I could see where students would love to do this. I thought it was very easy to do and I liked the fact that to change a letter I just had to click on the letter.
My daughter loves to play on the computer. My mother is afraid to try anything on the computer. I thought this would be appropriate for my mom 
I did this on Big Huge Labs and it was very easy to do. I also think that my students would be able to use this website.
As I am doing this post I am thinking about my parents that are landing in Honolulu (their plane landed 2 minutes ago!). I am a little jealous that they are going to be in a warm place for the next 2 weeks. My brother has been stationed in Pearl Harbor for the past year and this is their first trip out there. We are hoping to get out there before he leaves.
I have mentioned before that my husband is a photographer so I am very familiar with Flickr. I started by going to Explore, which is the most popular pictures of the day. The issue I was finding was all of the pictures were all rights reserved. I then did a search for Pearl Harbor, Waikiki and Honolulu (in honor of my parents getting there today) and most of what I found was all rights reserved as well. This is one picture I found that was some rights reserved.
This is a picture that reminds me of the trip I took to Hawaii when I was in college. One night we went up a mountain to see the view of the city. This looks very similar to where we were.
I am not exactly sure how to cite the picture, but this is a link that was on the page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/christopherdale/56044609
I love Picnik!!!!! I have played around with it a couple times before and I think it is so much fun. It is hard to see all the Premium features that are not available without paying. I am wondering if this is something that I would use enough in a year to justify the cost. I have a family blog that would be fun to play with pictures and add text to pictures for. As I was looking for pictures to upload I went right to my husbands flickr page. That was probably a mistake because he already has a border on all of his pictures and he has his own programs where he plays with the colors to make them the way he thinks they look best.
This is a picture of my daughter at a dress rehersal for a fashion show she did at the Bob. It was a benefit for DeVos Children's Hospital. It was a fun night!
I love this picture of my girls! I am very lucky to have a very talented photographer for a husband. I like the red matte and black frame, I think it goes well with the coats the girls are wearing.
This is a picture of my 16 month old daughter, Molly. I didn't do anything more than add her name to the picture.
I have thought about how I would use Picnik in a classroom setting and I think the students would love to ‘play’ with something like this. At the end of the year I do a PhotoStory project with a third grade class and it would be nice for the students to add fun captions and stamps on some of the pictures. I would also love it if I could have students take pictures of assemblies/events around the school. They could use a program like Picnik to edit the pictures. I think the program is fairly user friendly and with a brief introduction I think my second and third grade students could use it. The one downside of the program is with the free version one can only have 5 pictures on at a time. I saved the pictures to my computer though and students could do the same on their computer. Very good website!
So, I watched the first video and thought this was going to be very easy and I tried to subscribe to a couple blogs, but it didn’t work. Go figure. I went back then and watched the second video and saw how to do it manually and that worked great. I added all of my feeds that way, but I plan to continue to look for websites with the subscribe button to try it that way as well.
I tried to go to the syndic8.com, but it was really slow and couldn’t get it to work. I will have to try that another day.
My bloglines account can be found here.
Once I got started with Bloglines I found it very easy to set up. I really like the videos explaining how to set it up, they make things very easy. I have several friends personal blogs and Flickr pages that I follow on a daily basis and have them marked in my favorites. While it is not difficult for me to go from one to the other it will make it much easier to go to one place to see all the updates that have been made for the day. Very nice
After watching the videos I thought it would be really easy to set up a Delicious account, and it should have been. I guess I was making it more difficult than it needed to be. I just didn’t want to have an email and account with Yahoo, but I guess that is what had to be done to set it up. Thanks Kelly for helping me out! Once I got my account set up it was very easy to add websites to my account. I did a search and was looking through some other websites relating to elementary technology, it was fun to find some new websites. I only have a couple websites up right now, but I can tell that this is something that I will really like and be able to use to keep track of all the websites I use and those that I always intend to use, but forget about
I like the idea of tagging, but it is important as they are being set up to create tags that are personally relevant and helpful and will not make it more difficult to locate the website or information in the future. I will often put websites in my favorites on one computer, but when I need to find it I seem to always be on a different computer. I am curious to see how the Delicious account works as I have heard others talking about it. My husband uses tags to keep track of all the pictures he has taken in the past couple of years. He has learned a lot about tagging as some of the earlier pictures he was not as specific with his tags and he has difficulty locating pictures. I know he is able to add/change tags if he finds words to describe that are easier for him to locate and I think that Delicious works in the same way. I guess I will find this out…
It was interesting to read the articles describing comments and what is and is not appropriate as a comment. I know so many people (myself included) get very casual with comments left on personal blogs or websites such as facebook.
I have taken 2 online courses through Grand Valley. One course had everything done on Blackboard, the other was a Ning our prof created for that class. It was very difficult for me to get used to leaving comments for everyone to read and I often think about every word that I am writing to make sure it all makes sense and says what I want it to say without saying too much. A major part of being a part of an online community is the comments and discussion that takes place as a result of a posting or other comments. It is important to leave comments for others in the community as well as keep up on reading the comments because there is a lot that can be learned from others.
I already had a Google account set up, but honestly it has been so long since I have used it I had to reset my password because I forgot it. I really like the idea of the Google docs and the first thing I thought I could use this on is the recipe books that I am working on with my third grade students. I thought this would be perfect because I could have them work on these at home using Google docs. Reality set in though when I realized that they needed to have an email address so this would not work. Bummer. I am going to try to use this more though because I find myself emailing documents between places and this would make life so much easier.
We have a summer cottage that we share with several families and using something like a Google doc (or a wiki) we could communiticate better about who is going to be there what weeks during the summer and what needs to be bought before the next person visits. We have been looking for something like this, now we just need summer to get here so we can try this out.
As far as Google Maps go, my first thought was what makes this different than Google Earth. Google Earth is more set by pictures that people take. I have looked up my street before on Google maps and it is pretty interesting that there are no houses on our street. Our houses are around 10 years old. Once I went to the street view though all the houses were there. It also included the car parked in my neighbors driveway. It almost seems like it is giving too much information, but I will have to play with it more to see what else it is capable of.
I have thought about using Google Earth and now I can use Google map as well when I work on community. It was very interesting to me to see how big Wolf Lake really is when I looked at it on the map. The school is right around the corner from it yet I have really not even been by it. I think the students would have fun looking at pictures of the school community.
Since my husband always takes all of our pictures every family picture is posed. I wanted to have a candid shot so we had some fun one day while raking leaves.
Brian couldn’t resist these pictures of the girls! You just have to love the beautiful fall weather we have had this year.
This week has been crazy at our house with both girls getting pink eye. Thankfully Brian has been able to do some work at home. He left his computer for a minute and came back to find Molly ‘working’ at his computer. Of course the camera was ready for another picture!
I am always looking for new educational websites to use in the lab. I have one that I have used as a resource since I started in the lab. She changes her website every month to match the themes or holidays within the month. The website is www.computerlabkids.com . Mrs. Cannon is the teacher behind the website and I have emailed her with questions I have had and she is very quick with her responses. Even if you are not a computer teacher she has tons of resources on this website. Check it out!
