What I've learned.

I have been Skyping with a friend in Holland for the past two years.  It is so much fun to see a face and hear a voice.  We email, too, and that is a great way to communicate more indepth thoughts about issues and topics, but Skype is like the icing on the cake.  It’s just great fun and comforting to put a face and voice to the words and thoughts.

Classes could have Skype pen pals.  Imagine students being able to see and visit with kids around the world via Skype.  For kids who are deaf, you can sign to each other.  There are better programs designed to do just that with less of the time delay in the video, but Skype is a nice free way to get started when better technology is not available.

Skype is also a lovely way for grandparents and grandchildren to visit with each other.  Getting to see babies and little people in real time is something near and dear to the hearts of many of my friends.  It truly is the next best thing to being there.

My school switched over to gmail in December.  We are having lots of inhouse workshops on google docs and other features of gmail.  We’ve enjoyed the idea of using gmail/googledocs so you can access reports from home or school and that a google doc can be very much like a wiki.  You can send a google doc to a variety of people and each person can edit it and develop it and everyone can continue to access it and view the changes.  The person who initiates it essentially can control all the changes and change things back as needed.  Sounds so much like a wiki to me.  Google docs used this way are more efficient than just emailing back and forth about a topic.  We just used this approach for a group of us creating a poem.  The originator sent the first two lines to three of us.  Each of us added two more lines.  Finally we had eight awesome lines that the four of us had contributed to.  We liked the process so much that we each added two more lines each.  It was a lot of creative fun and got us thinking about other ways that we can use google docs to make our collaborating even more successful!

I want to share an insight I shared with Sarah, our instructor, the other day.  I was trying to upload a podcast and could not get it to work.  After an hour of frustration, I emailed her and asked for help.  After I sent the email, I went back and tried again and looked at the instructions again and realized I forgot to click on “share”.  I quickly sent her another email that urged her to ignore my first email.

What I’ve come to learn about myself is the following excerpt from a later email to Sarah about what happens when I can’t get something to work for one of our assignments:

“Typically I get upset and then I get panicky and then I get p.o.’d and then I get determined and go back and keep at it and then I solve it and get ecstatic.  I probably shouldn’t email you about a problem until I have sat on it for a few hours.  Maybe sending the email is the impetus for revisiting the problem.  May all our problems be so easily resolved by going to “share”!”

I’ve learned so much in our web 2.0 course and while I am in awe of how much technical info I’ve learned, I am also in awe of my learning process and style.  I truly started off as the most computer phobic person and have become a very competent and willing to try most things computer lover.  I’ve loved my blog entries and the things I’ve created and embedded in my blog and wiki.  I will miss this class very much when it is over, but I know that I can do online learning and some pretty amazing things.  I am not afraid anymore.  Sometimes I feel overwhelmed or intimidated, but I work through it and work it out.  That perhaps is the greatest gift–that feeling of empowerment and ability to find resources to try and learn anything I want or need or have to learn more about.  Thank you Sarah for such an amazing gift!

I think YouTube is a much more user friendly site than TeacherTube.  TeacherTube was one of the most challenging to use and navigate sites.  It was hard to find what I was looking for and when I finally found it, I had to listen to the same boring expedia.com advertisement at the start of every video.  There may have been great things to find on TeacherTube, but after an hour, I gave up.  I’d often think I’d found something great and it would turn out to be an advertisement for something and that was frustrating.  YouTube was much easier to navigate and to find what I was looking for.  Below is a segment of an ongoing series of presentations on Executive Function Skills. Here is the link to the video:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCanuJsVb90&NR=1

YouTube offers everything from the ridiculous to the educational to the entertaining option.  Friends of mine send me links to YouTube postings of their children.  I love watching the kids on video.  It’s the next best thing to being there.  I watched a video on tongue cleaners and bad breath that was really good!  You just never know what you will find on YouTube and with careful selection, you can find materials worth sharing with colleagues, students or friends.  Like anything, if you like it, then it was worth watching!

In case you have difficulty accessing my podcasts in the prior post, try it now:

and here, too:

Here it is!  My podcast called Who’d A Thunk It!?!  made in Garageband!  I made this one because I thought my first one was too long.  What I realize is that I forgot to do the share button so podbean was not able to upload.  Once I figured out what I forgot (after I emailed Sarah and moaned and groaned and then realized what I did wrong and emailed again to say ignore the first email) I went back and uploaded my first podcast.

This one is called Expect The Best! I hope you like it! 

I am so thrilled with my podcasts!  I loved making them and it was a great opportunity to use Garageband.  I love my MAC!  When I listened to my podcasts on the blog, I realized that something to look at might have been nice.  In lieu of that, I invite you to close your eyes while you listen and fully absorb what you hear instead of diverting you auditory focus to a visual.

