Pasha Bulka part 2...

... and this is another!

transforming the Pasha Bulka

Some novel ways to move the stranded Pasha Bulka have appeared on YouTube. This is one of them...

finding friends!

I discovered and soon after joined a neat little (well, it's not so little actually!) community on the net... called facebook. It's very user-friendly (especially for floaty users such as myself!) and has an incredible array of different features. So far I've linked up with a few friends from teaching and elsewhere, put up some photos of the kids (organised into albums - very neat!) and joined a few discussion groups (yummy mummies and domestic godesses - definately one for me! as well as a few other more 'academic' ones that are relevant to teaching and learning) and have been looking for other interesting discussion groups to join. It seems like a great way to keep in touch and share info with friends and find new ones with similar interests.
So... this is me on facebook!

readers and feeders

After having a look at the second part of this activity, I was a bit stumped...

"Now that you have a newsreader (your Google Reader account), you can begin adding other newsfeeds that interest you."

Ok... so this may seem like a silly thing to say but - I wasn't sure exactly what it was that I should be looking for - what interests me? Lots of things... what interests me that I'd like to have some sort of regular newsfeed giving me up-to-the-minute info? Not sure...

My time is limited - I get very little time in the day to just sit, let alone sit at a computer, so having specific newsfeeds should save me lots of time sifting through the HUGE amounts of info that is out there in its various forms. I have a few 'teaching and learning' blogs that I subscribe to (as well as a really neat recipe blog) but to be honest, there's just so much out there on so many different topics that it's difficult to sift through it all and find things that are really worthwhile subscibing to. I also found navagating through some of the search tools either difficult to use or just came back with so much that finding things that were useful was difficult.

Perhaps if I had more time to spend looking through it all I might find more but at present I think I'll just stick to my 'easy option' when it comes to finding interesting blogs etc - see what others recommend as being useful!

There's still something to be said for 'word of mouth'...

my little digital native

Where in the world... ?

I just worked out how to add one of those neat little maps to my blog! I also put one on my other blog as well - not sure if there's going to be too many visitors but... who knows?
p.s. I still haven't found my walkman... but have been enjoying listening to the new Missy Higgins album (amongst other things) on my new mp3 player :-)

Feeling clever...

Ok, I'm having a go at the first part of the RSS activity... as I'm typing this!

A few things I've noticed before I started this activity...

First, I'd used a "feeds" thingo (groovy-looking little orange button) before in Internet Explorer (I've somehow managed to get a new version of Internet Explorer which is a pain in the neck to use!) which I haven't found all that useful. It takes a bit of 'getting to' to see if anything new has arrived on any of the sites I've subscribed to through it.. so I'm going to stop using it and am hoping the Google reader one will be better - so far so good!

I had a look at the youtube video of 'how to use Google reader'.... it was ok for the first few minutes but then I started to get a bit lost with it all - there's lots to take in from a 9 minute video! I found I had to go back and look at parts of it again to get a quick refresher on how to do different things but it gives a good explanation.

I've also 'subscribed' to the other blogs from Learning 2.0 as well as a few others (not all that hard to do) and was a little concerned that it showed all previous posts as being 'unread' and so Google reader saw them as new content. I thought I'd have to 'look at' them all again but noticed the 'mark all items as read' button... what a nifty idea that is! :-)

I've also started a shared items page... there's not much there at the moment (Kendall Kids posts are just there as a test! The fact that the one post featuring "Uncle Robert" is on there is pure coincidence) but hopefully there will be in the future.

And... ta dah!!! I figured out how to put my shared items on my blog! It doesn't link directly to the shared items page of Google reader but instead takes you to the original blog. It's still kinda neat, though. Feeling very clever indeed! :-)