Is it the end or only the beginning?

My experience with the 23 Things has been fun! I have thoroughly enjoyed learning about all of the new technologies that are available to us. Some of my favorite things to learn about throughout this assignment were the RSS feeds and Google Reader, the various Google tools, the picture-videos on Animoto, the Delicious bookmarking site, and LiveBinders. This program has affected my lifelong learning goals in a positive way. I will continue to learn new things to use in both my personal and professional life. The things that I have learned along this journey will help me as an educator in many ways. I will be sure to incorporate several of these great tools into my preparation for lesson and unit plans, keeping up with educational technologies, and communicating with my fellow educators across the globe. Several of the RSS feeds that I have on my Google Reader will help me to stay abreast of the new developments in web 2.0, and the posts on Diigo will also inform me about the great websites that are available on the Internet. Diigo has been very helpful in expanding my knowledge of the websites of which I was previously unaware. It is a great website to use as an informational tool to learn about new things! Hopefully, I will be able to broaden my students' educational perspective by teaching them about the new technologies that are available as they come about.

After I finish with my 23 Things, I would like to continue using some of the tools and websites that I have learned about through this assignment. I hope to use several of them for my future classroom and students. Thanks to this learning experience, I will continue to look for new tools to use in my classroom and for my students. Once I have my own classroom and my degree, I also hope to create a blog or format my current blog for my classroom to communicate with my students and their parents. 

One thing that I recommend for this program is more step-by-step instruction regarding the tools to be used during the assignment. If the students have less confusion and frustration concerning the tools to be used, then they may be more inclined to actually use them after the assignment is complete instead of cancelling their subscriptions and/or accounts. This is especially true for those students who are less familiar with computers and other technologies in general. 

I was very surprised by the great amount of things that I learned about throughout this 23 Things experience. I thought I knew about many great websites and tools to use in my personal and professional life, but only one of the tools that I was aware of was presented in this program. So many of the tools that I have learned about are useful in one way or another. Several of them are great for everyday use! I am grateful for this chance to learn about so many new tools that I can use for the classroom and to assist me in increasing my productivity.

Thing #23

There is a note on the home page of The 23 Things that says "this project is loosely based upon the website 43Things (which allows you to set and track personal goals) and the Stephen Abram article titled 43 Things I (or You) might want to do this year (Information Outlook - Feb 2006)." That note tells me that the Learning 2.0-23Things for Teachers blog was not a completely original idea but was modified from someone else's creation. After learning about Creative Commons licensing, I have decided that I will be more careful about the things that I copy from the Internet for my own personal use and for educational purposes. I will remian abreast of the proper laws pertaining to copyright, Creative Commons, and fair use. I need to give credit to the original makers and respect their ideas as I would want other individuals to do for my works. I will teach my students to be responsible about the Internet, copyright laws, and Creative Commons licensing as well. The laws are in place to protect the creators of works, and we all need to obey such laws for our own sakes and theirs. 

Thing #22

I have created three LiveBinders called The 1st Thanksgiving, All About the Continents, and Explorers Across Time. I have embedded one of my binders at the bottom of this post called Explorers Across Time for you to view. There are many great possibilities for which an educator might use LiveBinders in the classroom. I could make unit plans and lesson plans binders to use in my classroom. I could also create a binder of all online education resources such as websites that provide educational worksheets, lesson plans, songs and activities, games, and any other thing that I think would be useful for the students. I could have my students make their own LiveBinders for certain assignments or just for their own individual use. I might have my students create a binder for a project the included two information websites, one video, and two related learning activities on a president. There are many possibilities for using LiveBinders in the classroom because almost anything from a computer may be put in it.

Explorers Across Time

Thing #21

This is the video that I made using Animoto. I call it Hudson Family because it is filled with pictures of myself, my two sisters, my brother, and my parents. I loved making this video on Animoto! The creation process was uncomplicated and not extremely lengthy. The video tutorial on the homepage was very helpful! The website offered several options for the style of video and had a large collection of songs from which to choose from. I really like the fact that you can preview your video before you make the final production and that the same style of video changes periodically. I would love to use the Animoto website again to make videos of my own personal photographs and pictures of my students in the classroom.

