The following is from http://manaiakindergarten.blogspot.com/2007/01/blogging-safely.html

Getting Started with an EduBlog

Before beginning a blog for your Kindergarten, Childcare Centre, School Classroom we highly recommend attending a workshop onNetSafety. Just like a FirstAid course, or RoadSafety course, NetSafety helps internet users navigate the world wide web safely. Just like the real world, there are trustworthy users and untrustworthy users. Avoid the pitfalls, keep safe, and educate yourself on the risks and benefits of the internet. Check out theNetSafety website for more information.

Are You Worried About Children's Photos on the World Wide Web?
Here are some interesting reads - Read and discuss at NetSafety workshop

Link1. Is Posting Children's Pictures online Dangerous? (this link has been fixed - please advise if any of our links are not working - thanks)

Link2. School's bizarre ploy to beat internet perverts

Secondly, Permission from Families for images of their children to be used on the blog needs to be gained. We have a specific Permission Slip as part of the MOE ECE ICT PL programme that we are happy to share with others on the programme. (It is the regular programme permission slip with a little added specifically for the blog). Parents need to be aware of the blog's audience, so as a community a descision needs to be made whether the blog will be open just for invited families or whether the blog will be a public blog that can be viewed by anyone. We give our parents options to have 1) no image of their children on their blog, 2) images but no names or pseydo names 3) images and names. See the video below about how to make your blog private and how to moderate comments (so that comments come to the teacher before being published (or rejected) on the blog).

Blogger appears to be the blog host of choice for many blog creators. It is user-friendly and customisable, and is recognised by many other internet services. You can use a template provided, or if you have a little knowledge of HTML (the language of the interent) then you can create new backgrounds, customise the width, columns, and much more. To start off simply, the variety of templates allow for a moderate degree of customisation in the DASHBOARD, LAYOUT, FONTS and COLORS.

WEEK 9, # 23: Summarize Your Thoughts

Since my primary lifetime learning goal is to keep learning, I'd say that this program has moved me along that path. I revisited some applications that I was already familiar with, and discovered new ideas that I am enthusiastic about.



One of the outcomes from this program that really surprised me was that sometimes the best ideas are totally outside the box. I'd say this is true about Book Crossing, which combines the idea of reusing books, talking about books, and giving back to the universe in a unique way. It may be the one thing that I am most excited about discovering!



My favorite ideas that I came across during this program include creating avitars, Rollyo, and Book Crossing. I think that whoever maintains this course should really consider adding Book Crossing as a resource to explore.


The format of this course was fantastic. I liked the independent study, tutorial format and the way that ideas were grouped and divided into things. I completed the course in sequence -- starting with Thing 1 and ending with Thing 23, but I think that it could be completed effectively in any order. If you offer an extension of this course, I am interested!


I've been looking at the Learning 2.0 for Teens and am recommending it to the students who have just left my class and are moving on to middle school; I think it will prove fun and helpful for them. The only improvement I'd recommend has to do with maintaining links. Some of the links were closed (such as Yahoo Podcast Directory), and some had new URLs.


The one sentence that sums up my Classroom Learning 2.0 learning experience is: Hands down, this is the most useful, effective, and flexible professional development that I've undertaken in the course of my career. My hope is that many of my colleagues participate in this experience; the curriculum makes for a band of common knowledge and language to move forward together from.

WEEK 9, #22: ebooks and Audio Books

I began exploring at the World EBook Fair site and checked out the Gutenberg Project. It's pretty ambitious! Downloading PDF's doesn't really appeal to me, and the British Library Online Gallery also relied on the PDF format, so I found it informative but I wasn't motivated to use it.

LibriVox, however, was a site I could sink my teeth into because it had podcasts of books, short stories, and poems: wahoo! Maybe it was just because I had been thinking more about podcasts recently, but I was jazzed and downloaded several short stories -- Poe, Twain, Anderson -- some of my favorite classics.

