Facebook for Fogies

I was on Twitter again tonight, because like Amanda, I’m addicted. I saw a tweet with a link for  “facebook for fogies” and had to check it out. I found an article at Huffington Post by Steve Kettman. He is in the process of writing a book with advice for grandmas on how to use Facebook and other social media. Can you believe it?!!. We should all go there and add our “Grandma and Web 2.0” assignments. Maybe he could use some of our advice. Or better yet, maybe we should write a book…

Helpful videos in plain English

I just learn via Twitter, about a very interesting website call Common Craft. They sell a service of course, but have many “how-to” videos. They have many 3-minutes to help educate and explain complex subjects in easy to understand plain English. By clicking on the “videos” link you can find lots of information about social media, RSS feeds, Twitter, and many other things related to technology. I thought this could be a very helpful site and wanted to share.

Private Universe

Our assignment was to answer the following questions. What causes the seasons/temperature differences on earth thru the year? And, what causes the phases of the moon (from new moon to full moon)? My answers are not important.

The video we watched stated that despite a lifetime of the very best education most graduate students do not have a good understanding of science.

One thing in particular that stood out to me in the video was the teacher saying that her smartest ninth grade student only understood the season and moon phases after she held the models in her hands. This tells me two things, one is that students don’t get the hands-on and individual attention they need to learn anything. Our teachers are faced with teaching so much in a little amount of time with way too many students And two, is that all students learn differently. This just emphasized the fact that as teachers we need to pay attention to learning styles.

There's an app for that

While I like keeping up with the news and world events, I find it hard sometimes. I get home from work late and miss the 6:00 news or miss reading the current days newspaper. I do have my favorite websites that I visit, but some days just don't get around to it. Today I found an article on on ComputerWorld about how to keep up with events in case of a natural disaster. There you can find a list of several apps that can be used to learn what to do, where to meet, even an app on how to give CPR if you are in a disaster. I wasn't surprised to find Twitter and Google in the listing. We have all learned and heard how social networking is changing the way the world communicates.

Embedding Content

I added some content in my Classroom 2.0 site. Embedding was simple enough. Most sites allow you to grab the code for doing this. I really like this feature. On Classroom 2.0, I embedded my YouTube video on Pano Units.

 Here is the link for my video that is embedded on my Classroom 2.0 site.
http://www.classroom20.com/video/rlhvideo5wmv-1

Oh gosh!, this is getting complicated...

What License To Use

If I had a great idea, photo, song (that will never happen), video, or anything else that  would warrant copyrighting, how I wanted it used would determine how I would license. If I thought it had the potential to be a big money maker, then I definitely would use the most restrictive licenses.

According Creative Commons, there are six level of license. They are, 1) Attribution, 2) Attribution-ShareAlike, 3) Attribution-NoDerivs, 4) Attribution-NonCommercial, 5) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike and 6) Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs.

While searching for a photo to use here I found this link with public domain pictures. I was able to find many photos that are free for commercial and personal use. They only ask if you use one of their photos that you link back to their site. So, I chose this picture. It reminded me my daffodils that are blooming in my flower garden.

http://www.publicdomainpictures.net/view-image.php?image=12558&picture=daffodils

I think the photographer chose to share his photo on this site to gain exposure and popularity. The information on the website says this will help with your photographic and graphic skills.

Wikimedia Review

I’ve never used  Wikipedia much in the past, and I was surprised by how much it has to offer.  Trying not to get so side-tracked,  I selected Wikinews and Wikiquote as my two projects to explore.

My husband says that I am obsessed with news programs. I thought I was only keeping up with current events. I realize that Wikinews is written by anyone that wants to contribute, but I will probably add this site to my list of places to check.  I just read their top story today, which is about the earthquake in Japan. It seems to be up to date as compared to what I’ve seen on MSNBC this morning. I was surprised to find that that are sub-projects to Wikinews. Audio Wikinews, which is a project to create audio-based Wikinews content. It was not current. Two more sub-projects I found are, News Briefs and Spoken Wikinews. Neither of these are current.

Wikiquote is another site I probably will visit often. I love that you can find quotes by people, productions like films, literary works, and television. You have the option to browse lists, proverbs, and themes and alphabetically.  I could stay there all day…moving on. While looking for quotes from the movie “Sling Blade”, I did fine a stub, which is disappointing. A co-worker of mine can quote that movie almost word-for-word. I was hoping to pick up a few lines.

I like the wiki communities and I'm interested to see how it will grow. I hope there is enougth interest to keep all the projects active.

Couch Surfing

I created an account Couch surfing. Here is the link for my profile. I was very hesitant about joining this site. You need to add so much personal information, and I can understand why, especially if you really plan on travelling or hosting strangers in your home. My husband and I both agreed that we wouldn’t do either. I did not offer my couch, but only “coffee or a drink”. Maybe sometime in the future I’ll meet up with someone within the site. When I get time to explore the site more I might be more comfortable with it, just not now.

Chirbit

Chirbit is a tool that allows you to record and share your voice or audio files. Setting up a free account was no problem. It took a while, but I finally was able to do three recordings. I'm not sure why I would use this site. I'm not really fond of hearing a recording of my voice. I also struggled with getting the links to my YouTube and Flickr accounts to display correctly. The links are there, but they are not what I wanted. I think I need to brush up on HTML. I ended up spending more time on this than I should have.

Flickr

Flickr is great. It is easy to use and allows you to store and share pictures with others. Setting up an account and uploading pictures is very easy. I like that Flickr has easy to read, common sense guidlines to follow. My favorite is "Do play nice". I think it's great that I can have access to my pictures anytime and anywhere I go. I can just log in to one website to access them. No longer will I have to pull out the digital camera or insert an SD card into a computer to show someone my pictures. Life is good...

YouTube Account

This was a quick and easy assignment since I already had a YouTube account. I only had to edit my info and add links to Flickr and Chirbit. I've been using YouTube for quite a while to find videos that suit my interest. I don't necessarily like having my own videos there for the whole world to see, but it is getting easier. Some of my co-workers and I were talking about it today and one of them said, "If you can imagine it, you can find it on YouTube".

Wild Fires

Living in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains is always interesting. Today I came home to a nearby wildfire and captured some of it on video. This is the 2nd one in two weeks. Hopefully, the fire department will get this one extinguished quickly.

Follow up on Desktop Virtualization

I finally made a video showing the Pano Units in one of our classrooms on campus.