Week #5 thing 11

11. Web 2.o award list was a great resource. I was happy to see that I already knew about a lot of the sites. I've experimented briefly with NING in my classroom this year, but found a wikispace more manageable from a teacher standpoint. My students really liked the user-friendly MySpace-ish feel of the NING.

I checked out Stumble Upon.  What a great idea. I've gotten a few emails about possible sites to check out and in exploring them, I did find some really neat sites that I might never have found by surfing. It is like strategic surfing, very cool

I've briefly used Google Docs and want to spend more time with it to understand how best to utilize for the classroom.

I have a Gmail account that I set up for my team parents. It has been fantastic. I email home weekly reminders of upcoming projects and tests. The set up of gmail storage makes it easy to keep track of conversations.

I am in love with Pandora, how cool is that. Is that considered streaming . . . I think so. I never have time to look for new music and am not very good about having my Ipod charged and handy. This is a really great way to listen to music. I like that can give songs a thumbs up or down.

I'm intrigued by G.h.ost. It provides computer capabilities based on the internet.  This is the idea of working in a cloud. So practical to education as students work in class, then want to be able to continue at home.  Our tech guy doesn't want thumb drives to be used because of the virus possibility. This would be a way to circumvent the thumb drives. How convenient to store all your documents on the internet for easy access.

I checked out Twitter, but couldn't get it connected to my phone. Not sure why? I am not sure how excited I am about this program, but I wanted to try it.  My mother in law was flying in during Redoubt eruption time and Alaska Airlines offered Twitter updates. The school district is also now offering Twitter  updates for school closures. Twitter seems to be everywhere.

All in all, there are so many tools. I'm sure I forgot to list some that I checked out. I will use this list as a resource to go back and explore when I have more time.