Ning was so big that it was almost too big for me and when I did find a group that I thought I might enjoy, there really wasn’t anything there yet (or maybe only one member). I know that the groups have to start somewhere so I will definitely check back and see how it is progressing and I might eventually join in for the ride.

I liked the “gadgets” in Ning in Education and I also enjoyed looking at some of the forums. When I tried to search the videos there wasn’t much there for me to use with my particular search but I did see some lovely vacation pictures of the other members.

Classroom 2.0 had a wiki section that I liked and I found some things there that I could use with my own digital citizenship search. I think that this site could be useful in a lot of ways for professional development as well as professional collaboration with ideas and best practices. The video section was also easy to browse through and I found a few things there that interested me as well.

I know I’ve got to become more “clickable” and join more social networking sites. I’m beginning to learn the balance of “reading” vs. “skimming” for information but I also have to protect my time (I could spend HOURS on this stuff). I appreciate the opportunity to explore some of these networks with some direction rather than just floundering in the dark for good groups to visit. There is so much out there that it seems a waste not to learn more. My plan is to try to get a buddy to do it with me (maybe carve out some time for a cup a coffee once a week while we scan the cyber world) and maybe that will keep me charged to do some more exploring.

For students, I think that they would enjoy and find this tool useful. I teach 6th grade and many of them don’t belong to social networking sites yet (although this is changing) and this might be a way for them to have a way to personalize a page without belonging to a networking site. For the classroom, students could contribute to a class page themselves or just go to a teacher created page and review posted class information, see class assignments, use the calendar to see what is due when, or check out web sites/RSS feeds/podcasts that that the teacher thinks are important.

Professionally, I see our English department using this as a tool for contributing professional ideas to share with each others. It could be accessed by all of our department and folks could add things to share with the group. We could also use the calendar for upcoming meetings and dates of relevance to our department.

Even though it is a good tool, I must say that I probably won’t use it. Our school has a very good technology network and I think that a lot of what pageflakes can do, we are already doing. I’m thankful to have such a good tech program already in place.

The document portion really just works like a word document with a few extra features. My doc looks like a circus page because I tried to use different things (and yes, I put in that same old picture of me). I tried to upload another picture but it was too big and I just didn’t have time to adjust it right now.

I really don’t work with spreadsheets a lot but I did look at the presentation feature. To me it was similar to power point and I think would be easy to use. I still had trouble with the pictures but I’m sure with a little more work/time I could figure out how to make that go a little more smoothly.

If you were doing a presentation together it would be a GREAT way to collaborate. As teachers we could create classroom/school rules to share and post on a school web. We could also create expectations for collaborative projects that we assign in class and then they may be viewed later online for student use.

I think students could really use this a lot. It would be a great way for them to work on a presentation together but not necessarily have to be in the same room or working on it at the same time. I had trouble this year with kids creating something on one computer at our school that was a little older and then trying to present it on another computer (or even one from home) and then it wouldn’t work when they were trying to present. This would eliminate that problem.

In my recent searches I was looking for information on how to teach students good digital citizenship. One particular topic was about posting personal online. See this YouTube video about “Amanda the Babysitter” and how posting her personal video online came back to haunt her… The video was originated at ConnectSafely.com.

Feel free to take a look at my wiki page (a work in progress) that we hope to use with our MS students this year in Advisement.

As far as making my own videos this year… I’m not sure I can tackle that (but you never know). I do hope to use some slide shows and some of the other tools that we’ve learned in this course but I may save video for another time. I’ve learned that I can’t take on more than I can chew at a time (unless I go in knowing that I can spit it back out – ha) so for now, creating a video is on hold for me.

This was really easy. I had a headset at home and I just signed up, plugged in the headset and “presto” here it is. The Jing from Shelley was helpful for putting it into the blog (I’ve learned to quickly look at those because some of these tools are not as intuitive as you think they are going to be…). I hope I can make time this year to use this because I think it would be a lot of fun and useful.

I don’t currently use podcasts in my class but since I have discovered how to use them I know I will tap into this source this school year.  I look forward to finding author websites who use podcast so I can bring the authors “into” the classroom to my students.

For my students… I think that we might get something out of the group discussions and they could even start their own group about a book that we are reading (or on their own personal reading selection).  That would be an interesting twist but I think I could accomplish a similar thing using a wiki or a blog.  I’ll have to explore it a little further.  It seems to have potential but I haven’t put my finger on just how I would use it…