Thing #11

When trying out all of these feed finding things, I found that google blog search was the easiest to use. Just by clicking on a subject on the left hand column, it takes you to a million blogs from which you can choose from. The other sites like topix.net were a little bit more difficult to navigate through. I personally would not take the time to navigate through these if I could easily go through google blog search. There were many unusual feeds on there but there were a few useful ones such as the ones about current events or home and garden tips and things.

When I first began my search for RSS feeds, I just went around to some of my favorite websites to see if they had the little orange symbol, most did not so thing was very helpful in giving me tools to find what I was looking for in a more precise way. I did not have very much luck finding other feeds in different ways just because I didn't really know what I was doing. But not anymore, Thanks Thing #11!

Thing #10

RSS readers were something that I had never heard of until I had to do this blog. I find them to be very handy for people that like to keep up with news or anything of that sort. I found some very interesting blogs to follow, most of them being from the New York Times website. I think that these could be put to good use in order to help students look for current events articles and maybe make a sort of portfolio for them to keep up with what they find. In my personal life, RSS feeds would obviously be very useful in that they would help me keep all of my news feeds in one place.
Teachers could use RSS feeds to help keep track of certain blogs that they would like to show their class by keeping it in one place, making it easier to access quickly. The advantages from RSS feeds I think are more on the personal side of using them rather than using them in the classroom.

 For each of the signs that I created, I used the sign generator, which I have put a link to at the end of this blog. There are many choices on the home page and I personally found it hard to choose from all of them! The process for creating these pictures was really easy. Each generator has a place where you can type in the text that you would like on each of the signs or whatever they may be.
These sign generators could be helpful for creating personalized name tags to put on each students cubby or to make signs out of in order to decorate bulletin boards in the classroom. Some of the signs on this site were very funny, yet not useful, while some of them could be used very creatively and in multiple ways, such as the hollywood star of fame, pictured above.

For this hand one, I thought of using it as a sign for a bulletin board, posting reminders for each and every student in the class.

This one was really just for fun because I love Elvis and would love to visit Las Vegas! But it could be used as a welcome sign into the classroom.









http://www.signgenerator.org/

Thing #8

Using the third party sources to create mashups for this blog was lots of fun! I liked using these because there were many ways to tweak the photos and choose where the photos came from. I connected my Facebook account with the Mosaic Maker and made many creations, one being to the left. This mosaic I made came from one album on my Facebook account. I thought this would be useful in my future for making mashups of pictures to display in my classroom or maybe even my future home. This maker and the others could be very useful in making handouts in the classroom as well. The cite itself was very easy to use, which made this part of the 23 things very enjoyable. I will be keeping this site in mind when doing pictures and other things in my future classroom. : )
Sharing photos online is very helpful in that you can find basically anything you are looking for, for personal use, as long as you give the photographer credit. As many times as I have looked for pretty photos or anything to use, I have never been able to find as much as I found on Flickr. There are many users of Flickr whose galleries are very good and this could also be used as a way to put your name and creative photography out there for the world to see. Photo sharing is beneficial for everyone : )

 In dealing with Flickr, I had lots and lots of trouble. I am not sure if it is because I have a PC or not, but everything I tried to do through this website seemed to mess up on my personal computer. I like the Flickr website itself and like to save my pictures but posting my pictures in my blog was very difficult when I tried to do it the way that it was asking me to do it. Finding pictures on Flickr was not the problem at all, that was very easy. I would like to talk about how easy and fun this activity was, but I can't do that. The only way I would try this again would be to use a Mac, maybe it would be easier that way. I figured out how to save the image to my computer and put it in my blog but fighting with my computer to grab the link was getting exhausting. This would not be something I would try to do again. :)















http://www.flickr.com/photos/cubagallery/5415577354/#/photos/cubagallery/5415577354/lightbox/
"Clouds" CubaGallery. 4 Feb. 2011. 1 March 2011.
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/cubagallery/5415577354/>

Thing #4

• Commenting on others' blogs can be impportant for validating what we are doing as students. We are trying to learn about technology and come up with ways to make it fit and make it useful in the classroom. Interaction is key in the classroom and if we can find ways to keep students engaged with eachother outside of class, that's even better. 
• I found the article "How to comment like a king! (or queen) to be very helpful and detailed. I like the idea of joining a site like co comment to follow all of the comments that you get as well as the ones that others post on your blog. The article about blogging etiquette was interesting to read and made me aware of certain things I could do to provoke more attention to my blog and how to respond to others' comments tactfully and punctually. 
• I am currently following Equinelvr (Lbarth), Jessica Daigle, Jodi Trog, Han Solo and CdeBaca, JPertl, and Raquel  Watters. I chose these because their posts were interesting to me and some of them I know personally from previous classes. Other blogs that I am following include Blogger Buzz and Learning to Blog and Blogging to Learn. I chose to follow these in an effort to help me with my efforts in blogging. 
• I mostly made comments on people's blogs that I related with. I enjoyed reading others' experiences about creating the blogs, they were funny and made me feel like I was not the only one that was over whelmed.

Thing #6

I chose to explore Last.fm. This site is so convenient! I love the way that you just type in your favorite artists and then it finds similar music. Signing up is free for this site and that makes it even simpler. I think I would use this site a lot personally, but maybe not too much in my classroom since I will be an English teacher. I believe this site would be good for music teachers to help their students explore different genres of music. This website has charts of music that you can explore including the top bands of today and the top songs of today. This site would be great for listening to the radio but personalizing it (with less commercials!) When you click on a band's name it quickly comes up with a bigography of the band, pictures, videos and much more. This could be helpful if researching a band for music class. I did not have any complications with this website and find it very easy and fun to use!
 
LINK!