Thing # 5 - Microblogging

I've personally been a fan of Facebook for awhile now - it has allowed me to reconnect with old high school and college friends, and even keep up with former students. The way I see it being used in the classroom would be to allow the teacher to post assignments, have students comment or ask questions, etc. I don't really care for the "What are you doing now?" - as I could really care less if someone is about to do laundry or they're laughing at an inside joke! Nonetheless, I think it definitely could be advantageous if used with more of a purpose in mind. As for Tweeter, not really feeling it. It seems so limiting in that the amount of text you can type in at one time is so confining. I have yet to figure out a real purpose for it. I checked out the post on some reasons teachers should consider using it, and I still didn't find a real purpose. Back-channeling seems pretty neat if you are lecturing to a large group and they all have access- that would be a challege in the typical classroom, and again I don't know how you would regulate it.

Thing # 4 - Video Hosting

There clearly would be numerous advantages to having access to teaching videos at our disposal to share with the students. Depending on what you are teaching, videos are an excellent resource. I also think that putting student work on the web is a great way to validate their efforts. Additionally it would allow a way to share their work with other classes - I think that students always enjoy seeing what others have created. I had trouble uploading my video to YouTube, so I just pasted it directly from animoto.
My personal video: http://animoto.com/play/CxkaR3xcgr1lsusdspjYYg

Thing # 3 - Like Skype

I had no clue that this type of technology was out there! Of course, I felt that way about most of the things that I learned last summer with 23 Things! Interesting. I'm not sure that this is something that I would ever personally use; it is a little out of my comfort zone. Saying that, I honestly don't know if it is something I would even want to take on in my classroom. I think that it has many benefits - especially if you were able to connect with another class and discuss something, but I have to wonder how effectively those conversations could be monitored within a class full of students. This might be something that the librarian could have set up in the library for a small number of trustworthy students to experiment with...I'm just not sure about it.

Thing # 2 - Image Generators 2

Wordle is really fun! I think that my students could find a lot of creative use for it - especially with a piece of literature we are reading. They could pull descriptive words for a character, quotes, all kinds of stuff. It would make it more interactive for the kids to do something like this online.
http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/930357/life

Glogster - equally as fun to play around with.
Again, this would work very well for a piece of literature - maybe it could be our project for the summer reading activity! I would guess that students could be a lot more creative using this in lieu of a posterboard. The possibilities are absolutely endless as is the creativity. Many students feel inadequate when we ask them to draw something because they are not good artists - this puts everyone on equal turf. As far as the thinking being different, I feel that it would open the door for more opportunity to think outside of the box.
I came across this one and thought it was pretty neat:
http://horse14rider.glogster.com/Body-Peace-Treaty-Seventeen-Mag/

Voki - way entertaining - a little weird though! I played around with the applications and did the Trek Yourself. I think that if someone received this through email it would definitely send a different message than text alone.
http://www.trekyourself.com/?mId=30307340.3

Bookr - this is by far my personal favorite! What a neat way to store photos and tell a story - I have tried keeping up with my kids scrapbooks, but this would be so much easier. I'm not sure how I would use it in the classroom, unless I had the kids narrate a story. Maybe after writing their personal narrative, they could use pictures to narrate it. That would be kind of interesting, but I'm not real sure - I'd love to get other people's ideas on how to use it in a high school English classroom.

Thing # 1 - The Networked Student

I think that although many teachers are outsmarted by the students advancement in technology, this clearly demonstrates that education through alternative methods is growing. I would love to become more tech savvy to be able to keep up with the interests of my students and to be able to reach them at their interest level. There are so many fascinating tools that are within our reach if we can just figure them out! I personally struggle with it. Just watching the video was a nightmare - it kept buffering; which finally after searching to see what exactly that meant, I was able to pause the video and let it load and eventually get through it. I'm sure one of my students would have had some code to bypass that!

I think that the teacher is showing the use of being a facilitator, which is what teachers are supposed to be. I see many benefits of this because it directly puts the learning back into the student's hands and gives him/her more ownership over their own learning.