My students are deaf, so the use of podcasts for them might be severely limited.  Professionally, you could make a podcast of a presentation to share with others. Wouldn’t it be great to get podcasts of conference presentations that you can’t attend?

I can see creating podcasts for friends and family. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to get a podcast message from someone that you can play again and again and again.  If it is someone you love and it is a nice or inspiring message, it could be a precious gift.  I keep my parents’ phone messages on my answering machine for just that reason!

I am so delighted with my new podcasts.  I now have This I Believe, Thistle and Shamrock, Story Corps and You Bet Your Garden all from NPR.  I love these programs and can’t always listen to them due to my schedule.  I am so excited!  I’m listening to my favorites as I type this.  This is so cool!

I hope you like my video as much as I do!  Photo credits are listed in an earlier post entitled Flickr in the Classroom

“The Magic of Spirals”

Have you ever fallen into a spiral with your eyes, with your heart, with your mind, with your soul? Take the magical journey into these spirals of depth, pattern, design, aspect and color.

I like the video I made so much that I’d like to embed it into my blog, but I can’t figure out how to do it.  Can anyone help me with that?

Also, the license plate site, how do you figure out the jpeg so you can save it and embed it in your wiki or blog?

Thanks for letting me know and pls go to my wiki page and check out the video.

I wish we could keep all the course work assignments and lessons after the class is over.  I want to be able to refer to them again and again.  Is there any way we can continue to access the info?

Web 2.0 enthusiast here wants to stay “in the know”!  I’m going to miss learning together.  I wish our class could continue indefinitely.

You can spend hours creating with Flickr and all the amazing slideshow and photo manipulative options out there.  It’s great fun for your own personal purposes, but how exciting it is for students to express their creativity using photos and videos they’ve taken for a class activity and then being able to design slideshows and amazing billboards and newspaper style products to go with the materials they are working on.  This is not your grandmother’s science fair posterboard presentation!  Hello web 2.0 and all the limitless creative options you can integrate into every aspect of teacher or student presentations!

A collage of photos can be generated to show all of the aspects of one activity or of the entire year’s work.  Go to http://bighugelabs.com/flickr and check it out!  Snapfish also offers collage and poster options.

Warning:  if you get into all of this, you will have no time for anything else and your entire evening will be consumed with these projects.  It’s not a bad way to spend your time, but forget getting to anything else!  You’ve been warned!

I really enjoyed flickr.  I love taking photos and use iphoto and aperture to edit and sort and store my photos in a variety of ways.  I also use a variety of backup systems and posting systems so others can see my work.  I also use snapfish so it is nice to know that flickr and snapfish are linked to each other. Being able to edit my photos has been very exciting and I’m sure people will love using the edit features embedded in flickr.

As I looked through the amazing flickr photos, I was in awe of the photos of spirals, specifically spiral staircases and how you fall into them.  There was one photo that was not part of the Creative Commons collection that looked like a lightbulb embedded in the spiral.  It was just an optical illusion based on how you viewed the base or apex of the spiral.  The photographer captured it brilliantly!  I chose a series of spiral photos from the Creative Commons collection and invite you to see them.  They are a wonderful photo opportunity for teaching photography, perspective, illusion, the play and effect and affect that color create, the mathematics and physics of spirals and all the connections that one can make to spirals in various aspects of our lives visually, internally and spiritually.

Here are links to a few of my favorite spirals from the Creative Commons collection. I’ve labeled them by color and I invite you to fall into and in love with them as much as I did:

Spiral Gold

by exper

http://www.flickr.com/photos/exper/2054395513/sizes/m/

Spiral Blue

by George Morgan

http://www.flickr.com/photos/georges/282478/sizes/m/

Spiral Green

by sjdunphy

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sjdunphy/2701753359/sizes/m/

Spiral Orange

by slightly-less-random

http://www.flickr.com/photos/slr/11147904/sizes/m/

Spiral Pearl

by Calain

http://www.flickr.com/photos/calain/53465858/sizes/m/

Spiral Gold and Black

by Martin Haesemeyer

http://www.flickr.com/photos/haesemeyer/2866372516/sizes/m/

Spiral Peach

by davsag

http://www.flickr.com/photos/davesag/4146473/sizes/m/

Spiral Pink

by herbstkind

http://www.flickr.com/photos/herbstkind/522883270/sizes/m/

Spiral White to Silver to Purple

by Ana Patricia Almeida

http://www.flickr.com/photos/anap/3296616700/sizes/m/

Spiral Burnt Orange

by Sifter

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sifter/363922319/sizes/m/

Spiral Wood

by geoftheref

http://www.flickr.com/photos/geoftheref/260069251/sizes/m/

Spiral Dark Wood

by s*t*e*v*i*e

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevie-velvet/3255755204/sizes/m/