I was happy to find that making a podcast was pretty easy and painless. I used the microphone and had no problems recording. Here is my podcast.

I have been listening to some podcasts on my rss feed and I enjoy the radio sites that I don’t always get to hear when they broadcast live on the radio.  I am sure I will be able to answer the questions of usefulness in the classroom after I actually make a podcast.  I would think it would be nice to podcast lectures in the classroom,  parents day messages,  information for teams, etc.  All of these podcasts would be helpful to the parents that can’t get to meetings or kids that miss class.  Although I think it may make it too easy for parents and kids to start missing things if all they have to do is a click on a website and listen to the 30 minutes of information.    I personally would love to use the podcasts to learn another language.  I did listen to a few lessons on italian.   I had a lot of trouble figuring out itunes once I had everything downloaded.  I would have to get a few lessons in that software before I do much more with podcasting. 

I love LibraryThing! I usually spend an hour at the bookstore trying to find a book and am always asking people what they are reading. This is a perfect site for me! I love being able to read reviews and see what new books are out there. I will definitely use this site again. I doubt I will do a lot of conversations or reviews myself – but will definitely use this site and give it to others.

Setting up the delicious account was quite easy and manuevering through websites turned out to be pretty painless.  I like having all of the sites that I would look at in one place and being able to get to those sites on any computer is nice.   I am really not sure how I would use them in a class setting, but I know I will use it in my professional side of the job – preparing for classes and keeping up with my favorite sites.   My page

This blurb shows that our ( China and USA) youthful cultures are not that much different.   As a group of over 1,000 women formed the olympic rings in bikinis to break the Guinness World Book of records.  See article or video .

Jigsaw Puzzle of Olympic rings

I had to do a puzzle; which I embedded into my wiki page and linked on my blog above.

Most of the tools I found on the list were great for me personally, but I am not sure I would use them for professional reasons. I would like to play around with the newsletter tool, http://letterpop.com/. I fear that I would spend 4 hours preparing something that will take 2 minutes to read. I checked out the writeboard http://www.writeboard.com/,- which would be a great help to kids doing group projects. The 30boxes calendar site could be helpful to some – but I like plain old paper for my organizer. I will probably delve into toondoo and mixbook with my son to make some cool books and things as he starts kindergarten.

I visited two sites using the K12 online conference site. This is a fantastic idea and could help so many teachers that don’t get the chance to go to conferences because of financial issues within their school districts. One conference I visited was on sustaining blogging in the classroom. The lecture was geared to finding ways to keep kids blogging and gave ideas on grading blogs with a rubric. I liked part of the lecture that suggested blogs should be for conversation and not just a journal entry. The other lecture I visited was on RSS feeds. I learned a little more on other sites – but it basically reinforced what I had learned in that section of this course. I am finding that I stay interested when I am watching someone live – instead of taped or audio – but this is an easy way to keep current with technology issues in the classroom.

My slideshow has an olympic theme.  It took me a while to figure out the embedding… but I think I got it!   I would guess these get easier the more you do.  I am sure the kids would be very good at it and I would love to see them make slideshows with their own pictures relating to the topics they are learning in class.

http://k12l20sandbox.wikispaces.com/incognito

My slideshow is living currently in my wikispace.  Please view and enjoy.

photo by striatic

As I am getting geared up for the 2008 Olmpics – I tried to finds some cool pictures of past olympic games. Can you say OVERWHELMED? I am wondering if you can narrow your search after your first search? I couldn’t figure it out… I found either no pictures or literally millions of pictures. I think I need help with this one.

I had never heard of creative commons before this course and had never noticed the cc trademark on any webpages.    I LOVE the MIT open commons site and would find it very helpful in classes for the kids to use as an additional resource and to use in class as an additional learning tool.   I am sure the motivated kids would use the idea and run with it and the less motivated kids would just USE other’s ideas.   So, once again the resources are available – it is up to the teacher and the kids on how these resources will be used to actually improve their education.