JNiles' Blog

It seems that with all the use of technology it is very confusing to provide proper citation for all the various forms of media that people want to include within a new piece of work. I have found information that I would have liked to use but really couldn’t properly cite it and therefore did not include it in my work.

Our district has enforced a strict policy of copying copyrighted material for use within the classroom. If the page has a copyright logo on it we must also submit the permission to copy for classroom use notice when we send items to our copy center. This has presented a problem for many teachers who had pulled together many resources from older curricular material and no longer have the right to copy notice from the beginning pages of a workbook or supplemental materials.

I never realized that new laws now protect our work automatically and basically every thing we do is copyrighted. I never paid much attention to the CC logo on websites because I always have chosen sites that offer free use of classroom materials. It has been very useful to find sites that allow the use of  materials that also have a disclaimer that allows a teacher to make copies for use within a classroom.

Creative Commons is an excellent way to find and share media. It was interesting to find out that by using CC’s search engine you are linked to a number of search engines but the results are filtered to only include CC items. I have used very little media in creating specific lessons for classroom use. However, I use Discovery (United Streaming) very often for science and social studies. I guess I only use media that is available and suitable for my second graders to view or listen to, but do not include it into my own work. I never thought about violating copyright laws if material is already posted to the web. If material is already posted is it always OK to view it or listen to it? Is it only a problem when it is incorporated into another form of the work? I assume this is where CC would be very helpful in finding work that can be used/included within a new piece of work.

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I add trouble with the EPN site. I could find podcasts that looked interesting but could not open them to listen. I got messages that they couldn’t be opened on my computer. Then I restarted my computer to try again to listen to some of the elementary grade podcasts and the page wouldn’t even load.

I did better working with Podcast Alley.  However, to be honest, just listening to a podcast while sitting at my computer is not very interesting to me. I know I’m a visual learner so I must need more to look at while I’m listening.

I surprised myself by downloading itunes to my computer and actually getting it to work! LOL! I don’t have an ipod or mp3 player so I never realized the various types of media offered by itunes. It’s great on itunes that you can watch many shows and find so much music.

There are great options for children’s music and I found songs that could be used in a classroom. It was easy to search within a category and many choices were offered. (I tried Thanksgiving.)
Well I’m off to explore itunes. I’m wondering if the TV shows can be downloaded to a flash drive? or can they only be played on itunes?

P.S. For those of you who may be wondering why I am working so much on this class I have 3 reasons. My husband is deer hunting, I do not want to do class work during my school breaks and Comcast recently deleted many of the channels I could watch on TV. After 7 years of receiving basic cable I was told they did a “Line tap” and discovered we were getting extra channels. Does anyone know if this is legal? Now Comcast wants an increase of over 300% to restore (upgrade) my package to the channels I was watching.

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The exploration of podcasts led to a number of thoughts. The ability to download to an ipod would be very useful as a study tool for older students. Personally I think I prefer the concept of a vodcast (podcast with video) or a slide show to keep my attention.

I checked out a recommended site called First Book and found it relevant to teaching reading. The author interviews provide interesting insights into the stories written by specific authors.

For my classroom I could use Storynory to help students develop imagine skills and listening comprehension. There is a category called Junior Authors which offers audio stories that are suitable for elementary grades.

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I used widgets to add a calendar, an archive browser, recent comments and RSS feed. It was quite easy to use within my own blogs. Some were not available and they just didn’t work, but I did find ones that I thought would be useful. I like the calendar feature.

I wanted to add a counter. My friend Kelly added one to my school blog very quickly. However, I tried to complete this task and was not successful. I don’t know where to or how to use the following directions from the easy counter site.

Paste the HTML code  into your homepage to activate your hit counter. Put this in a “text” widgwt so you have to add a text widget and then pste your code into it. Thanks Kelly!

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I made this using Big Huge Labs which is advertised as a Flickr toy. What a toy, I was up so late last night playing with it. Finally, I went to bed because my eyes hurt!

There are so many “things” to do using this site. I checked out the Badge Maker, Mosaic Maker, Pop Art, Magazine Cover and Photo Booth.  It was great fun to play with the badge maker and it was easy to use. The image of my sister and I was easy to upload into the activity. I made a few different badges before I liked one. If you try the “styles” option it lets you change the title of your badge, which was a feature I looked for after exploring.

I tried the Spell with Flickr link and had fun creating word art, however when it came to applying it I was frustrated with my lack of tech knowledge. I quit before I even tried to apply the spelled images to this post. When I see the words Javascript and HTML I’m done. Especially when directions say to change a part of the HTML. I can’t even remember what HTML stands for.  In my experience it means, “Huge Trouble More Later” if I try to do anything.  The Flickr Montager was the only application that I didn’t know what I would do with after it was done. There was a link to e-mail it, but it seems that a mosiac image would be hard to download in an e-mail.