Following links and poking around I came across Fried Beef Tech's Best Places to Get Free Books - The Ultimate Guide (www.friedbeef.com/best-places-to-get-free-books-the-ultimate-guide). This is where I came across my favorite free book resource which, oddly enough, wasn't all that technological at all. It was Book Crossing (http://bookcrossing.com), a site dedicated to the pursue of recycling books by leaving them in public places to be discovered, read, and passed on by others. What makes this site so intriguing is that books are registered, released, and tracked! Registered members release books and can follow them as they move around the globe. Each book is given a unique registration number (a BCID#) and whoever finds the book can go to the site, make a log entry for the book, and send it on its way. I was so excited about this that I created information stickers for a few books and released them into the wild on my daily walk. This method of sharing books is a brilliant way to reuse them and to share thoughts. Additionally, it has some of the same appeal as geocaching (www.geocaching.com) because it feels burying treasure. There is also a treasure hunt component because members can search for books left by local or GPS coordinates! Somehow, I'm going to use this in my classroom this year. It might just be one assignment where kids bring in a book, register it, and leave it. I don't know -- but I have a whole summer to think about a fun way to incorporate this concept into my classroom.

WEEK 9, #21: Podcasts

A couple of years ago I played around with podcasts, and my students made them as part of a project on explorers. That was also the time I began exploring Google Reader, so I added the Edutopia podcast feed to my reader -- way back when -- and I refer to it faithfully.

Probably the most poignant lesson I learned about podcasts, early on, was to take on only the volume of subscriptions that I could manage. I was surprised about how quickly they piled up! The other aspect of the reader subscription that I quickly discovered was that subscribing to podcasts via my reader tied me to my computer.

I'm an Apple junkie, so the delivery venue that makes the most sense for me is to load podcasts on my iPod via iTunes. It's easy to use, and meets my need for flexibility. I can listen to the audio in the car or when I exercise, instead of sitting in front of my computer. Additionally, I can share the broadcasts with my students, all of whom have iPods. (Okay, one of my students last year had seven of them -- go figure!)

As far as locating podcasts, I have some sources that I am especially fond of, such as The Educational Podcast Network and the NPR Podcast Directory. It is important to me that the source of information I listen to is reputable, and I have great success with these directories. I perused Podcast.com and PodcastAlley.com, but was overwhelmed by the amount of content and the time it took to search; the Yahoo Podcast Directory is now closed. Of course, if I have an idea of what I want to listen to, I just google it. For example I googled "alice waters podcast" today and located a program that I began listening to in the car last week. I plan to finish listening to the program on my walk this afternoon!

WEEK 9, #20: YouTube and video

I signed up for Teacher Tube because I know that I can stream the videos at school. The videos are difficult to search through, though, and the bulk of them seem to be student projects. I might use this site to upload and share a class video, but it seems time intensive to use as a classroom. One feature of Teacher Tube that will help me is the ability to download videos; that gives me much more flexibility, which I alway appreciate. I liked this Think Before You Post video and think I will incorporate it into one of my lessons on safe use, so I embedded it:

Then I tried You Tube, which I didn't have to register for because it is linked to my Google id. You Tube is easy to navigate and organized for quick search results. I wish it had a download feature because then I could use the videos in the classroom. I quickly found this animated Shakespeare series that I'd like to use when teaching The Tempest, provided our district allows teachers to stream You Tube:




Part Two:




Part Three:

WEEK 8, #19: Library Thing

Library Thing is interesting, and I'm still digesting it. Of course, the first thing I thought of was cataloging my classroom library but, with about 2500 books in it, that seems daunting! LibraryThing would be a great way for kids to keep track of the books they have read -- goodbye reading logs! The Children's Online Privacy Act, however, presents a problems in doing this.

While I could have one LibraryThing account for the entire class, this is what I use my reading blog for. The advantage that the reading blog has over LibraryThing is that my kids learn how to blog by participating in it -- and blogging is a current skill. Also, LibraryThing is still BETA, and so I wonder what happens if it closes? Do I really want to invest a lot of time in something that could disappear without notice?

I like the book discussions. For me, however, it is important to know the person who is recommending or commenting on a book. I know which of my friends have tastes similar to mine, so those people's thoughts about books are more credible to me. LibraryThing would be a wonderful tool for collaborating with our librarian. She always has such great recommendations, and it would be good to have them all in one place!

