From Wikipedia on Web 2.0 definition:
"Web 2.0 encapsulates the idea of the proliferation of interconnectivity and interactivity of web-delivered content. "
"Tim O'Reilly (founder of O'Reilly Media) states Web 2.0 is a set of economic, social, and technology trends that collectively form the basis for the next generation of the Internet—a more mature, distinctive medium characterized by user participation, openness, and network effects. (O'Reilly Radar,Principles and Best Practices, 2007)"
"More than just the latest technology buzzword, it’s a transformative force that’s propelling companies across all industries toward a new way of doing business. "
35 years ago I heard the first rumblings of the 'internet'. I worked for Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, a subsidiary of American Telephone and Telegraph, and we were using a modem to connect from San Jose, California to the Bell Labs in New Jersey. It was one of those monster couplers where you push the receiver of the phone into the two receptacles to carry the signal over the phone lines.
At that time you had to have specific locations to navigate towards - you had to know where you were going ahead of time - no searching to see what's out there. The scientific community, especially in academic realm, was using the internet, but they knew each other's addresses and they were in url format. Take a look at a url after you have navigated through a few pages and you will see it's not something you want to remember!! Without the concepts of web 2.0 we wouldn't be able to use the web the way we do today. Imagine me telling you to remember this site to see the poster of Buddy in a previous blog: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aluckygirlproduction/3444443233/
who wants to remember all those numbers and letters??? and that's just one picture.
So I am grateful for the point and click convenience of web 2.0.
More on the web page I chose to investigate later. No surprise on the site though - it's I'm Cooked - a funny, funky little site where wanna be top chefs upload their own cooking demonstration videos. Honestly - you may want to bookmark this page - I think I'll try to put something up. Let's see if Jill beats me to it!
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Week 5, Thing #9 Education Feeds
I checked out the Technorati blog accumulation site. It's huge - the demographic breakdown of bloggers was interesting though. To tell the truth - I didn't find anything related to education, most of the suggested sites were either down and non-functional, or had info that you can get on aol or msn.com. And I find aol and msn.com to be much easier to navigate for the latest news and such. There was a fun little item on Topix.net - this links you to news feeds in your area - and there is a great job listing for someone to do tech writing/blogging/web feeding for the Murphy Goode winery - $10,000 a month!!!!! yes, 10,000 a month! they must be having some good sales over there. The job is only for 6 months, but hey! if you can write and love playing around with facebook, twitter and all the other social networking sites, go for it!
so all in all, my jury is out on educational rss feeds. I will keep you posted on what I discover as we go. That's it for thing #9.
Classroom 2.0: the 23 things
so all in all, my jury is out on educational rss feeds. I will keep you posted on what I discover as we go. That's it for thing #9.
Classroom 2.0: the 23 things
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Trading Cards
This is a great way to present research on mathematicians and the history of math. This is another Big Huge Labs application.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Monday, April 20, 2009
Week 4, Thing #8 RSS feeds
So I have subscribed to a bunch of feeds, including locating blogs of a few friends, a few random cooking blogs, a few links to npr programming - my favorite is the soapbox blog with Scott Simon on Weekend Edition, Saturday. I used the Google Reader and right now my feeds seem awfully cluttered, and not so accessible. I looked at the Bloglines website as well, and it seems to be very similar to Google Reader. The advantage to me for Google is that I have an email account with google already, so I can get to email and my reader at the same time. I wonder when aol will start putting this together with their service (yesterday?? - am I behind here??)
I'm not sure how often I'll be reading these - this little box already sucks up significant amounts of my time! And I guess I have been subscribing to a education news feed for a few years now, under the auspices of ACSD. And those are stacking up in my school email account. But if you're interested in signing up, here's the link.
On to thing #9, Education feeds!!
Classroom Learning 2.0 - 23 Things
I'm not sure how often I'll be reading these - this little box already sucks up significant amounts of my time! And I guess I have been subscribing to a education news feed for a few years now, under the auspices of ACSD. And those are stacking up in my school email account. But if you're interested in signing up, here's the link.
On to thing #9, Education feeds!!
Classroom Learning 2.0 - 23 Things
Week 3, Thing #7 Technology
This 'thing' is to report out on technology - very open-ended, hard to know where to go, but I have so many irons in my life fire and technology is definitely a part of it. So I checked out Cafe Press.
