Week 6, #13 Del.icio.us and tagging

This has potential as a research tool; setting it up in advance, using it to guide students to sites you want them to visit; searching for sites related to a subject you are teaching or learning. The "tags", and following their lead, aren't of much interest to me; I think I can tag a site in my own mind and rely on years of other kinds of research to guide my internet searching, though it's interesting to see how, in "tagging", others have used the sites.

Week 5, #10 Image Generators

I looked at a few of these. Nice sites, but I am having trouble getting the image to link
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Made with free image tools @ TXT2PIC.comere from the image generator.

Week 5, #10

Week 5, Thing # 12 Rollyo

I created a searchroll on Anne Tyler, to use with an English class. I hope it works out with them. Again, I see the usefulness of this tool, and again, I wonder how I will ever have the time to set it up for class use!

Week 5, Thing # 11

I looked at Pandora, a site where you create your own "radio station" by entering the name of a song or musician, and have the site generate a playlist of similar songs/artists. You can also set it up by genre. Registration is free, and you can set up scores of "stations" to listen to. I asked a couple of young people to take a look at it , too, and the response was overwhelmingly positive; "I listen to that at work all the time!/ "I love it!"/etc.
It would be a fun project to have students in a foreign language class set up a station related to their language studies, or a cultural activity for "salsa" or "jazz" music--they are broken down even further in those categories. This is a really fun, creative site, and I'm so glad I found it!

Week 3 Thing #7--some technology of interest to me

I learned to use Microsoft Moviemaker by creating a DVD for my parents' 55th anniversary. I matched a musical soundtrack of my own choosing with hundreds of family photos to make a wonderful anniversary surprise. This is a simple program that could be used in classrooms for foreign language travel info, social studies units, English classes, drama, etc.
I had a good time with it, too, during the production and the "premier showing"--not a dry in the house, especially when we laughed at our terrible hair styles through the years.

Week 4, Thing # 8 and # 9- RSS feeds

I set up and account and am now impressed with the information overload I'm laboring under. There's just so much out there of interest, and while RSS is simple and easy to set up, the huge amount of information that I could spend hours sifting through doesn't simplify much for me! There are some great sites of both professional and personal interest that I signed up for, and this is a good tool to know about; I can recommend it to teachers and family but with a warning--exercise with caution!
I found there to be such an ease of use and such a vast number of sites that this quickly becomes too much. I don't want to spend so much time managing and looking at sites and tools.