Thing #17 Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a activity that I really enjoy. I have never heard of Delicious before but I have spent an inordinate amount of time browsing Digg before their last redesign. Delicious is a great way to bookmark things and is generally a pleasant experience and feature rich tool. However, I feel that its purpose of managing bookmarks is done much better by RSS readers; but this is just my personal preference. I could see this having some use in the classroom as teachers could make stacks for new units in a sense giving them a large grouping of resources. However, it would need to be heavily moderated and locked down which would ruin the social part of it. This is though, its only real limitation. Outside of the class room teachers could use it to collaborate with other teachers as was shown in one of the videos.

On another note. For anyone who reads this who really likes the idea of social bookmarking and is really wanting to get into it. I would highly suggest a website called Reddit (warning: may contain mature content). It has its own quirks and is essentially the same website as Digg but with around fifty million users.

Thing #16 Getting Organized

Of all the homepage editors I went straight for iGoogle as I already used it for a previous post about the vast resources that Google offers. I really enjoy using iGoogle and I do use it as my current homepage. Its great for just sitting down at the computer and getting all of the small important information such as the weather as well as the option to search. The thing that I enjoy most about iGoogle is how easy it is to create, update, and change. This allows me to never grow tired of the same old homepage as I can change it whenever I please.

I found the calenders to be extremely useful but at the same time a bit too time consuming. They are supposed to be a time saver by allowing the user to be more organized and have time to do other things. However, I find that it takes so much time to fully fill out a calender that its not really worth the effort. I assume, that if I were to sit down and load in everything I could think of into a calender and then keep it up to date as new things come up, it would be an extremely powerful tool. This is something I am debating doing as some organization could go a long way in managing my work, school, and home life.

I really like the concept of sticky notes for webpages. However, I do not like traditional sticky notes as after a few days of using them my desk area becomes a mess of colors and notes. I feel that using the sticky notes for websites can be a major help to some people but really does not appeal to me. I find this fact to be rather unfortunate as it sounded like a very good idea.

Probably the coolest feature was the website Remember the Milk. This website is really cool to do list creator that sinks with your smart phone and many other applications such as Googles calender. I downloaded the app on my own phone and found it pretty easy to use and operate. It also allows you to pair your phone with the website allowing you to work offline and back up your to do lists if your away from home and do not have an internet connection. Unfortunately, I find this service much the same as the calenders in that it takes a lot of time to get it set up even when its very easy to use. None the less, I am contemplating using this service day to day.

Thing #15 Wikis

Wikis are a really interesting tool in so many ways. They can be edited by anyone with access to it and depending on the wiki, that can really be anyone in the entire world. The entire idea is fascinating as it gives people who otherwise never would have communicated in any way with each other a chance to work together. I personally had a lot of fun seeing the rather haphazard and crazy sandbox of the APSU 23 things wiki. It reminded me a lot of the Geocities days of the internet as I have mentioned in previous blog posts. I hope my contribution to the sandbox is both comical and helpful for other students. Using a wiki in a classroom seems rather hard to do as it would have to be heavily moderated and as such ruins the spirit of anyone editing the wiki. Of course, one could use a wiki much like what we use for this class to manage documents and assignments but I believe this only works well due to the maturity of college classrooms. I can only imagine the kind of obscene things middle school and high school students would do to a poorly moderated wiki.

Thing #14 Flowcharts and Mind Maps

I absolutely love flowcharts with every aspect of my being. They can be extremely informative, hilarious, absurd, educational, and are almost always fun. I am normally a written and auditory learner and have always learned very poorly visually, but I always learn a lot through flowcharts and mind maps and as such I believe they are a very powerful educational tool. Creating flowcharts is never easier with all of the web based applications out there. I had the best experience using Gliffy, mostly because it just was the easiest to use and was very visually pleasing. However, there are many tools that are just as easy to use and it really just comes down to personal preference. While I think it may be rather complicated and hard for a student to create a flowchart, I can imagine a long term project of sorts to make a flowchart relevant to what is being studied. Of course, using them for a lecture, while challenging, could be an effective way to teach students complex topics.

Mind maps are to me, flowcharts distant sibling. They are an extremely effective way to gather a lot of thoughts and compile and relate them together. I find mind maps most helpful when needing to write papers for most of my classes and they are essential for in class essays. I remember in middle and high school being taught how to use mind maps for various reasons and it is a tool that has stuck with me and as such in my own teaching I plan on teaching students how to use them effectively. This task, is pretty easy now mainly due to the ease of creating a mind map online. I chose to use Bubble.us and found it rather easy to use. While some of the controls took a bit of time to get the hang of, once I had them down it was very easy to create a mind map.

