Thing 4

RSS - I have always wondered what those three letters meant. In the short little video it explained it all. I was able to create an account, add my subscriptions and start the news frenzy. It took less than 5 minutes. I can't wait to start adding more blog sites and all my favorite news links. What a great and simple idea that I hate to admit I knew nothing about until now. Thanks 23 Things for teaching me something new. I can't wait to share this with my students. What a useful tool this will be for them in college. All the wonderful sites feeding them updated information. I personally will be using this to keep track of all the cool blog sites I have recently found. Professional and personally this is a great tool to keep abreast of things without wasting time searching over and over for things you know you bookmarked but just can't seem to find. Organization is the key to being successful.

Thing 3

Blogging - what an amazing tool. How can anyone not love having the option to type your thoughts, or ideas or better yet to vent. How many of us want to vent about the students, the administration the politics behind education. We all do! Blogging allows you to do that. The sites are so easy and interactive to use. You don't need to be a techi to start blogging - anyone can do it.

I don't currently use blogging in my lessons. I do use Discussion Boards, which are very similar but I have not created an official blog site. Perhaps that is something I will try in the near future.

Thing 1 & Thing 2

I'm excited to begin 23 Things. I have heard great things regarding this course from two of my colleagues. So I decided to give it a try myself. I am a business/technology teacher and try to incorporate new technologies into my curriculum all the time. After reading Thing 1  I felt like I should be doing a lot more. I do online testing, blogs, wikis, email communications between students, surveys, etc. etc. I feel as if I am moving in the right direction with my students but I find myself struggling with the issue of TIME management & the issue of a few students not having access to a computer or the Internet. The more I do - the more I feel the kids just don't get it. My students in particular seem to struggle with the new instructional methods that I try to implement in the course. They don't like typing, they would rather write it out, they struggle with email extras like sending attachments, they don't know the difference between a Word doc. or a pdf file. So I end up having to back track and teach common computer knowledge lessons to my students which then interferes with the time that was set aside for the project. There is just not enough time to do it all.  The students I get are having less and less skills in regards to technology.