My newest friends are Blog friends!

Ok, so I'm a little 'off task'... again... but I'm up to date with the Learning 2.0 activities (well, almost).

One of the aspects of Facebook that kind of annoys me a little are the applications or at least the number of applications out there. Why? Well, it seems that almost everyone I know on Facebook loves to install a myriad of applications on their profile page, which is great - for them... but they seem to feel the need to 'invite' others (i.e. me) to get these applications too. Now I know there are some fantastic applications there (who doesn't love a good game of scrabble??), some of which I've installed and use quite regularly, but there are others that maybe just harmless fun but to me just seem to be clutter and, logging onto Facebook and seeing about 20 invitations to everything from aquariums to hot potatoes to fish tanks to movie trivia to superlatives (phew!) gets a bit tiresome!
Having said that, I did, however, find one application today that I think is fantastic - blog friends! It allows you to link your own blogs as well as the blogs from your friends (and their friends!) to your Facebook profile. The blogs appear according to your 'interests' that contain a series of keywords. Anyway, I discovered some excellent edubloggers through my newly formed connections and have been enjoying having a read of them. Might have to subscribe to some of their blogs also!
Take a look sometime!
p.s. yes - I did send out invites to some of my friends to join blog friends... but only to people I thought would use it!

"will we wiki?"

This was a question I posed to my family via email about six months ago when I first heard/saw what wikis were about. I thought it would be a great way for us (my 10 siblings and myself who live in various locations around the state!) to keep in touch, share pictures/stories, plan family get-togethers etc. The result can be found here (yes, I use pbwiki too!). It's still very much a 'work in progress' (but I doubt that a wiki is every really 'finished'... is it??). So far we've used it to share photos of our kids as well as jokes and there's even a recipe page (you HAVE to try my sister's Toblerone slice - it's AMAZING!!!). I set up the sidebar with some instructions for those less 'techno-savvy' than myself (ha ha... right...) so they could add pages etc. themselves without too much trouble. In the future, there's the hope that our kids (some are primary and high school age) will be able to have their own pages and put up some of their work from school or just about anything else they want to share with their cousins etc. We're also hoping to have an annual 'get-together' which we may use a page on the wiki to plan - anyone can add comments or ideas on where we can go etc. We'll see where it goes in the future...

Anyway, having had some experience of setting up a wiki for personal use, I had a look at the ones listed in the Learning 2.0 activity and saw some uses there I'd not considered (i.e. 'choose your own adventure' story - interesting!). Something else that also became very clear to me was the importance of making the wiki 'look good' (so, yes, I thought I'd better go back to my family wiki and improve the look of it!). The Room 15 wiki, for example, was much easier to look through than the others and also had some interesting pages in there (there's even one for teachers!).

I can see wikis being very useful for students to publish their work in many different ways (i.e. text on a page or podcasting etc) and it also has the benefit of keeping it organised. I recall many occasions, teaching Studies of Religion and having the students work on groups to research part of a topic and then 'report back' to the rest of the class. This also involved getting copious copies of notes etc for the other groups in the class and general required huge amounts of time (which we didn't have!). Having the students do something similar in a wiki would be a fantastic way to save time as well as make the work accessible for other students as well. It is also accessible to anyone who has the internet at home (that would be most students these days? Or is that too big an assumption to make??). Another use could also be for groups within the school (i.e. St Vincent de Paul or Student Representative Council) to report on or give information about events or other things they were doing.... the possibilities are endless! And just makes me wish I could get back into it all sooner....

Off task?

Sorry if this is a little off task but...
I discovered how to make this really neat slideshow thing from a friend on Facebook and then worked out how to put it on my blog!
More pics of my kids - that's about all I take photos of these days!
I'll get back onto Learning 2.0 soon.... I promise!
If you'd like to have a go at it yourself, you can find it here.

Fav.or.it

Like lots of people I tend to get a bit behind on looking at Google Reader and keeping track of all the blogs I subscribe to. Today, however, I noticed one of the blogs mentioned a new RSS reader that was going to be available soon, called fav.or.it. I haven't had a chance to really have a good look at it yet but it looks like it will have some interesting features...

"fav.or.it is our answer to the current separation of feed reading and commenting. We have built a web interface that lets you read all your favorite content and at the same time take part in an interactive community." (click here to see more)

Yum!

I've been using del.icio.us for a while and have found it to be quite useful. I must admit, however, that so far I've set it up and only added a few different things to it that are of interest to me. I know it's easy to just 'tag' different websites as you're looking at them and save them to del.icio.us but... most of the time I forget to do it! This means if I want to go back to that page later I need to go searching for it again...
Like lots of Learning 2.0 tools, I can easily see the benefit of using this for teaching - huge potential! But for now I guess I'll just keep adding tags slowley as they become useful to me.

Rolling around...

Just had a quick look at Rollyo and wish I'd had access to this a few years ago while teaching Studies of Religion! For me, that was the most obvious use this tool would have - senior kids doing research etc - it would make it so much easier (for me and them!). There was always the problem of students accessing information from sites that weren't very reliable. The students do need to learn to recognise the difference between reliable and unreliable sources on the net, however I think there would be times when it would be useful to 'restrict' their searching rather than have them search for something very general using Google, for example, and have it return thousands of results that may or may not be from sites that are useful. It would save lots of time!

There's probably lots of other things I could use it for too - I think it's good to be aware of these tools for future reference - Ali might like to do a search of Wiggles colouring-in pages on some of her favorite sites! :-)

I quickly put together a search roll on Christian beliefs that might be something Studies of Religion kids would use (but I'm not sure if that link is going to work). It's pretty basic and something I'd probably have to do a bit more work on and add more to but... it's a start, I guess.

Dance!

I had a look at some of the image generators (actually, I managed to waste heaps of time looking at them! There are so many...) and found one that I thought was rather neat and something I know some senior kids I use to teach would have had fun with. It's a generator for making motivational posters so here's one I made with one of my favorite quotes...

I can see this poster appearing on the wall of my classroom in the future :-)

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/motivator.php