Thing 23

Well, I have seen the light, and yes...a middle aged dog can learn new tricks! I have learned a lot on this journey of technological discovery. Most important, I think, is that I don't fear new technology anymore. Most of it is now developed in such a way that it is ridiculously user-friendly and it would be a waste to not delve deeper into all of the resources that are available. I've always been a fan of not "reinventing the wheel" but haven't had the means to narrow the search for finding and borrowing other people's ideas. Now I do. I feel confident that I will be able to incorporate much of what I have learned into my teaching: from great lesson ideas to developing and maintaining a classroom blog. I look forward to being able to spend a good chunk of time browsing through all of the new tools that are available this summer; especially when I know it will save me so much more time in the future.

Thank you for offering this course, and for organizing it in such a way as to be informative, interesting, non-threatening, useful, and relevant. I learned more from this course and the short video tutorials than I have in 20 years of in-services and professional development.

Thing 22

What a great tool! When I saw what this was all about in thing 21, I couldn't wait to jump right in. This is going to be one of the coolest collaborative tools I've ever worked with. This will be so much better to use than sharing a google document when it comes to brainstorming ideas, creating itineraries, developing lessons - and to meet my immediate needs. We are currently developing a marching show between a music writer, drill writer, 2 directors, and color guard, brass, woodwind, and marching instructors. In addition, we are working on the show concept, prop design, and costuming as well as our instructional itineraries. This will be an amazing collaborative tool and I have already gotten started. I can see applications for using the links as well, as our project grows and we need to separate ideas on different pages.

My team teaching partner and I are constantly trying to collaborate online and this will be BY FAR the thing that I use the most from this course. Thank you!

My wiki is at:
http://chargercamp.wikispaces.com/Band+Camp+2011

We have just begun to brainstorm ideas and have only invited one other instructor so far, but will be adding the rest of the team shortly. I showed this to my team teacher this morning and he is as fired up about it as I am!

Thing 21

This is exciting! We are constantly trying to collaborate with multiple instructors for our marching season and our emails get jammed, just like in the little video. What a great tool this will be for us! I did a quick search and found 21centuryteched which looks like something that I will dig into more deeply. I will definitely forward it to my tech people in the middle school where I teach and our building principal. They are always forwarding new sites and great tools and this will likely be very useful to them. In the meantime, I am jumping right into thing 22 to get started on a wiki of our own!

Thing 20

I had a really hard time with downloading itunes at work. I tried several times and finally figured that this was the one thing that I couldn't do there. While I have access to youtube and everything else that I've learned in this program so far, I could not access the itunes store. Once I grabbed an hour to do this at home, it was a piece of cake. Itunes is very easy to use, but again I found that the amount of choices available were vast. I spent a lot of time wandering about until I finally hit on a really neat music educators podcast called musicteachers911. I have to admit, I first surfed for other things that interested me, but I was getting disappointed when I couldn't really find anything great. Once I regained my focus and got back on task it was easy. I preferred using keywords in the search bar and then browsing through the icon list. I plan to spend a good amount of time searching for something that I am truly interested in subscribing to, but in the meantime I feel that I have learned enough to move on to the next thing.

Thing 19

I spent some time looking at a couple of podcasts (http://www.merriam-webster.com/word-of-the-day/ and http://www.michigan.gov/mde/0,1607,7-140-37818_45256---,00.html) but didn't see anything there that I would choose to subscribe to. I am looking forward to "Thing 20" where I will learn about a better way to search for interesting and useful podcasts, as I believe that learning to use this tool would be a good way to get exposure to new information and techniques, as well as finding podcasts that appeal to my other personal interests. I'm not sure yet how I could incorporate this into my classroom for student use, but I do understand that it could potentially make me a better educator.

Thing 18

I've been searching for a site that had presentations already made to use in my classes, and it looks like this could be it. I was hoping to find more material though, and found that I had to spend a lot of time and try a lot of different searches before finding something that I could really use. I'm hoping that more will soon be uploaded that better meets my needs and I plan to spend some time this summer cruising the site to see what else is there. We've used power points in our class before and have found that it is a great way to engage students when we are directing our attention to different individuals throughout the course of the hour. It's great to keep a presentation rolling so that every student has the opportunity to check out the supplemental material at some point during the class period. It's also a great way to introduce new information that we normally might not be able to get to.

Clarinet Power Point

View more presentations from srexroat

Thing 17

I would like to spend more time exploring this to find something that is really useful to me. I checked out the "Remember the milk" tool and will see if it is something that I might really use. I would also consider using the 30 boxes calendar tool if I could get my husband on board with using it. Maybe then we'd finally be on the same page with who was taking kid #1 to hockey and kid #2 to baseball!

Thing 16

I am a regular user of Google docs. I love the availability of accessing my work from any computer, and I love that I can share living documents with colleagues. My only negative comment would be that I wish it had document and spreadsheet programs that were more similar to Word. I find that it doesn't have enough of the "details" that I like to use ie: specific fonts, data sorting, etc. I also sometimes have trouble viewing things that I have uploaded, but overall, it's great to "go to the cloud".

Thing 15

Believe it or not, I actually have been checking in with my Google Reader account fairly regularly and have already cleaned it up. It isn't as valuable to me from an educational standpoint as it is from a personal one, but I do see the potential that is there. I have found that technology on the web has become so user-friendly that it's ridiculous to not use it. I have also recently found out that my building principal is planning on having our entire staff take this course, and amazingly, I already feel that I will be comfortable enough to help walk our staff members through the process. That is a really, really good feeling!

Thing 14

Delicious!

I admit it. I used to fear all social sites and technology in general, but it turns out that you really can teach a middle aged dog new tricks. Yes, my kids still have an easier time experimenting with all things computer, but I'm getting the hang of it and every step forward sheds a little more light.

Delicious is a great resource and a good way to access your bookmarks from any computer. I love that I can search through other educator's bookmarks to save myself time. Now I just need to find the time to go through all of these great new websites...