My catalog link is: http://www.librarything.com/home/mfront

WEEK 8, #18: Online Productivity Tools

I'm a GoogleDocs girl, so I had high hopes for Zoho. Using Zoho Writer, however, was problematic from the start. Strike one, it didn't run on Safari, so I had to switch browsers.

I liked that I didn't have to create a new account, but could use my Google account. Score one for Zoho.

Creating a test document looked like it would be a snap. The menus were intuitive and clean. Making changes, however, didn't go well. If, for example, I changed a font more than once, only the first change would take. I tried this many different ways, always with the same problematic result with formating. Strike Two.

Strike three came when the Zoho kept freezing up on me. Regardless of how well it was suppose to work, I don't have the time or the patience for problematic service. Maybe it was Firefox, maybe it was Zoho. I only know that it didn't work well for me. With that, I returned to GoogleDocs and quickly created a couple of documents to post on a new blog that I'm working on, blog home 4 room two (http://maggie-blogroom2.blogspot.com/).

One of the Curriculum Connections suggests using GoogleDocs for a class assignment; it is the single application that my students use for writing. I love the flexibility that the product offers. Kids can work on documents at school and at home, conferencing is flexible, and there is a retrievable history of every single revision! One of the realities of the classroom today, especially with class sizes getting larger, is that there isn't time to conference in a meaningful way with every students. With GoogleDocs, I can review work on a more flexible schedule and offer comments that can be discussed quickly in class, or even during off hours; one of my favorite things is to be editing a document simultaneously with a student at 8 p.m. -- it quickly turns into an impromptu conference, and is akin to the way people collaborate in the real world!

WEEK 7, #17: CL2.0 Wiki - curriculum connections

I visited the California Classroom Curriculum Connections wiki, but there wasn't much there. I like the idea of the sandbox story; I have done this on a Google Document that was shared with the entire class, but calling it a sandbox make it sound more like play than work!

I'm still trying to figure out how I would use a wiki in my classroom. I'm inspired by the Hobbit wiki that I found (mentioned in thing #16), but I already put a lot of time and energy into managing blogs. I don't want to create a wiki just for the sake of having a wiki. I want it to be relevant, purposeful, and meaningful.

I found the Web Tools 4U2Use to be quite a useful wiki. Well-written, current, and informative, it is also a great model of an effective wiki. It's design was simple, and its organization allowed me to navigate intuitively.

WEEK 7, #16: Wikis

I really like the idea of a wiki, but I'm stuck trying to get my head around exactly how it would work for the kids in my classroom. I mean, I'd love a wiki where I can give kids access to some pages, but not others. All of the wikis I've seen have had general access control, but nothing quite that specific. Maybe I just don't understand what to look for!

I think that a wiki has a grand possibility as an e-portfolio!

Here are some wikis I found that I think could be good models for me to work from:

Arbor Heights Elementary School Wiki

http://arborheights.wikispaces.com/

Mrs. Abernethy's Global Gorillas (5th grade?)

http://globalgorillas.wikispaces.com/

Hobbitalk - Home

http://hobbitalk.wikispaces.com/

I'm jazzed about stumbling across this wiki because I just read the book to my class for the first time. This wiki is not only a great sample, but it is a wonderful resource!

WEEK 6, #15: Copyright, Creative Commons, and What's Coming

Moodle post after this assignment

Okay, so I had this entry completely written and Safari quit on me. Arrgh! I always tell my students to work offline and then cut-and-paste to the online venue, just to avoid this very problem. Cheap reminder.

As a teacher, my primary interest in this course is centered around how to teach 2.0 to kids in an integrated and meaningful way. To that end, I chose to approach Thing 15 from a more practical teaching perspective rather than a reflective one. Basically, I modified the assignment to fit my agenda. But hey, that’s critical thinking, right?!

