From My Summer Vacation-Portage Glacier Alaska

Thing 23-You Made It!

Whew....finally made it. I now have a lot of stuff to ponder and use in class. Hopefully, I will be able to do this in the next few weeks. After all of the business surrounding layoffs in my district I hope now to get back to teaching my students. I will recommend this course to other teachers.

Thing 22-Online Video Addendum

I have found TED.com to be a excellent resource and have created my own TED page for parents, students and teachers to access. http://www.hs.bcpsk12.net/dprindle/ted.html This will soon be migrated over to my new site.

Thing 22-Online Video

This year (through the inspiration of a friend see her channel www.youtube.com/user/kristadawnprice/) I have started using online video. I have a Youtube channel and also have them stored on my website. www.davidprindle.com and www.youtube.com/user/dprindle1/ . I and many of my fellow teachers feel that Youtube is a great tool for the classroom. However, at BCPS it is blocked during the school day. It is accessible from 3 pm to 745 am which in my view makes no sense. The only dislike is you don't know what is going to be the next video that may be recommended by YouTube and they may not be appropriate for class. I assume if the student watches the video through my channel that won't happen. I plan on continuing the use of this. I will be saving my videos in several forms....Quicktime movies to be stored on our school server (since streaming video is blocked at school), podcast form (playable on an iPod) and if necessary mobile phone size. In order to be better at all of this I went out and bought a MacBook Pro. Having been a long time PC user this was a huge move. But the Mac does everything easier than a PC with preinstalled software.

Thing 21- Twitter

I do have 3 twitter accounts. 2 for class and my own. However, I have not really used them yet to there full potential. I told my students that the class sites would be mainly for "flash" traffic. Snow day notices, good tv shows that would be of interest in class. Personally right now I only follow the Alaska Volcano Observatory. I am still trying to determine if Twitter will be a good thing to use in my personal or professional life. This is one of the tools that I will have to exam and/or develop further.

Thing 20-Bookmarking with del.icio.us

Here is my username dprindle. I have put all of my bookmarks up. As soon as I can find time I will edit some of them down or create a new user name and just put up select ones. I will be using these in class and for EdTech PD in our district. As far as productivity I can see the benefit of having your bookmarks online when you don't have your own machine with you. Anything I can use to when I don't have my own machine with me with enhance my productivity.

Thing 19-Introduction to Social Bookmarking

Not only would tagging be beneficial to fellow teachers but also to my students. If they can go directly to my delicious site they can then easily search it for current material rather than trying to weed through all of my book marks. I don't really see any disadvantages to this tool. An advantage is it also lets you control what fellow teachers and students need to see. I do like the tag cloud concept and will most likely add it to the sites that I manage so users can tell if my site has what they need.