I do audio production work for Jackie Baldwin, the host of Storylover's World on KSVY 91.3, Sonoma. She has a wonderful web site, Story-lover's World, with information about stories and folk tales from all over the world. Jackie has done a tremendous amount of work to make her website accessible and useful to storytellers, librarians, and especially teachers. And in her work, she has uncovered hundreds of wonderful, old, out-of-copyright pieces of artwork that will make fabulous notecards, t-shirts, buttons, coffee mugs, aprons, baby clothes, and many many more things that she can sell without having to do the actual production work.
Her problem is getting the images ready to upload and set up shop in Cafe Press. It is very time consuming for the initial startup, but once it's up, the sales will take care of themselves and the 'proverbial' money will start rolling in. Jackie is a retired film producer, and she doesn't have much income, so having her Cafe Press site up and running will be a huge benefit to her. And she said if I help her get it going, she would share with me, so I am motivated doubly so!
So in researching Cafe Press and getting images ready to make products I learned that images in a '.png' format are much superior to those in '.jpg'. With .jpg you get 'ghosting' or fuzzy little pixellations on the edges of your picture. I never noticed it before, and well, honestly, to my eye, still don't notice it, but I have seen mugs and shirts where the image is not that pristine, and I guess if you are transferring your image to clothing or mugs, ghosting really picks up.
I also learned more about tagging images. When you are preparing a product for sale, you want to get as many targeted hits as you can, so you need to think like your customers and think about what the people who would buy your product might be looking for and keep those tags specific, yet encompass the topic areas. These tags allow your product page, or your virtual 'shop' on Cafe Press to come up in a search.
Now how would this transfer to the classroom/school? Well, you can make just one t-shirt without the huge expense of a template that we have here in town when we want to do t-shirts for events like homecoming. And with Cafe Press, classes could upload their image to the site and then only the students that actually want it could purchase it. That way - no overruns on t-shirts that get handed out by the MAC team for dress code violations!!
Cafe Press is also great for individuals and families that might want to make gifts of things like mouse pads, or coffee mugs, etc. with family photos or images. You could also do a shirt with your child's artwork. And the best part is that for families and their friends you can 'open up shop' free of charge. There would be no need to try to reach customers if your images are family things and you can easily direct your family to your Cafe Press site.
So! Technology - wow, we are only limited by our imagination.
Classroom Learning 2.0 - The 23 Things
I do audio production work for Jackie Baldwin, the host of Storylover's World on KSVY 91.3, Sonoma. She has a wonderful web site, Story-lover's World, with information about stories and folk tales from all over the world. Jackie has done a tremendous amount of work to make her website accessible and useful to storytellers, librarians, and especially teachers. And in her work, she has uncovered hundreds of wonderful, old, out-of-copyright pieces of artwork that will make fabulous notecards, t-shirts, buttons, coffee mugs, aprons, baby clothes, and many many more things that she can sell without having to do the actual production work.
Her problem is getting the images ready to upload and set up shop in Cafe Press. It is very time consuming for the initial startup, but once it's up, the sales will take care of themselves and the 'proverbial' money will start rolling in. Jackie is a retired film producer, and she doesn't have much income, so having her Cafe Press site up and running will be a huge benefit to her. And she said if I help her get it going, she would share with me, so I am motivated doubly so!
So in researching Cafe Press and getting images ready to make products I learned that images in a '.png' format are much superior to those in '.jpg'. With .jpg you get 'ghosting' or fuzzy little pixellations on the edges of your picture. I never noticed it before, and well, honestly, to my eye, still don't notice it, but I have seen mugs and shirts where the image is not that pristine, and I guess if you are transferring your image to clothing or mugs, ghosting really picks up.
I also learned more about tagging images. When you are preparing a product for sale, you want to get as many targeted hits as you can, so you need to think like your customers and think about what the people who would buy your product might be looking for and keep those tags specific, yet encompass the topic areas. These tags allow your product page, or your virtual 'shop' on Cafe Press to come up in a search.
Now how would this transfer to the classroom/school? Well, you can make just one t-shirt without the huge expense of a template that we have here in town when we want to do t-shirts for events like homecoming. And with Cafe Press, classes could upload their image to the site and then only the students that actually want it could purchase it. That way - no overruns on t-shirts that get handed out by the MAC team for dress code violations!!