Guiding 10- and 11-years olds through the very abstract practicalities of copyright, fair use, and plagiarism is tricky, at best. I found the Disney spoof video clip to be highly entertaining, and I thought that it would be an effective hook to begin the discussion with my students in September. Happily, I believe that I’m going to have access to some YouTube videos through our district server, so I will probably be able to use it.

Creative Commons seems a bit daunting. I got the idea but, again, I’m thinking about it in the context of mentoring 5^th graders. I’m attracted to the idea of teaching kids to modify image searches so that they are about to locate material with CC attributes. The instructions for modifying a Google search proved overly complicated. Yahoo, on the other hand, has an elegant solution for filtering image searches with Creative Commons attributes under its Advanced Search menu: simply check a box. Now, that is something I can teach a 10-year-old!

Creative Commons: http://creativecommons.org/

Yahoo image search: http://images.search.yahoo.com/ [choose options, advanced search]

I took a gander at the Lessig blog and followed a link to the CTAP4 Cyber Safety Project page on piracy and plagiarism. There, I came across helpful links to curriculum guides for 3-5 grade and middle school, which I intend to use with my students in September. I think that covering this material early will set high and clear expectations for the students’ use throughout the year. Components of this curriculum will give the kids something to work on at the beginning of the year while gmail ids are being set up by their parents. I think I’ll also a link to Cyber Tree House to my blog because I think the kids would enjoy the site, plus it reinforces smart use.

http://www.b4ucopy.com/kids/B4UCopy-Kids-Teachers-Guide.pdf

http://www.b4ucopy.com/kids/B4UCopy-MiddleSchool-Teachers-Guide.pdf

http://www.cybertreehouse.com/

All in all, this is a confusing arena for kids. Hopefully, these ideas will help!

WEEK 6, #14: Technorati and tags

Right now I'm feeling pretty frustrated. I've been trying for three days to join Technorati, and I keep getting an error message. Arrgh! I even tried accessing the site from a variety of browsers, as well as from a pc (I use a mac).

When I search posts, I get several returns for Technorati directory listings, none of which seem applicable, and one return for Videos about Classroom Learning 2.0. Searching tags results in two unrelated directory listings, and searching the Blog directory resulted in the following error message:

Doh! The Technorati Monster escaped again. We're currently experiencing backend issues and are working to resolve them as quickly as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

While I appreciate the Simpson-esque humor, I'm very frustrated with the site, overall, at this point. I'm also questioning how much uncontrolled exposure I want for my blog. I do like the tagging function overall as an organizational tool, but I want to keep it confined to space that I am responsible for. It seems to me that once I start using tagging to promote my blog, then I have to manage the tagging regularly and keep it current, and I don't need one more thing on my "to do" list!

Again, I remain frustrated with this site, which I feel like I have tried over and over to access. That's just the way of things, sometimes.

WEEK 6, #13: Tagging and Del.icio.us

I had been searching for resources on colonial craftsmen, specifically bakers, when I began this assignment.  I wasn't having much luck searching with Google, but del.icio.us was very helpful.  I was able to find several links and draw on other people's search efforts.  Using del.icio.us as a tool is great because it means that I don't need to recreate the wheel every time I want to search.

Additionally, because I use several computers, I like the fact that I can access my bookmarks from any of them.  Very convenient!  Another idea I like is using tags to develop a collection of sites to review with my class.  It is quick and convenient.  I would also be interested in subscribing to the bookmarks of a select few colleagues so we can share resources -- especially our librarian!

I have a del.icio.us account that I had forgotten about.  Now, I'm beginning to wake it up and use it, again!  Why am I bothering to use my traditional bookmarks, with all of their limitations?!  Of course, that's one thing about the amount of technological resources we have at hand:  there is too much to remember, sometimes.

I looked at the network badge feature and at first I thought, "I'm not up for that, yet"  because many of my bookmarks seemed personal.   I had to do some housecleaning on my del.icio.us account, but then I added the badge to my blog, just so I can get a feel for it.  I want to think more about how I feel about adding it to my blog, though, because I'm uncomfortable with it.

