Thing #10 Creative Commons

In all honesty I have never noticed the Creative Commons logo on a website. Personally I probably would have thought that the CC logo meant Closed Captioning. LOL I think CC should impact the way students learn and create projects, but I don't think students respect copyrights very much when working on school projects. I know my daughter used whatever resources she liked when she was developing a photo story for Aquatic Science. I use digital images and audio quite often in teaching to build background knowledge for my students, and I've never considered it to be a copyright violation since it was for educational purposes. As far as ownership of my own self-created teaching materials, I feel as though they are my property. Anything I have bought belongs to the person who created it. Potential negatives for CC might be confusion. Some users might not understand which materials and which are CC.

Thing #9 Sandbox!

Playing in the Sandbox was cool. I had already contributed to a wiki on that site before during my master's degree classwork. It was relatively simple. The only difficulty I encountered was the table of contents. On the set of instructions I had, toc was not double bracketed. As a result, my table of contents wouldn't set up properly. Once I read another set of instructions and it showed the double brackets, I was good to go!

My favorite part was embedding photos of my darling daughter, The Hog Princess.

If your interested in visiting my page in the MISD 23 Things wiki, here's the link:

Razorback Mom!

Thing #8 Stretch!

I explored Birthers on Wikipedia because there I watched a segment on the O'reilly Factor about them. I had know idea that people who dispute President O'bama's country of birth had an actual name. Well of course under the "discussion" there were several questions regarding the title of the article. The actual question was, "Isn't the use of the terms "conspiracy theories" and "fringe" in the article title and body a violation of Wikipedia's policy on neutrality?" Of course I expected to see controversy since this is a controversial subject. The history tab had over 500 revisions listed on it, with the latest occurring just yesterday.

Thing #8

The wikis were very interesting! I particular liked the Salute to Seuss wiki. It was not particularly user friendly on the home page. Although I should have seen that coming since there was an explanation of how to find student work under the link on The 23 Things page. Once I did start navigating around the sight, WOW! It was a collaboration of many different schools and the projects were fantastic! (Movies, Powerpoint games, etc!)

Schools in the Past was cute but not too fancy schmancy. Just a long running list of comments from interviews conducted by the 1st grade students.

Go West was the most user friendly, as far as being able to discern what the different links were for. It was a great example of using students' writing.

Thing #7 Commenting!

I have a personal blog other than the one I've created for The 23 Things and it has never had a comment posted on it. Which is probably for the best since so many people post such stupid mindless things sometimes. On my personal blog, I must approve your comment before it is published anyway. When I posted to one blog in particular, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, I noticed that the author has obviously done the same thing. My post did not publish immediately.

Thing #6 An Appropriate Feed for this Stage in My Life

I subscribed to the Cool Cat Teacher feed and didn't find educational insight, but insight into life itself. The article Look for the Happiness Drain and PLUG IT! was appropriate for the stage of my life that I'm going through. The author instructed readers to stay away from people who are never happy and suck the happiness from your life. The author puts some people in the unconditional column; children and spouses. She says that you must listen to their rantings. Others she says you should distance yourself from in order to avoid their poison.

Thing #5-RSS Feeds & Google Reader

I subscribed to the NY Times US Education feeder in Google Reader. While perusing the latest feeds, I came across an article about schools administering Swine Flu vaccines to students in the NYC School District. The article was entitled, City to Start Vaccinations for Swine Flu in Schools. I found it interesting that even though Texas has had more confirmed cases of swine flu that we are not implementing the same procedure here.