Thing #12- Slide on in

I embedded my slide show of galaxies into the sandbox. I also put in a family slide show because I liked it.

#11-third time is charmed.

No know copyright, and the Smithsonian Institute has posted these images to Flickr. If you click on the long thin rectangle it does link to the photo page,(so does that) so I guess I have learned this one in stages.

#11 Try, Try again

I hope for this to be my missing picture of a spiral galaxy taken from the Chandra observatory. On the previous blog if you click on the ? mark it will link to the image. Go figure.


I think this is successful. Hooray!

Thing #11, A Flicker of Genius, but maybe not mine!

Well, here goes. Thing #11 did take be a little longer. I searched flicker photos and added my own photos to flicker to use later. I decided to use galaxies as my educational search, so maybe I could use it later. I am hopeful that at the left I have a picture of a spiral galaxy, I cannot tell in this screen. If it is not here. I'll try again in my next post.

I am getting better at the sandbox, and I did get my picts in for thing #12. I absolutely love the blog on using Flickr to teach vocabulary. This would tie in extremely well with the Frayer model that we are using now in our classes. There were great examples here. Kudos to Teacher dude. I even left a comment.

#10 A very common thing or is it?

I love the entire creative commons thing! Honestly, I have not noticed the CC on any of the sites, but I never really looked for it. I definitely think that it will affect student work in the future, and I love collaboration. Coming from a family of coaches, most if not all plays, in most sports were "borrowed" from other coaches. I guess that is creative commons in its simplicity. Everyone begs, borrows and steals from each other and some of the time it can make the difference in winning and losing a game. (Most of the time, if your athletes are better than theirs-you win) Talent being equal, though, the creative common things can work for you! I know, I think it is fun to work collaboratively and there is something mysterious about collaborating with people that you do not even know. This is such a paradigm shift from all the copyright presentations that have been presented to us during staff development.

Thing #9 Be careful or your could get stuck in the Sandbox

Well, I can't say that I really enjoyed this one. I have spent more time on this one than any of the others. When my kids were little I used to be so paranoid about them playing in the sandbox because if you left the cover off the neighbor's cats could come and visit the sandbox. We all know what that means. This is why I named my page "No Cats in the Sandbox."

Well, as life would have it, I made a brand new wiki and then tried to put it in the 23 things sandbox. That doesn't work. Kelly helped me and I mostly copied and pasted so it did not take nearly as long to create the 2nd time. I did post it, as well as my favorite yucky science web site to the sandbox.

I did create a voki which I put on this blog, and maybe when I get a few more hours I will try and figure out how to get in on my sandbox page. Good luck to all of you on thing #9. May all your burning questions get answered.

#8 Stretch Wikipedia-the expert opinion on all things

You just have to love wikipedia. First I decided to look for the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram of stars for my son's homework. I typed in Hertzburg-Russell and didn't find a thing. Just another example of computers only doing what you tell them to. I did find it and it had a lot of history and a lot of information. I compared it to one on Glenwood, Arkansas. This is a small town where I grew up (outside of it anyway). It had little history and it said in the discussion that pictures should be added to make it better. I agree, but I do not have any of this very small town.

Thing #8 Wikiness

This is one of the things that I have most wanted to know how to do. It was amazing seeing the wikis that classes have created. In the post called Wiki Wiki Teaching, there were great links to several student created wikis. Two of my very favorites were one which was set up as a study hall sight for students to view and see assignments and projects that were coming up. I really liked it since it made the  students responsible for maintenance of  their own study time. The other was a review for an English exam where students were basically making their own collaborative on-line review.

While exploring the list of Wikis provided, I of course went to the science sites first. I absolutely loved the 6th grade science site called "code Blue". Since I teach body systems in the Spring, we may try something like this one. It appears that each student had to do a brief amount of research about a medical profession and write a short paragraph about themselves with a description that made them that Dr. It would be a great way for the teacher to know who they are and they still retain their anonymity. Also within this wiki was a great link to a "yucky science" site that students would love. My favorite discussed the digestive system.

One of the sites was a high school chemistry teacher's wiki. I found the way it was set up to probably be one that would not be a problem for anyone monitoring the system. It seemed to be very clear and concise and would allow the students to access expectations for each lesson and to post their assignments to the wiki. It appeared that many students had made powerpoints of various subjects.

As the U.S. turns its head toward elections, I found one the Wolf's Den wiki had a link to a student history site where each student had a link inside their class, and they were asked to post reasons for who they would vote for and why. Some of the posts were most insightful and I believe that if the teacher had not made up his or her mind, they might make a decision based on input from students.

Thing #7 or sharing a little part of your soul

As I was scanning my reader, I came across a post on Infinite Thinking Machine called Freedom to read. It has one of my favorite lists of the top 100 banned books from 1990-2000. It is amazing to me how some of these could make it. Maybe they could ban our posts and comments too!

Commenting is like voting, it seems to give you some say. Sometimes we feel that voting may not do any good, but when you think about the process it really is the only say we have, and no matter how small that say, it is still mine. So when I now blog that is my chance to send my "Vote" out into the mysteries of cyberspace for the universe to read.

I have really enjoyed reading not only posts but others comments to the posts. I know that I find it exciting to get posts on my blog. It is kind of like seeing how your number of friends compares to others on facebook. In the movie Spacecamp, the quote was, "ohh, competitive, aren't we?" I guess I am!

Word/Spanish word of the day

I also added the word of the day in Spanish and English to my Reader. Since I am also taking Spanish on Tuesdays this semester. It is fun for you word buffs. How is that for verbiage.

#6 I fed my reader, how overwhelming!

Wow! Where to start. The amount of information that you can gather by "feeding you reader" can be overwhelming even if you skim read. I could literally spend hours just skimming these awesome blogs. I began with a spot for the 50 year celebration of Sputnik since I am a space nut. I really do think this is 51 today, but I digress. There is a man who claims to have pieces of Sputnik which fell out of orbit and landed in the back yard. He tried to turn them in, but the air force gave them back, and he buried them under the house. Who would have thought?

Then for the most amazing techno/educational thing I saw was about a teacher who was trying to do great things for the students and move them into the 21st century but he was locked out by his district, and could no longer have access to his laptop. Another person comments on the same blog that they had been waiting 2 weeks for software so that he could put his class images on the system. I know that parts of this have been frustrating for me with this class also. I have just decided to do all my blogging for 2.0-23 at home. I don't have to override that way.

I believe one of the most informational blogs was one which gave guidelines for students and teachers using U-Tube clips in presentations. Sometimes it is just hard to get my head around "fair use".

By far, the most fun or funnest (so glad we are not graded on perfect grammar and spelling) thing that I have seen, is one that I our saw on one of our fellow classmate's blogs. Steering me toward wordle. It is great! I have a science one on my blog.