WEEK 5, #12: Roll Your Own Search Tool

Incredibly easy to use, Rollyo allowed me to set up a customized site list in about 20 minutes.  I didn't need to read a bunch of instructions because the site was designed in such a way that compiling the list was intuitive.

I created a searchroll for Body Systems to support one of my beginning-of-the-year science units.  This was a particularly important topic for a closed search because the searching the topic lends itself to students accidently stumbling onto inappropriate material or sites blocked by our county office of education.

In the right column, I have added a Rollyo search bar, which contains the body systems links and allows me to search my blog, as well.

WEEK 5, #11: Web 2.0 Award Winners

onesentence.org

Clever, diverting, addicting.  This site is everything I love and hate about the web.  

http://docs.google.com

I can't say enough about this product.  I have used in in my 5th grade classroom all year long and it is fantastic.  It allows kids to work on a document at home and at school, without carrying a flash drive back and forth.  It also allows several students to work on one document together, which is how writing really works in the real (aka non-school) world.  What I have liked the most about GoogleDocs, however, is that it has revolutionized writer's workshop.  Kids invite me to their documents and then we are able to talk about them online.  I can leave notes for the author, and vis versa.  Best of all, if a student accidently erases or deletes work, every single revision of the document is available to be recalled.  I LOVE this product!

http://www.go2web20.net/

I looked up and down the award winner list to find something that I don't currently use that would be particularly useful to me.  I came across this site, which is a wealth of information about web 2.0 applications -- a web application index!

I signed up with a discussion group on ning -- image, it was a Classroom 2.0 site.  Although I understand the need to try new projects, I feel like I am getting spread too thin.  Just for this class I am writing my blog, checking colleague's blogs, and posting on moodle.  In my life, I facebook, twitter, manage google reader, skype, and email (3 separate accounts).  And I'm sure I've forgotten something!   When I was checking Twitter this morning, I noticed a posting via TweetDeck, so I investigated it.  TweetDeck, at first glance, looks like an interface to manage social networking, so I'll probably look into using it.  If only someone would develop a product that pulls everything together in one place, that would be a godsend.

WEEK 5, #10: Image Generators

ImageChef.com Word Mosaic

ImageChef.com Poetry Blender

ImageChef.com Sketchpad

ImageChef.com was fun and I think that kids would enjoy augmenting projects with crazy images. I didn't have a lot of success with Comic Strip Generator, mostly because I couldn't right click to save the image. That was disappointing, especially after I had found an ominous image of Gandalf.

WEEK 4, #9: Education Feeds

I'm definitely suffering from information overload, at this point.  I went crazy adding feeds to my reader, then realized that I don't want to look at so much material -- it's too overwhelming.  So, I went back and focused on what I did want, and ended up with a feed from the New York Times Sunday Book Review, and four specific feeds from the California Academy of Sciences.  

I found it frustrating to use feed search services and, instead, I went to sites that I frequent and looked for available RSS feeds.  This worked for me, much better.  Also, because I like to have information in one place, I decided not to put a RSS feed on my blog, but to link to my reader, instead.  For the purpose of the web 2.0 blog, this makes the most sense, for me.  I can see, however, how a direct RSS feed could really support a blog, if the topic were related to its content.

WEEK 4, #8: RSS Feeds

I'm set up my RSS aggregator on Google Reader and have the following feeds in place:

*CTA

*Edutopia

*Stories N Stuff with Mr. T. (blog)

*CMC (blog)

*55fiction.com

Using the reader is pretty nifty because it lets me see everything in one place.  I never seem to keep up with CTA or CMC news, so having one-stop-shopping will help me with that.  The only issue I can see here is that I'll get distracted by all of the material there is to read and end up not keeping up with other commitments.  Like anything else on the internet, it requires self-control and imposing limits on my online time.  I tend to lose myself online by reading just one more article, and looking at just one more website, and reading just one more email.  I need to have balance.

WEEK 3, #7: Blog About Technology

Since my son's gone to college on the opposite coast, this has become one of my favorite applications.  I like being able to chat together, Jetson's-style. I think about how, when I went away to college, it was hard to share the one pay phone on my floor, and I would go months without seeing my family, so I was really disconnected.  Cell phones, computers, and Skype have changed all that.   

