IPads

While taking this Web 2.0 class, I realized quickly that I did not know as much as I thought I did. By working in at IT department I thought I was keeping up with technology. However, there is so much out there, I guess it’s hard to stay abreast of everything. I’ve come a long way thought, heck, four months ago I couldn’t define Web 2.0.
Another things that I need experience with a IPad. Recently, at an IT conference, I was wishing I had brought my laptop for taking notes. But as I looked about the auditorium, I saw that a lot of attendees had IPads. I was thankful I didn’t have my laptop. It would have seemed old fashioned and I probably would have been embarrassed. I’m sure the employees and students at my school have some already and my staff and I need to know how to support them. I’m putting in a request for one tomorrow…

Motorcycles and Social Media

What does a Harley Davidson motorcycle and social media have in common? You may think, “nothing”. However, my husband, who doesn’t know how to log onto a computer, found Craigslist about three years ago. In his daily searching for a bargain, he found my soon to be, motorcycle. He even sent an email to the seller to inquire about it.

My husband bought this for me as a surprise for our 20^th wedding anniversary. He woke me up early on a work day and asked me to walk to the barn with him. I thought he had lost his mind and told him so. I finally agreed to go and found that beautiful bike. I was soon out on our little rural road riding it, still in my PJ’s. Not many people have seen this picture, so don’t spread it around. ;) Yes, that’s the title. It’s mine!!

Technology and Small Children

As most of you know, I have three grandsons. They are all 2 ½ years old. It is amazing to watch them use technology. All three of them can use a cell phone. Although they can’t read, they know with button to press to call Pa, Momma, or Daddy. They can even answer a call! They recognize ring tones too. They know who is calling before I do. Even as small boys, they knew what a remote was and even though they couldn’t pronounce the word, they knew that it controlled the TV. Isn’t that amazing?

I know this is because it's all they have known. When they are with me, they get to use a computer. They know how to use a mouse and click on their shortcuts that I have made for them. They understand that by clicking on one they get to see Mickey Mouse, or by clicking on another they can see Sponge Bob.

Technology has brought us so far. I can’t imagine what these boys will have access to when they are grown.

Final Fun Group Project - Team Mac!

For our final group fun project, our class split into two teams to do a spinoff of Top Chef. Our project started out with Lauren introducing our plan with chocolate and bacon. Her video was sent to Justin, who showed us how to melt the chocolate. He sent it to Tasha and she made smores. I made a BLT and sent the video to Jenny. She made a wonderful summer time drink. Ray completed our meal with good ole Lays potato chips. The video turned out great! You can view it here.

How Things have Changed

When I got up this morning, I was thinking about how I used to get a cup of coffee and read the newspaper before starting my day. Things have changed so much. I don’t subscribe to the newspaper any more, I read it online. And not only do I ready our local paper, but also check out The Winston-Salem Journal and The News and Observer from Raleigh, NC. Another thing has changed with getting my news online. I don’t read in-depth anymore, but just scan the headlines. If something catches my attention, I’ll read it, but it’s nothing like I use to do. I used to know who was engaged, who got married, who died, and everything else that was going on in our community. Now I get that info from Facebook.

I miss my paper. So much for relaxing.…

Group Serious Project

For this project I did a tutorial on using igoogle. It is a very convenient tool to use for accessing your social media content from one personal web portal. As our social media tools grew throughout the semester I needed an easy way to keep up with all my accounts. Igoogle has been so helpful. No longer do I have to open up several taps or windows to see my content, it’s now all located on one page. You can see my tutorial here. I hope it’s helpful.

Social Media Policies

Recently, I had the honor of working to create a social media policy. I did a lot of research to see what items needed to be covered in our policy. After reading many articles, I found one that really stood out. Mashable.com had a list of “must haves” that needs to be covered in all social media policies. Although it was a group effort in creating our policy, we all agreed these items and many more must be covered:

1.     Introduce the purpose of social media

2.     Be responsible for what you write

3.     Be authentic

4.     Consider your audience

5.     Exercise good judgment

6.     Understand the concept of community

7.     Respect copyrights and fair use

8.     Remember to protect confidential & proprietary info

9.     Bring value

10.  Productivity matters

We have many employees who want to incorporate social media into their departments. I hope they do. Everyone in those positions has been advised to ready the policy and attend a training session. I think our employees will benefit if they take advantage of the resources available to them.

Individual Serious Project

My individual serious project will be a Flickr slideshow of one of my grandsons. I want to captures his pictures from birth to one year and then his two year old picture. Since I don’t have copies of all the pictures, I will be gathering some of them from my daughter’s Facebook page. (with her permission of course) The pictures I do have in my possession must be scanned into a digital format.

Once this course is over I will definitely change the security on the slideshow that will allow only my family to see these pictures and present it to my daughter. This will be for her.

