David Grisman

David Grisman,
originally uploaded by zweb20tourist.

This is an example of use the framer tool from Flickr tools

Week 3, Items #6 and #7

Mash ups and making curriculum connections occupied my time today. I sat down early this morning to complete all the items in Week 3 and I'm now ready to post and move on to the next week. I tend to become preoccupied with explorations and then two hours later remember the reason why I originally sat down at the computer.

I enjoyed the following sites during my wanderings through the Flickr mashups:
Quick Online Tips (http://www.quickonlinetips.com) I found this to be an interesting site full of things to explore.
Big Huge Labs (http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/). This site has oodles of ideas on how to use Flickr and ultimately multimedia project ideas for the classroom. Some of the project ideas I came up with through this site are:

Create a pocketmod: http://pocketmod.com This site helps the user create a pocket guide for just about anything. My thought was to use it as a gimicky review for a test. One down side is that new information cannot be typed--only a template can be made for the user to handwrite information.

Framer: http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/frame.php This is a cute way to add a frame to any picture.

Captioner: http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/captioner.php

I saved the best for last--I can envision students having fun while learning if a teacher posts images to a flickr account and they have to come up with an appropriate caption to paraphrase the picture. My explorations can be viewed at http://www.flickr.com/ tag is: zeweb20tourist. I'm not sure; however, if keying in the tag listed above will display my account. I need to explore the publishing options as I think I marked them for family and friends only.

Week 3 Exploring Flickr

I must say, I spent an hour playing with my avatar from last week's lesson before I even got to Flickr which is the main reason I sat down at the computer in the first place!! I am excited to report that I successfully added my yahoo avatar to my Moodle page. A small fete but one that make the page a little more fun and gave me some time to play with the html code in both tools. Now onto Flickr.

Flickr has been a great tool for me to lift (with permission) students' graduation photos for promo movies I had to develop for my work. I use the tags to locate our area or the kids' give me the Flickr URL. I have not utilized Flickr groups todate.

The first task I completed was to explore Jacksonville, FL, photos on Flickr because we plan to visit my son there next week. Before I knew it, another 30 minutes passed because there were so many interesting photos to look at as well as a default map that displayed when I keyed in the address. The site of one of the photo groups I viewed is http://www.panoramio.com/photo/491479
. I then explored the library projects on Flickr--there are so many creative people!!

I created a Flickr account and uploaded three vacation pictures as a trial run. My link is http://www.flickr.com/photos/28678602@N03/?saved=1.

I think it is so important to honor the privacy of subjects in your pictures and I appreciated the reminder written about "photo posting ettiquette" in the Web 20 tutorial instructions. That being said, this is such a fabulous way to learn in the classroom--even as a discussion starter for students to guess where a certain picture was taken if learning about a region in the classroom.

Learning more about Flickr was delightful! Looking forward to my next stop on the tour.

Week 2 Creating the Avatar

I loved creating my avatar. I spent an excessive amount of time paging through the options to add to my avatar. I hope to see avatars used in education--I think it is a way kids can "try on" new ideas or communicate without being judged. I tried second life which is based on avatars navigating a virtual world and did not like the environment--possibly I will try second life a second time since I enjoyed this activity so much.

Week 1

The hardest part of the process of setting up a blog for me was creating the name. To answer the exercise questions:

hardest habit of lifelong learning: View problems as challenges--I tend to shut down when problems arise. Excellent idea to view a problem as a learning experience. I tend to see problems the same as the "go to jail" card in monopoly--I hate wasting time--however it is important to think of the "wasted time" as a learning experience.

easiest habit: using technology to my advantage--can't wait to learn more ways to be an efficient user of technology.