Smilebox

I mentioned earlier that I was going to try an online scrapbook tool for personal use. I had originally planned to use picasa.google, but did not find it the most user-friendly. However, I found the website smilebox.com and it worked great! Here is the scrapbook I made of my daughter, Kelsey. (You will need to pause the music on the left as the scrapbook plays its own music.)

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

Week 3 Reflection

I am writing my formal week 3 reflection a few days before the class week is officially over because I am attempting to use my time wisely. This week has been very busy for me. With my husband gone to Florida and my hurt back and strep throat, not to mention a sick baby, I was left feeling very overwhelmed by this class. I am the kind of person who likes to be organized and have a plan. It made things very difficult when I had so much to do and was not able to do it due to certain circumstances. Therefore, I believe the skill I worked on the most this week was time management. I wanted to make the best use of my time and be productive. I attempted to document my time for this class and was amazed at how many hours were spent reading and using the online tools. Now this does include checking my facebook, which often times takes awhile to get caught up from day to day. However, I also explored new websites and just tried to read and play to see what is all out there that I don't even know about. I commented earlier on using plinky and pandora in previous blogs. I am still feeling as though I am behind and trying to catch up. In a traditional classroom setting, all the students are in one place sharing ideas and receiving the information. In OL learning, it is very much the opposite. When I get the emails about all the posts to the website, I feel as though I need to respond immediately to stay in the loop and caught up. However, with all the posts being made, this is tough to do. Building on my time management skills, I found the Hendron book to be a wise use of my time. I feel as though I can understand the writing and it is an easy read. Sometimes I do not understand the terminology he is using, yet the flow of the writing makes it easy for me to reread or find the answer I am looking for by reading on. I also respect the fact that this author has been in the classroom and can look at technology from a teacher's point of view. On a final note, I am still completely stumped about what I am going to do for my final project. Any suggestions? I am all ears!

Plinky

As you may have been able to tell from my excessive amount of posting today, I am laying on the couch annoyed that I am sick and trying to be productive at the same time. I found the website called Plinky. www.plinky.com It will email you a daily prompt so you have interesting things to blog about. They call it a way to fix blogging block. For older students, you could have them set up a blog and use it as their daily journal. Then, they could sign up for plinky and receive daily prompts to write about. Of course you need to have daily access to the internet, which we have already said gets to be tricky especially during "testing season." But I thought this might be beneficial for some.

Pandora

I just checked out the website www.pandora.com and love it. You type in what kind of music you want to listen to by putting in an artist, song or genre and it creates a playlist for you. Sometimes at school, I struggle to find appropriate music to play for my students. Although they think listening to rap would be the best, obviously the lyrics make that impossible. But I feel it is getting harder and harder to choose appropriate music that is not considered "babyish." So many of the lyrics have inuendos that just cannot be played at school. I don't think they even know what some of the songs are suggesting. (At least I hope they don't know!)I thought the website was nice because it suggests songs you might not have heard before which adds some variety. You would need to preview the song list before playing it, but it is a free online tool that could made kid-friendly with a little work.

Facebook

I have not checked my facebook account for a few days because I have been sick. I just went on this morning and was amazed at how much stuff accumulates in such a short amount of time. I finally just had to tell myself that I could not possibly read all the status updates and look at all the pictures posted. It is so easy to get wrapped up in "playing" on websites like facebook when there are probably more productive things for me to be doing. By just as the other million people with facebook, I too am curious about what others are doing and find myself engulfed with it.

Delicious

I used delicious.com at school on Friday. My students are working on their state reports and often have a very hard time when we are in the lab trying to find information. The search engines are just too big for them because there is so much out there. So I pulled a few students who I knew were struggling and we looked up information through delicious. We were directed to some very user-friendly sites. I also used delicious for personal use. I want to find a way to create a photo collage to post online. I typed this in the search line and again was directed to some great sites. I like the way the website shows you how many visits the site receives to help narrow down your choices as well. The website I found that I plan to try is www.picasa.google.com. If I am able to make the collage, I will try to post it.

Sick

For the first time during our master's program I felt like I couldn't keep up. As you all saw in class on Wednesday, I hurt my back earlier in the week. My husband has been gone to Florida all week with the baseball team, so lifting our 8 month old daughter was a bit of a challenge. However, as my back got better in the latter part of the week, I noticed my throat was really scratchy. By yesterday morning, it was so swollen that I could not talk. I was running a fever and felt awful. I went to the doctor and found out I have strep throat. UGH! Plus, my daughter is coming down with something as well because she has a runny nose, nasty cough and fever. So I have spent the past 24 hours trying to feel better. I couldn't help but keep thinking about the master's work I was not getting done. I forced myself to go online this morning to try to keep up. Hopefully my posts make sense since I am still feeling pretty out of it. I guess the nice thing about online learning is that I am able to type this while sitting in my jammies and dealing with strep throat. Sitting in a classroom setting would probably be quite unbearable at this point. This has also given me a different perspective on single parents. The past week was a blur because I felt all I was doing was running from daycare to school to daycare while trying to get housework done at night and care for my daughter. My husband will definitely be getting the "I appreciate you SO much" speech when he gets back today! Just thought I would share my frustrations as it was a new experience for me to feel like I was truly falling behind.