Thing 15

Using delicious would have save so much time for Things 13 & 14 and others. I added the photograph to see if I could. Guess what!It was easy. Maybe this Thing needs a new, earlier number? I keep visiting flickr simply to view the photos. I need a vacation on a beach somewhere. But I digress. The main problem with using the tag was to remember which sites I go to frequently. The ones I tagged I do use weekly and this requires some time to remember where & how to navigate to the site. Now I need to think about tagging sites that are a little more entertaining.
As a coordinator for ELAR, I now have the pleasure of a district wiki. I hope to use this new skill of tagging in delicious to link sites for teachers. Too much information and knowledge is available and not enough time to filter through that information and make the connections to the classroom. This new adventure is exciting, but I must confess some fear. Not a large amount of fear about the technology, but fear of not being able to locate the new information.

Thing 14

I "played" before Spring Break, but did not reflect. This meant that I needed to revisit some sites, but this revisit worked to my advantage. Wordle is so much fun. During the break, I played with the site with two granddaughters. Each created a word poster using a homework assignment. (They eventually became excited!!). I created a word poster using the introductory paragraph to the new ELAR TEKS. What popped up was amazing. The most frequently used word was "student" and "reading." I hope to give new teachers a copy in August.
Some of the other sites I need more time and an idea of how to use them. The sandbox wiki will be very helpful.
Another site my two girls enjoyed was Trading Card Maker (from Thing 13). We made character cards for "Sponge Bob" and John Adams (Emily has a report due this week and plans to hand out her cards). The three of us spent several hours on the trading cards. Time flew by and we all had fun learning how to navigate the site.

Thing 13

This was fun!!!! I tried several different sites. Mappr and I did not speak the same language. Mosaic Maker and I did not speak the same language. Trading Card Maker and I finally spoke to each other. The card on the right is the result. This was so easy. The difficult part was uploading the photo from Flickr and then locating it on my computer. Thank you Joel Palmer for your help (multiple mini lessons). The trading cards could be used for vocabulary development. Teachers begin by creating the cards for the whole class, but releases the responsibility to small groups or pairs to create cards for academic language or vocabulary necessary to the meaning of a short story,, poem or novel. The subtitle could be the syllabication. The description box the meanings. The Greek and Latin root/base words would work hear.
Another thought could be to create a card for character(s), setting, mood, tone, etc. Oh, the places students could go.
The photo of William Shakespeare (FotoTrix) is a must. After all, I have spent a few years thinking about this man and his works. Teachers begin with a photo of a character or author with a caption to begin a unit of study. The caption would be a hint of the focus for the unit. Students would be able to create a character map using images with captions to analyze character traits and motivations.
One last time this was fun! This requires limited time (after the search for images and drafting the captions) to create.

Thing 7a

Traveler guided me to OER. The site is massive. A teacher could spend days scanning the variety of lesson plans. After thirty minutes I started using the tags and was able to surf the material quicker. The one lesson that lingered in my imagination was a lesson based on ABC's for a well know fairy tale. Students used the structure of the alphabet to write a 26 sentence retelling using the letters of the alphabet for the first words of the sentence. The goal is for students to develop the skill of sentence variety.
I need to continue practicing adding images to this blog.

Thing 11

The trees are practice. This is a view from my daughter's former backyard. Always made me think of the old poem "Trees" by Joyce which begins "I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree." In the olden days of yore, we had to memorize poetry. Guess some things never go away. Now to Flickr. My topic was places. The places I've traveled and would love to return. This is amazing. Flickr that is. A person could wander within the site for hours. I did notice that the photos with multiple tags appeared over and over. A statement to myself: think before you post a photo of yourself-not everyon shares my humor. I really do not want the universe to question my sanity. Within a classroom, this would be a great tool to locate photos about setting. I discovered that my students had no clue about how dense a forest could be. They could not visualize how Henry Fleming in "Red Badge of Courage" was not able to see the enemy, but could hear fragments of sounds. This is a tool to bring the far away locations into the classroom. Just image how exciting it would be to see ancient Troy, Cyrus, and London. You will notice the picture of Big Ben is not near the bottom (need another lesson) (http://www.flickr.com/photos/weon/3343489097/)
What I am discovering is my navigation skills are limited.