To Game Or Not To Game

This week’s assignment was very rewarding for me. I have never been a gamer and this week reinforced that for me. I tried to get onto Second Life a couple times to no avail. I took this as a message that I am not supposed to be a gamer. I did however research the topic quite thoroughly and found that I do see how social networks and gaming could be used in the classroom. Previous to this week I would have disagreed with using either of them in an educational setting. Here is the link to the articles about World of Warcraft that helped change my mind.

Another reason that I changed my opinion about gaming and social networks in the classroom was my interview with my son and a few of his friends. In talking with them I saw how passionate they were about gaming. If you could somehow get them to have the same passion about learning that would be great. Maybe incorporating gaming and social networking into their education is a way to do that. When I showed them the game on 360Ed they were really excited and said that they would love to take a history class like that. Not only was it very informative to interview my son, it was also nice to sit and talk to him for two hours about something that he was very enthusiastic about. He wanted to talk to me which is a rarity these days. Teenagers are not very much fun!

Finding Podcasts and Videos

I do not know if it was my topic, animal adaptations, or that I am not very good at finding podcasts, but I found it very difficult to find any. There seemed to be many more videos out there than podcasts. I am going to keep searching just to see if the more I practice the better I get! Jing is going to be my next endeavor! I have only tried to use it once before and I was not very successful. Hopefully I will be able to figure it out now.

Creating my Flickr Account

Creating my Flickr account would have been much easier if my photos were stored on my computer. Using Flickr was easy, and I found it very user friendly. Unfortunately my husband is the photo person and keeps all of the photos on his Mac. Being a PC user I had no idea how to even find the photos. Once I found them and figured out how to use a Mac the process was very fun and simple. I only uploaded a few pictures from my wedding and honeymoon for now, but I do plan on uploading the rest of our photos because then I will have access to them also. My sister-in-law will be happy because she is still waiting for pictures from Christmas! You can check out my photos at if you would like to see my wonderful husband and my sometimes wonderful teenage sons.

Coming Up For Air

With all of this new technology that is supposed to make my life easier, I find that I am feeling like I cannot breath and need a chance to come for air! In addition to my blog, my wiki, and my tweet, I now have an account with Shelfari, which I cannot wait until I have the time to actually enter all of my books into. I love the look of bookshelf and the way that the books are organized. I definitely am guilty of judging a book by it's cover, even though I tell my students not to do that, so this book organizational tool is great for me. It will also be nice at holidays to just tell people to check out my bookshelf if they need a gift idea! I also found a previous colleagues that has an account. It was interesting checking out her books. I think that so far I like wikis, delicious and shelfari the most. I cannot see me blogging much after this class, unless my district starts letting me blog with my students, which seems very unlikely. The other tool that I might use is the RSS feeds, I put all of my classmates blogs on my feed so that I can check out their sights. I still cannot figure out how to see who I am following from my own blog. That will be a project for a different day.

Technology Overload

I now have an account with Google Reader, Diigo, and Delicious! At first I was only going to use Delicious because I have already been using it and Diigo seemed a little overwhelming. But after reading what some of my classmates had to say about Diigo, I decided to give it another chance. I think that Diigo is going to take some time to get used to but in the end I think that I will end up using it more. Google Reader, just like this blog and Twitter, is going to be something that I remember to check on occasion, but until it becomes a habit, I do not think I will use it often.

Creating my blog

I am definitely feeling a little overwhelmed by all of this technology. I knew that I had fallen behind the times but I did not realize how far! I need to get out of the nineties and into the 21st Century!
Overall setting up the accounts was fairly easy, I think that maintaining them and actually using them will be a different story.