Cafe Press is also great for individuals and families that might want to make gifts of things like mouse pads, or coffee mugs, etc. with family photos or images. You could also do a shirt with your child's artwork. And the best part is that for families and their friends you can 'open up shop' free of charge. There would be no need to try to reach customers if your images are family things and you can easily direct your family to your Cafe Press site.
So! Technology - wow, we are only limited by our imagination.
Classroom Learning 2.0 - The 23 Things
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Thing #6 - making a poster
More fun things to do with flickr and their toys. I love these inspirational poster formats - and now they are even more fun with my own photos and quotes. you can go to the poster maker and create your own. I think this would be a fun activity for students to do - we could even make 'math' posters with an example of a something real in the world that can be described with an equation or something geometrical - I'm thinking on this one. I have a new camera - instead of going somewhere for break, I spend my money on toys- so I will see what I can work up. Watch for future updates.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Week 3, Thing #6 all the fun things on flickr
Retrievr: Oh my - the disclaimer was on target - they said 'be careful - you may be spending way more time than you thought you would' on something so silly as drawing sketches with different colors and seeing what photos match it in the flickr archives. This is an interesting sketch , see what it pulled up as matches. The first sketch I did was awesome and had an interesting match with the black labrador.
Classroom Learning - The 23 Things
Classroom Learning - The 23 Things
The Storm - thing #5, part 2
Found this photographer in flickr - one of her photos came up on the interestingness section - the colors, natural images, and extreme closeups make this a photographer to peruse. You should see the bee's!
Week 3, Thing #5
Flickr: ok, I don't really have that many photos anyone would want to see - I don't really travel, and ironically when I do travel, I don't usually bring a camera. And then, like I said, I don't know anyone who would want to look at my pix. That being said, it was really fun uploading pictures of Buddy! When I created an account the first thing they asked me to do was create a "buddy icon" - so I did - with a picture of Buddy, my little guy. It's pretty cute - so you may want to check it out: my page at flickr
The Ag group at Sonoma Valley High School led by Christina Story has quite a collection of photos on Flickr - fun photos from trips and from competitions. Their photostream name is Sonomaffa. Andy Mitchell also has his photography students work on SVHS's Photos. Good things happening at SVHS!
The Ag group at Sonoma Valley High School led by Christina Story has quite a collection of photos on Flickr - fun photos from trips and from competitions. Their photostream name is Sonomaffa. Andy Mitchell also has his photography students work on SVHS's Photos. Good things happening at SVHS!
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Week 2, Things #3 and #4
Ok, Blog created and 'registered' - I think! I hope!! We'll see.
And I have an avatar, isn't she cute? Not sure what she's going to be doing, but we'll take it a thing at a time, eh?
The one thing I really like about the blog process vs. the web page is that when we update the blog, everyone with it on an rss feed will automatically get the updates. If new information about a math concept is on the blog I know that my subscribers will get it automatically. If parents are the subscribers, they know what we are doing in class. If students are my subscribers they know what they will be doing or have done in class. Win-win.
I can see actually having more than one blog depending on it's purpose and audience. I would really like to blog about research and information on my subject area specifically and learning and how the brain assimilates knowledge in general. So that is the big idea for today, figuring out how to use this blog. And since it is all learning all the time right now, I will consider my audience to be other teachers with an interest in how to make learning interesting, fun, productive and effective. Stay tuned for links, podcasts, and all the other "things" I'll be doing as part of Classroom Learning 2.0.
And I have an avatar, isn't she cute? Not sure what she's going to be doing, but we'll take it a thing at a time, eh?
The one thing I really like about the blog process vs. the web page is that when we update the blog, everyone with it on an rss feed will automatically get the updates. If new information about a math concept is on the blog I know that my subscribers will get it automatically. If parents are the subscribers, they know what we are doing in class. If students are my subscribers they know what they will be doing or have done in class. Win-win.
I can see actually having more than one blog depending on it's purpose and audience. I would really like to blog about research and information on my subject area specifically and learning and how the brain assimilates knowledge in general. So that is the big idea for today, figuring out how to use this blog. And since it is all learning all the time right now, I will consider my audience to be other teachers with an interest in how to make learning interesting, fun, productive and effective. Stay tuned for links, podcasts, and all the other "things" I'll be doing as part of Classroom Learning 2.0.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