One of my best friends now works at the American School in Qatar, and she rang me up while I was working today.  With Skype, distance doesn't diminish my relationships the way it used to.

 When I first explored Facebook, I felt like a voyeur in my kids' world.  And, while it's assumed that most kids facebook these days, I love that more people my age are joining.  In the last month I've reconnected with a college friend and my nephew, plus I have all sorts of adults from my community that I'm friends with.  My initial reaction was that it was impersonal and superficial, but I've found that it is another great way to keep connected to people in this crazy-paced world we live in.  I can keep up to date with what friends are doing, and it seems like no time at all has passed when we get together.

I'm trying to figure out Twitter.  I think that if I used a Blackberry, it would make more sense because I could stay more current.  As it is, I have to log in on my computer to keep up. This doesn't take much time, but it has become one more thing to do.  At this point I'm following a few individuals and sites that I'm interested in, such as my local independent bookstore and a local author.  It startled me, though, when I got a message that someone was following me; now I feel pressured to have something to say!

I added my comment to Portals to Learning, thing 7: http://janertl2.blogspot.com/. Hopefully, my friend Jane will set up a Twitter id and explore Twitter with me.

WEEK 3, #6: Flickr fun and mashups

Okay the trading cards are great.  I made this one of my daughter using FD Toys' Trading Card Maker.  Coming across this application now seems like kizmit because I just ordered a bunch of trading card-sized watercolor paper for class pro

jects.  I think the kids will like making trading cards in a variety of mediums; this application will be a great addition to that project.

Another idea I have for using the trading cards is as an initial tech project at the beginning of the year, kind of an adaptation of the traditional "How I Spent My Summer" exercise.  I need to think more about this, however, because it requires kids to be set up to use online applications, which is a very involved process.

I also tried FD Toy's Captioner on this old prom picture.  Since my students LOVE making comic books, this would probably be a big hit.  Adding the bubbles was easy, and I liked the optional stamps.   The only downside I could find is that I could not scale the bubbles; they're one standard size.  That was a little frustrating to work with.  

This image was made using FD Toys' Bead Art.  It was kind of fun to play around with, and it was tricky to get the bead color just the way I wanted it.  I was surprised at how much the image was influenced by the selection of the bead color.  I ended up going with a dark purple because it emphasized the shape of the mini and minimized the background in this photograph.  I think that this is a good application to know about, but I wouldn't want it see it overused.  The effect becomes tiresome.

WEEK 3, #5: Explore Flicker

Flickr is pretty easy to use. It's intuitive and navigating the site is clear. I wasn't able to link to the URL to add my picture to the blog, but I was able to imbed the html. I explored Flickr and had a passing interest in groups, because I thought it would be a good way to share photos with my students' parents, but I don't want to put myself in the position of managing another product. Managing a blog is already a lot of work! Using Flickr, I added this photo of my son on the river, which originally came from a cell phone image:

The product I really like is PicasaWeb. It is easy to use and works cleanly with blogger, probably because it is a product managed by Google. Its album sharing is straight forward, and I had an easier time adding photos to my blog. Below are some pictures I added from a fish dissection activity my 5th graders recently did as part of our school-wide Oceans Week:

From 2009 Fish Dissection

From 2009 Fish Dissection

From 2009 Fish Dissection

WEEK 2, #4: Register Your Blog

I'm having a little trouble understanding how to register my blog.  I am unclear about how to locate the online registration form provided by my district, so I've emailed Jane the Librarian Teacher (I'll never be able to call her anything else, now), and sent an email to CSLA 2.0 Team asking for clarification.  I'm going to keep on working while I wait for a reply.  

Next day: I registered my blog with CTAP, at the suggestion of  Jackie Siminitus @ csla2team@yahoo.com.  I provided my blog's address, so I'm just going to wait and see what happens next!

