Thing 9

At our school, only teachers can use youtube and this is the first year we can. The district has made a site where teachers can post useful videos for students called Titantube. This helps eliminate suggestive or unacceptable material. There is a lot out there that can be accessed. I loved the teacher comedy sketch you recommened called What do I make? I watched a video on Rube Golberg and commented on that. It is a very cool contest that we had our 7th graders do many years ago.

Thing 8

This is some of my daughters friends on her cheer squad. She will love the magazine maker and the mashed up images. This would be good for the students in my class to use and then do creative writing with it. They all love to take pictures of themselves and their friends.

Thing 7

For some reason, this was supposed to be really easy and I got stuck and frustrated several times. First I tried to do it at school and I couldn't figure out how to get the cookies to work. Then when I did it at home, I was having trouble with the tags and getting my pictures to come up with the tags at RESA23. I finally got it. I am not sure how I feel about the Flickr. I found it hard to search, and I am still having some internal private/public issues I have not resolved.

Thing 6

I chose this picture from flickr because I thought it was really interesting and reminded me of me. I often have piles of books that drive my husband crazy... I don't have that many classics though. Mysteries are my favorite. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is my latest find. I also spent a lot of time searching yellow lab puppies because I badly want one, but couldn't decide on which was the cutest.

Thing 5

I thought Thing 5 was easy, thank goodness. I use Firefox and dragging it to the bookmark bar was easy. I subscribed to the English Stop and The Magical Middle School Blog from the 23 Things and a blog that my godchild created. I am going to browse around for more. This will really help with time management.

Thing 4

RSS is an awesome tool. I feel like I can totally manage the blogs on bloglines. I am one of the few that is not on facebook, and the primary reason is I was scared away by the amount of time some people seem to spend on it. I was getting an anxious feeling when I was exploring all the blogs from Thing 3. I will definitely like finding a few that I like and just checking the new information. This is an awesome way to keep up with my students blogs too.

Thing 3

As a Middle School English Teacher, I saw endless ways I could use my blog to interact with students. I see this as a wonderful way to get reluctant students to write, they don't realize they are writing. Besides as an informational tool for parents and students, my top ideas were to use my blog as a creative writing prompt, book reviews, interview tool, to showcase student writing, and for the students to comment on issues important to them.
I really liked the Hobo Teacher site, Gus the Teacher, and the High School Journalism Site. I had a hard time telling if they were written by the students or the teachers on some. Also, what is the copyright issue for items posted on a blog- can you pull things off of other sites if you credit the source? Is everything teacher /student original work?
I also found that I was drawn to the shorter blogs, the more elaborate or long, I tended to loose interest. The ones with the simplest designs, pulled me in further to explore. When I went back to my Thing 1 and 2 I realized I was rather long winded...