Thing #23

As a teacher, it is very important to know what you can and cannot use in the classroom. Creative Commons provides an easy way for people to protect their creative or intellectual works while giving the creator the ability to determine how and in what ways their work can be used by others. Creative Commons allows teachers to share their ideas and resources with others while still maintaining their ownership of the material.

The example of attribution on the Learning 2.0-23 Things for Teachers blog is below:

Credits

Learning 2.0 - 23 Things for Teachers is based on Learning 2.0 - 23 Things, a staff development program for the Mesquite Independent School District. That program was based on the Learning 2.0 program that was designed by Helene Blowers and adapted by the California School Library Association and others. Content and style for Learning 2.0 - 23 Things for Teachers has been borrowed and duplicated with permission, under a Creative Commons License.

Thing #22

I thought LiveBinders was a bit confusing to navigate at first, but once I figured out what I was doing, it was not so bad. I can definitely see the usefulness of LiveBinders for teachers and the classroom. LiveBinders provides a way to easily organize and store websites and online resources to use in the classroom. Rather than trying to remember where you found a site, you can save your sites here for future reference. LiveBinder can be used to direct students to specific sites and provide them with easy access to various resources. It is also nice that you can search other people’s binders for resources as well. The three binders I created were:

1)      Social Studies Resources

2)      Lesson Plans

3)      Class Activities

Here is the link to my Social Studies Resources Binder: http://www.livebinders.com/play/play?id=858934

Thing # 21

Make your own slideshow at Animoto.

Using Animoto to make my own video was super easy and fun! It was not hard to do at all. The tutorial video made it very easy. I decided to make a video of some photos from my vacation in Hawaii last summer. What a great and creative way to share photos with your friends and others. I can definitely see myself using this website again. 

Thing #20

While exploring YouTube, I came across a fun channel called “History for Music Lovers”. These teachers rewrite the words to popular songs and create music videos about certain historical events to make teaching history more fun. The video above is about the Trojan War set to the song “Tainted Love.” These videos are very creative and fun and would be great to use in my future classroom.  YouTube is a great site for teachers to utilize. You can find videos relating to just about any topic.

Thing #19

Facebook is really the only social networking site that I am a member of. But this “Thing” has opened my eyes to all the other social networking sites out there. I did join TeacherPop which is a nice site for professional connections and uses. I do use some of the other sites listed on a regular basis such as IMDB to look up movie and entertainment information and Yelp for restaurant reviews. Goodreads also seems like a site I would like to explore further. All of these sites have great uses for your personal life and some of the professional sites such as TeacherPop and Classroom 2.0 would be a great way to make connections and share information with other teachers.

Thing #18

It is important for teachers to understand social networking because it is such a fixed part of our culture and society these days. Everyone is on Facebook or Twitter including the students we will be teaching. Cyber bullying is also an ongoing issue with students today, so teachers need to be able to address that.  Social networking sites can be a great way to communicate with others and share news, information, photos, etc. However, I am not sure of how I would use these sites in my classroom. I suppose I could set up a class Facebook page or Twitter account for easy communication purposes with students and parents, but I don’t think I would use it for anything else because I feel these sites are more for personal use.

Thing #17

I enjoyed exploring Delicious and learning about social bookmarking. I can definitely see the benefits of using a social bookmarking site to save websites rather than just bookmarking sites in your web browser. It provides an easier way to locate saved websites and the tags help keep them organized by category. This is a great resource for teachers to use because the tags allow them to easily find websites related to their subject area and it also is a way to see what other teachers have found and used in their classrooms.