I believe the use of Mash-ups and Image Generators would be only limited by a lack of tech knowledge (Me) and imagination. For my classroom (2nd grade) we could do many activities with these applications. The badges could be used at the beginning of school to note useful information, bus #, teacher, room #, etc. A safety feature could be the use of a student picture without using a name on the badge. The magazine cover could be used as the cover for a class book or research reports. Posters could be made for many reasons, poetry, procedures, rules, etc.

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Beauty by Nosha

This photo (found on Flickr) was taken south of Cancun Mexico near a small town called Akumal. It is about 2 hours south of the airport. The snorkeling here is beautiful. I chose this image because it reminded me of my summer vacation. During this trip I did my first scuba dive and was thrilled to see a school of tarpon, a barracuda, a sea turtle and many tropical fish. The sea turtle image was the same type of turtle I saw. As you can see in the photo, the photographer captured a very clear underwater close-up.

I really enjoyed the work of ironworker63 and the work posted under a search for “Grand Sirenis Riviera Maya Mexico”. This photographer had stunning work of the resort where we stayed. The work was copyrighted and not shared under the Creative Commons license. It is worth a look if you enjoy a Caribbean Theme.

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I am somewhat confused about how the  RSS feeds work and why they are  not always available on sites that have blogs.  For example, on our Oakridge web site we can access a blog set up by our principal but there was not a RSS feed available. Is this because it is a non-public part of the web site? Teachers have to sign in to participate in the blog.

I found some interesting sites just  by searching for popular blog sites, there was information available on the 25 Most Popular Blogs of 2009. It was surprising that some of these sites did not appear to have that many subscribers to the information. Some of the best sites are already located on Bloglines and you can easily add them to your feeds. However, I don’t think I put some of my choices in the folders correctly but I can still find the feeds. Is a feed the same as a link? I’m getting confused about some of the tech jargon!

I found that it was easiest to copy and paste the URL. I could select a folder for these feeds. When I selected a recomendation from the Bloglines lists, I didn’t know how to select a folder to put it in. I did find some interesting sites but they did not have an RSS feed and could be bookmarked instead. They seemed like they were interactive but must not have been. There are many blogs out there and it was hard to determine which ones are of a high quality.

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So much has changed in 4 generations!

Registering on Bloglines did not cause me any problems and I do not consider myself to be very knowledgeable in the area of computer technology. My son and daughter still laugh and shake their heads at me if I ask them questions that are considered “common knowledge” about using the Internet. I toggled back and forth between the direction videos and Bloglines, along with taking a few quick notes and the process went very smoothly.

I agree that it is so easy to be overwhelmed with information and the need to quickly find accurate data that is needed. I absolutely hate wasting my time searching for information and never quite finding exactly what I am looking for. Also, in the past I have found sites that I really found useful, forgot to bookmark them and never could find them again. With Bloglines and Social Bookmarking, I am hopeful that the compilation of data will be much easier to access.

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After I previewed the Delicious site, I didn’t have any trouble creating my account. I have a Yahoo email account so signing in to use Delicious was simple. The process of copying and pasting URLs went very smoothly. I’ll have to practice with my tags, I’m not sure yet if my keywords were the best choices. It will be most beneficial for me to bookmark sites that I use almost everyday. All of my bookmarks are related to work and will be easily accessed.

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Within a learning/working  community tagging appears to be an efficient way to find, save and share valuable information already preserved in easy to use links. For example, our lower elementary teachers could share favorite sites and links by tagging this information into subject area groups. I could see the value in setting up an account of social bookmarking where the various genres of reading could each be tagged and easily located. Of course, within the realm of bookmarking ad tagging, the variety of information that could be useful within a working group could be almost endless.

I perceive the use of tagging advantageous for many reasons. Different forms of information and media can be gathered into one location to share, users would be exposed to new sites that they may have never thought of or discovered on their own and the information could also evolve to include new data. The use of this type of data retrieval system would also save so much time!

The only disadvantage, in my opinion, would be trying to weed out unwanted sites because someone used  poor keywords which would cause a user the task of having to sort through unwanted data.

For social bookmarking and tagging to be efficient, the data shared must be readily available to peers and colleagues who are in need of the same information. Groups must communicate where to find the stored information, how to productively add to the data and how to effectively keep the data updated. Users must plan ahead on which bookmarking system to use and how to tag these bookmarks with keywords that fit the needs of the group.

Since users set-up their own accounts on an individual basis, is it possible for a group of workers to set-up one account that is usable and accessible by each member?

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