Thing #20

I love watching videos on YouTube. There are so many things that you can find on the site. You can find informational videos, music videos, tutorials, cartoons, movie trailers, and just about anything else you are looking for. The great thing about YouTube is that there are so many videos on a large variety of topics, and each one is unique in its own ways. However, there can be inappropriate content found on YouTube. I do not know if it is possible to ban only specific content, but if YouTube is allowed in the classroom, there should be specific content that is banned for the sake of the students.

There were several great videos that I found on YouTube about educational things. All I had to do was type in my desired topic in the search bar and click "search" to retrieve the many videos that were related to my search topic. I watched several videos until I found one that I liked. It was a very simple process. A video that I found was the President song video about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. It gave a few facts about the two best known presidents, and the song was catchy enough that I think children would enjoy it and pay attention to the information presented in the video. I chose the President song video because I hope to teach third grade social studies. I love to focus on individuals throughout history. This video was perfect to engage students about the Presidents in a fun, informational way. It combines several different learning styles to maximize learning potential.
Some features of YouTube could be useful for my school library website. The recommended videos that are based on recently viewed videos, recommended channels, and the watch history could all be helpful features for students, teachers, and librarians to use. 

Thing #18

I thoroughly enjoyed writing about this "thing" on social networking. I already had a Facebook account prior to this assignment. https://www.facebook.com/jessica.j.hudson.1?ref=tn_tnmn is the link to my Facebook page. As part of this assignment, we were asked to befriend teachers and other people that we may know on Facebook. I must admit that it was rather strange sending friend requests to my professors! Somehow, that seemed to be outside the realm of propriety. To this day, I do not have a Twitter account. I do not see the point of it to be honest. I have experienced Twitter by borrowing my friend's account to browse around it and find out if I wanted to sign up for it. After my experience, I concluded that I prefer my Facebook by far! However, I understand that there are benefits and down-sides to both social networking sites. For example, I like the graphic design and layout of Twitter better than Facebook, but Facebook has so many more features to offer than Twitter.

I believe that Facebook has more useful features for education than Twitter does because you can private chat on there, post pictures and text, like posts and pictures, comment on someone else's post, make your own pages for anything, and play games through Facebook. You can find friends, add friends, block friends, and specify who can see your page items. You can also make groups for people and create events to invite friends to. From what I remember about Twitter, you can add people to follow, post Tweets, and reTweet someone else's Tweet. I am not sure if it provides private messaging on the site.

I believe that there are classroom and school applications for Facebook. Educators can make their own Facebook pages. They can use the Facebook pages to post information and/or pictures about the students, their progress, their assignments, upcoming events, and many other classroom related topics. Administrators and other teachers can see the teacher's Facebook page to see the teaching techniques being used, the curriculum, and the student progress if the teacher chooses to post such things. I think it is important for educators to know how social networking works because it is a great way to communicate with people. It would be beneficial for educators to have social networking accounts with several different networks to open various lines of communication with other educators, their students, and the parents of their students.

I did not find out anything new about these websites that I did not know before. However, one new insight that I realized about Twitter is that one could follow teachers to see if they tweet anything useful from their classroom experiences.

Thing #19

I am currently a member of online communities such as Facebook and GoodReads. I am addicted to both because there is so much to do on them. I recently joined another online community called TeacherPop. I am really excited about joining it because it is geared specifically towards current teachers and future teachers. It is a great place for educators to communicate and collaborate on things concerning education. Some of the other websites that have interested me are Bake Space and Play List. I have been looking for a good website on which to find new recipes. The design of Bake Space was well organized, fashionable, and pleasing to the eye. I loved that it gave the user the option to create his or her own cookbook! Whenever you searched a recipe on the site, you could put it in your own cookbook for safekeeping and easy retrieval. I also liked the play list website because it had such a huge selection of songs. It allowed the user to make their own playlist of songs, make a song their ringtone, and share songs with other people. I have been wanting to get some new ringtones on my phone, so the play list website was a great find for me! I will definitely be joining and using Bake Space and Play List soon.