Thing #13 Web-Based Applications

After having spent a fair bit of time exploring Zoho I can say that it is a definitively rich service for the creation of documents and projects. The amount of features that Zoho offers its users for free is rather large, especially when you compare it to its competitor Google Docs. There are so many features offered by Zoho that using it is like learning how to use Microsoft Office all over again. However, I think that this may be an unfortunate problem for Zoho as it has too many features that make learning how to use it not as simple and much more cumbersome. It is though, a very powerful service that probably can not be rivaled by any other document creating software when it is being used by experienced users.

Google Docs, on the other hand is really a foil to Zoho as it is extremely simple. While users who are experienced in Office applications can pick both services up with almost no instruction, Google Docs feels like something you have used before and not foreign like Zoho. While it is not completely void of features, it does pail in comparison to Zoho's features. I rather enjoyed playing with their Microsoft Paint "copy". While I rather enjoy playing around with Zoho's features it feels far to foreign to me and as such I much prefer the simplicity of Google Docs.

The collaborative power of Google Docs has an almost unlimited potential in the classroom especially in the area of group projects and larger assignments. The simple fact that so long as one has a working browser they can edit and collaborate on the document is the single key feature that opens this potential in the classroom. If students were to use Google Docs in the classroom it eliminates the problems of accessibility so that it does not matter what kind of computer they have at home and the student is able to work on the assignment at home with ease. For group projects it allows students that lack transportation but must work together on the project a vehicle to work together. These two things can not be overstated in their importance to classroom activities. In my own teaching experiences I can easily see requiring students to use this service.

Thing #12 Using Googles Vast Resources

For this assignment I chose to use iGoogle and Google Translate. Both of these are amazing tools and I particularly enjoyed using Google Translate. iGoogle is a fun way to in my opinion, build your homepage of the internet. You can set up to see the weather, glimpses into your favorite websites, cool pictures or quotes, pretty much anything you can find on the internet can be added to your iGoogle homepage. Google Translate is an amazing tool to translate pretty much any language into pretty much any other language.

iGoogle could have a place in the classroom, however I find it to much more limited than Google Translate. With iGoogle I could see having a few gadgets on your page maybe from the school, or sources for your subject area to display on the page. With this you may be able to set up some sort of overview of the day for the students on say, an overhead projector. Outside of this, I really see no other application for the classroom.

Google Translate on the other hand, has an almost limitless place in the classroom. Some of the applications that I can see this service being useful for are, but certainly not limited too, accommodations for English as a second language students, translations of primary sources for use in history class rooms, easier communications between students who may speak different languages. Basically in my mind, any time you could (or rather will be) needing to communicate in some way with an individual using a different language, either through reading, writing, or spoken communication, Google Translate will have a place in the classroom.

Included in this post are my new iGoogle homepage that I built featuring my favorite websites, the weather, date and time, and some cool daily images. Also, check out the power of Google Translate. I was able to take the website China News, and translate the entire website into English. This first image is of the website in its original version and the second is the website translated through Google Translate in English.

Thing #11 Searching for RSS Feeds

Searching for RSS feeds and new blogs to read is a pretty interesting experience. There are a multitude of resources available with many websites solely devoted to just that such as Google blogs, Technorati, and Topix. You can also just visit websites that you know and like and look for the RSS icon or something of that nature.
I definitely found that just visiting the websites that I love and partake in everyday to be the easiest and most enjoyable way to look for RSS feeds. However, that can get rather boring when you only look at the same things over and over, and trying to find other sources surges its way into being a priority. I naturally wanted to try Google first and it did not fail me. Being able to search with Google was by far and away the best, least cumbersome, and easiest search tool to use. However, Google only shows you blogs that you know to search for and this in itself is a hampering limitation. Technorati in my opinion became the answer to this problem. From its top 100 blog lists, to its authority ranking system, Technorati is an extremely successful service that makes it easy to find great and enjoyable feeds that are outside of your comfort zone. On the other end of the spectrum would be the unusual and cumbersome service offered by Topix.net. I had a very hard time trying to find anything of interest and found the service that it offered overall as pretty lackluster. Its major flaws are a Google like search engine that is not nearly as effective as well as a oddly designed and hard to navigate layout.

Check out these great feeds and blogs that I found in my searches: Gizmodo, Engadget, Kotaku, Joystiq, TorrentFreak.