Thing 23: I made it!

Excellent video! Education will become increasingly irrelevant unless it changes and adopts the everyday technologies that students use outside of school.

This has been a very worthwhile class. Some of the tools, I knew. Others were a complete revelation. I have discovered some tools that I will use, that will make my life easier and more productive. I have also discovered tools that I appreciate learning about but probably won't use. But that's alright because I may not use but I may be able to pass it along to another teacher. It has reconfirmed my thought that schools and teachers need to change. We need to foster creativity. We need to use technology for more than online workbooks.

Not only did I learn from the content, I learned from the format. Just taking the class online was a learning experience.

Thing 22 - Online Video

YouTube use to have all sorts of fun, crazy, useful videos. It still does but it has gone mainstream. The Library of Congress just created created a YouTube channel. (http://www.youtube.com/user/LibraryOfCongress). You can't get more mainstream than LOC. Because it has gone mainstream, there are videos on YouTube that are very useful in the classroom. But YouTube is usually blocked at school. Yes, you can fool around and transfer them to SchoolTube, TeacherTube or EdublogsTV but what a pain.

Not only does YouTube have excellent resources, it also could be an avenue of creativity for students. They can produce videos and post them to YouTube. Talk about an authenic audience!

But it is blocked. Next year, in our school district, the goal is to have it unblocked for teachers. This will allow teachers to use their discretion to show appropriate videos in the classroom.

Thing 21: Your Heart will be all a Twitter

Hmmmm. My heart isn't Twittering yet. My daughter uses Twitter and it posts to Facebook. I like to know the minutiae of her life cause she lives 2,000 miles away. But just too much information for most other people. I don't think I will use.

Not that I don't think this tool could be useful but just how much time do people have? I can see that if you had a PLN, Twitter could be an easy, quick tool to keep information and communication flowing. The character limitations keep the tweets concise, which is a definite benefit.

Thing 20: Bookmarking with delicious

Delicious is going to be a very useful tool. I set up my account and added bookmarks: http://delicious.com/Booker69. The power is the ability to tag and access from any computer, anywhere. Tagging is the key. When you bookmark on your computer, you can organize but tagging adds a whole other dimension. Each tag is a hook that allows the retrieval of information. Because tagging is so important, consistency is vital. As I discovered! Don't use commas between words, watch plurals and capitalizations and use the recommended tags.

Thing 19: Intro to social bookmarking

A few years ago, I used an online booking site. It was sort of cool but you have to organize all the links in folders. It was nice that you could access from anywhere but a burden to keep organized. Del.icio.us seems much easier to use. Tags allow you to "hook" the information.

Tags are not an issue with me, it's sort of like what librarians have always done. What are tags but subject headings? Same thing. You have all these resources in a library and you use subject headings to hook subsets out. Same idea with any set of information. Tags are used in blogs, in Library Thing and now in social bookmarking.

I'm looking forward to creating a del.icio.us account.

Thing 18: Building your PLN

Interesting. This is the first time I have used ning. I visit the MACUL ning and promptly spent about an hour exploring the site and links. Then I search for library nings of which there are many from all over the world. I can see where this would be a very productive tool. I can see our school setting up a ning to foster dialog and communication. It almost seems like facebook with a purpose.

Thing 17: More 2.0 Winners

What fun! I went with the short list. Being a book person, the first site I visited was Lulu. Amazing, anyone can write, publish and market a book. We really are democratizing media. But Lulu wasn't quite what I was looking for.....I didn't want a photo book and I didn't want all text. I wanted something in between. So.....I explored further into another interest of mine, geneology. I started with geni a few month ago. Geni is the 2nd place winner in the category so I tried out the first place winner: My Heritage. Very similiar to Geni except it had a family tree maker that I may go back and download (except it's PC and I'm Mac at home....need to get new Mac with dual processor). So I continued on my journey to find just the right 2.0 app. Went to Zillow. Sort of scary and seemed a little messed up. I looked through my neighborhood. Had a picture of my house with a different address which sort of messed with what I thought the comparative house prices would be. If you were moving, zillow would give a good overview of the prices in a neighborhood. So onward and back to geneology. I thought I would play Jeopardy and complete the category. Looked at Amiglia and GeneTree. Getting a little scientific with DNA geneology at GeneTree. Last but not least in the category, I visited Ancestry Press which now seems to be called MyCanvas. I was familiar with Ancestry.com but had no idea they had a publishing/project service. This was just what I was looking for...the match of books and geneology. I registered and have spent quality time exploring. It is an amazing and my kids will be getting a fanastic, one of a kind Christmas present.