Curriculum Connections:
Take a look at some of these teacher blogs:
8th grade history teacher
High School teacher in Arizona
Kindergarten class blog

When I saw this I wondered how kindergarteners blogged. Silly me, it was a brilliant newsletter blog.  I took a look at this kindergarten blog and liked it enough to recommend it to my friend and colleague, Kim.  I offered to help her set up something similar, if she's interested in setting up a newsletter blog, like this one, next year.  This type of blog would probably not be a good method of communication with parents for me because many 5th grade parents wouldn't bother to check it.  In kindergarten, the parents are substantially more involved and hungry for information; by 5th grade, they're ready to take a break -- and they often do!

Take a look at some of these school librarian/administrator blogs:
Assistant Superintendent Blog in New York
High School Librarian in Pennsylvania
Alaskan Librarian

Take a look at some of these student blogs:
Fifth grade student in China
Abby, 7 years old in Colorado
Newly Ancient, 15 year old blogger

WEEK 2, #3: Create Your Own Blog

Oops!  I didn't read carefully enough and I set up my blog so I could write about Thing #1 and Thing #2.  No harm, though.  

I was watching Pirates of the Caribbean while I was working, and Johnny Depp (aka Capti'n Jack Sparrow) kept saying, "Saavy?"  I thought to myself, "Saavy? Yeah, that's what my goal is." Hence, my blog name.

While I was making my second post, I played around a bit with adding images.  The post ended up looking like a story from Highlights magazine, but it was fun.  It also brought to mind the question of whether or not it's o.k. to use images without crediting its source.  

Creating the Avatar was a blast.  While I experimented with the scarlet red dress and high heels, I decided on something more real, my perfect day.  It was a little creepy to create myself, but I was able to find the right hair, glasses, everything!   In addition to exporting it for use in my blog, I downloaded the smaller version of my avatar to use as my picture on Twitter.  That was helpful, because all of the pictures I had of me on my computer were too big!

Curriculum Connection:  Start a book discussion blog -- it is a library and language arts favorite. Start one today and then branch out into other topics such as pro/con topics of interest.  

My class's book blog started me down this whole Web 2.0 path last year.  I began it not knowing what I was doing, and my students and I learn together as we go.  The reason I began it was because my students HATED to write reading responses, but they loved to write anything on the computer.  Now kids post, once or twice a month, about self-selected books they are reading, or about their book club books.  The blog also has links to other items of interest, including blogs, websites, and student photographs.

Right now, the blog's becoming unwieldy, and I need to make some choices about how to manage it better.  I've removed most of the slideshows and have unpublished some of the older posts.  This is an area I really need to learn more about.  Our book blog can be seen at http://maggie-kidstalkbooks.blogspot.com/.

WEEK 1, #2: Lifelong Learning

The easiest habit for me to follow is that every obstacle is a learning opportunity.  Unless I'm overly tired, which lead me to become frustrated easily, I enjoy working through problems and see them as an opportunity to improve myself.

Of the 7 1/2 Habits, the most difficult for me is to begin with the end in mind.  While this works for me sometimes, for example when I'm taking a class and my goal is to complete it, usually I prefer a more organic approach to learning.  I like the distraction that I experience as I work online: check , browse , or order something from . For me, it's all connected and moves me along the path of learning about the Web.  For example, I was watching Morning Joe  this morning while I worked on a class. Everyone on t.v. was talking about .  So, I went to Twitter and joined.  I have no idea what to do with it, yet, but playing around with it is taking me somewhere.  If I were focused more acutely on my learning goals, I would have worked on my class and missed a learning opportunity (plus a lunch invitation). All of that said, the Learning Contract isn't for me.

WEEK 1, #1: About

Well, I read all of the information, sent my notification email to request a book, signed up for units through Fresno, and started this blog.

Since we're asked to credit CSLA, I added a photo gadget to the sidebar with a "thank you" caption.  I also put a link list on and added the Classroom Learning 2.0 blog, for easy access.

I'm pretty excited to begin, and have several questions.  What's an avitar?  I thought that is was a game character, but I guess I'm going to find out exactly what it is.

Okay, I just stumbled across the Learning 2.0 for Teens, and it looks much more fun!  I want to use a comic strip generator, too!  Oh, well!