed
Nine great reasons why teachers should use Twitter. I find that I can agree with many of the ideas presented there. So, it can be a great way to expand your knowledge base and keep up with friends.

I experienced using back-channeling using Today's Meet at a GT workshop in early June. It was an awesome way to communicate without disrupting the session. I can see many ways that this would be helpful for students to post questions without fearing that they would be embarassed by expressing their ignorance about a topic.

Next, I'll look at Facebook. I've wanted to join, now I have a reason!

Added to this post: 7/31/09
I've been able to setup my Facebook account and requested quite a few friends. This was fairly easy because my husband is friends with sooooo many people, so I just looked over his friends list. Plus, I do have other friends as well and they were easy to locate and add. I'm looking forward to being part of this. Looks fun! The idea about using the book club app with older students for reading groups sounds interesting. I'll need to investigate more, but I'm doubtful that this will appropriate for elementary, mainly because of the age requirements.

Ta, Ta for now!

Thing # 19 - Web 2.0 Awards

Since I have spent what seems like the entire summer away from home and on the road, I thought that the top travel site might be fun to explore. I explored Farecast. It was a fairly basic travel search engine. The nice thing about it was that it would let you do your search simultaneously in several of the other major travel websites like Hotels.com, Expedia, Hotwire & Priceline. That's pretty helpful.

Just because I was curious about what the Organization software was, I looked at Backpack. It is not a free app. It seemed very geared toward the business sector. Could be some educational value, but schools are highly unlikely to spend the bucks for it.

There was a big article in a recent Houston Chronicle about Twitter, I looked at it and even registered. However, I haven't found any "friends" that twitter. Could be fun! Since this is the newest cool thing, I know that lots of students are doing this, so knowing what they are doing and how they're doing it is neat.

At the Books section, I looked at Lulu. It was a great website if you want to publish a book. I thought that the prices to publish 1 copy of a book would be quite expensive, but it was much less than I imagined. Their add on services for editing and f ormatting were somewhat pricy, but if you were planning to market your book, and not do this just for personal satisfaction, it might be worth it. If you had the funds to create a book for your classroom and give each child a copy, it would run a little more than $10 per book for a 40 page color book that was "perfect bound." Might be a fun project!!

There were LOTS of other apps that look really interesting. This is yet another site to piddle at later!