Thing 23

1)My favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey were learning about blogs, del.icio.us, tags, mashups, web page filtering, and working with podcasts and videos.
2)My lifelong learning has been greatly affected because I now know how to organize and access tons more information really fast. Using bookmarks is really cumbersome and I can never remember where something is located. I will be more inclined to visit more blogs and look research more topics because it is now much easier.
3)I will use at least 3/4 of the content of this program. I loved the mashups and can see multiple uses for them. I really didn't expect to find anything like them.
4)I like the format and the concept. Online learning is the only practical way we can learn technology at this point. I would like to be able to get fast help with problems. I spent way too much time trying to sort through difficulties on my own when help would have resolved the issue quickly.
5)I would participate in another discovery program like this in the future if it involved items of interest to me. I'd like to see tuitorials for Photoshop, Powerpoint, PhotoStory, Audacity, etc. and we should get credit for it.
6)Professional Development at its best.

Thing 22

I went to Ning for Teachers and found nothing of any value for art teachers. So, I started a new blog and opened with a request for ideas for "first week of school" projects. We'll see if it gets responses. I'd invite other art teachers if I could easily get their email addresses from home. Social websites can be quite valuable for kids to interact with each other regarding a topic or lesson. Especially if several school participated.

Thing 21

I became really frustrated with Switchpod. I created a PhotoStory3 project successfully but Switchpod would not upload it because it did not like the wp3 extension. I read on another blog as a suggestion to change it to a wmv file and Switchpod accepted it. But I cannot get it to show up in my blog. I've spent at least 4 hours on this and will now move on. I emailed Switchpod and they had no useful suggestions. I like the idea of being able to email podcasts and include them on a web page. But I tried to include my podcast on my page and was unable to edit it from my home computer for some reason. I'll try again when I get my laptop from school. Anyone have any ideas about how to solve all these problems? I just found help from Lily Pad. Here goes. Nope...no cigar. Didn't work.

I just tried to place my PhotoStory3 wmv file into my blog and I still get an error message. I'm out of ideas. But thanks.

I just found a post that uploaded the PhotoStory3 video to used TeacherTube. So, I did the same. I copied the URL and pasted it right onto the edti html page (the add video tag didn't work). It now shows up on my blog but it keeps spinning and isn't opening.

Thing 20

Thing 20

I had lots of trouble getting a video into my blog. Took several attempts. Google has several good tuitorials including Gimp tuitorials. Teacher Tube, again, had very little of interest. The advice about evaluating web sites was really good to remember: Credibility, accuracy, reasonableness, support. ePals, ning, podo matic, wikispaces are worth investigating for classroom use.
http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=f70780820e714a3fcce8

Thing 19

I spent way too much time on this one. Kept finding interesting places and stayed there too long when I arrived. I opended an account with Stumble Upon and found some great art places such as Drawspace.com. I registered with Drawspace and tagged some great tuitorials and print outs for class on color, drawing, perspective, and shading. Metacafe has many useful videos. I found several about Op Art that I can use for school. Also found Color Blender which will be useful for color theory lessons. I joined The Million Masterpiece and created a digital painting. Students of all ages can participate in this. It is a forum about art.

Thing 18

I think there are many good uses for the online documents offered in OpenOffice2. The advantages are that kids can download and use them at home, free. The draw capabilities are adequate for basic work and you can create Flash versions of your work. The multi-media presentations have lots of good tools and can also be converted to Flash versions. Also, you can save your work in different formats like MS Word. However, most teachers already have all the MS suite at school. Perhaps they might use Open Office2 at home, however. The presentation limitations will make it impossible for me to create slide shows because of all the visuals I use. They make the files very large. Lastly, the calendar is not easy to use. It would work better if you could simply click in the field and type everything directly or at least add everyting to one field. I could not figure out how to do this. I do not foresee ever using these Online Productivity Tools but it is nice to know that they exist. I may find a use for them in the future.