IBM is 100 Years Old

I read in a magazine recently about IBM celebrating an anniversary. They turned 100 years old on June 16^th. IBM formed from a merger of the Computer Scale Company of America and the International Time Recording Company. The business was renamed to International Business Machines in 1924 when the new owner, Thomas J. Watson took over . Hence the name, “Watson” for the computer that played on Jeopardy. Who knew?....

IT Conference

I attended an IT Conference a couple weeks ago. When I got home, I videoed my thoughts about events that took place there and I forgot to upload it to YouTube.

It's a little late, but here are my thoughts on a discussion we had about social media.



Great Resources

Today on Twitter I saw a great resource for copyright-friendly images. I know we had a previous assignment to find a site about images that could be used for free. Just bookmarking this site will be so helpful in the future. It looks like a one-stop site for all your graphical needs.

The disclaimer is very simple. “Most of the images in the collections below include images with a variety of less restrictive licensing. Though students may not need to ask permission to use them when publishing on the Web for educational purposes, they should cite these images unless otherwise notified.”

I sure wish the tweet had come in a few days earlier. This would have been a great place to find one source to blog about for a previous assignment.

Being a good leader

Do you ever wonder what it takes to be a good leader? This video describes what it takes and how important it is to have your first follower. I never thought of it this way, but getting your first follower is the biggest step in becoming a great leader. Take a look...

QR Codes

As this semester progressed, I begin noticing Tweets and email messages relating to QR codes. I never heard of them before and thought that when I got time I would do some research to see what they were. I never took the time to do that until this past weekend.

While at Lowes on Saturday, I purchased a house plant and a few other much needed items. When I got home, I removed the tags from the items I had purchased and threw them in the trash. As I was throwing them away, something caught my eye. It was a QR code on the houseplant tag. Still not knowing what it was all about, I went to the computer and googled “QR codes”.

It seems these codes are the newest rage for merchants, advertisers, and professionals. QR stands for “Quick Response”. They are the equivalent of bar codes and can be scanned by an iphone app. They can also be used on business cards to capture contact information from someone and automatically enter it into your contact list. How neat is that?

The code on my plant contains information about caring for the plant and a link to a website to learn even more.

Wikipedia has some great information about these QR codes if you want to learn more about them.

Easter 2011

Easter at our house was great this year. We had a three day weekend and that was wonderful. I made Easter baskets for our three grandsons and our three great-nephews. It's always so much fun when we get our whole family together. When that happens, we have eighteen people at our house!

Our little boys are so much fun. Their ages are from two and a half through seven years old. Watch my video to see what I did for them for Easter.

Usable Non-copyright Content

I found a great website that has tons of free photos. The photos are free, but the owner, Sam Mugraby at http://www.photos8.com/ asks for a link back to his site if using his images for personal use. For commercial use, he asks that you include the source of the images and keep the name unchanged. If you don’t want to give credit, then you can pay a release fee to use the images. What I really like about this site is that there is a great “Terms of Use” page that leaves no questions unanswered about copyrighting. Another plus is that this site contains really great images that can be used on personal websites. I'll mark this site as a favorite. Maybe I'll be able to use some of these images in future classes.

Here is a sample of his work.

Photo courtesy of Photos8.com

Wish Trip

My husband wants us to ride our Harley Davidson motorcycles to the beach this year. So, I have plotted our route. My intentions are to stay off of the interstate highways. This is the route we have taken before when driving our car. I tried very hard to insert an image on one of the pins. It can be done, but I'll need more experience with HTML before I can do it. (I think I am so close.)

View Wish Trip in a larger map

Geotagging

I created my Flickr geotag map. I tagged my  images with asuweb20, then searched for “asuweb20” and found all of our pictures. I love this technology. I used the Attribution-NoDerivs Creative Commons license for my photos. I would like to get credit for my work. I will be using Flickr more when I have time.

What amazing technology Blaise Aguera y Arcas has developed. He works for Microsoft and is the architect of Bing Maps. He has built dreamscapes using still photos from the web. This technology leads to the ability to drive down the road, take a picture of a landmark and be able to find other attractions that are located nearby. After viewing his video, I visited www.photosynth.net to view some of the images. They are amazing! It makes me want a professional camera.

EXIF stands for Exhangeable image file format and is basically the properties of your image. By checking the meta data on your image you will see the camera model, shooting time and date, shutter speed, aperture, light metering, exposure, ISO speed, image size, and many other things. GPS information can also be included with up high end cameras that will list the location of where the image was taken.

I’m not so sure I like the idea of the GPS coordinates included in the EXIF data for my pictures that I put online. We have no privacy or anonymity now. I think it is dangerous to give this information to everyone. When doing the geotagging within Flickr, I had the option to pick the located of where my image was taken. I choose not to pin-point the exact location. Not so with the cameras with GPS. Smartphone camera also have this feature. For safety sake, you can turn this feature off. If not, any photo you upload to the Internet will contain a road map to your door. Scary stuff…

Archived Newspapers

A coworker of mine shared a link with me for archived newspapers. I am so excited to find these resources. Our local paper, The Mount Airy News has their collection here and I can’t wait to explore many of the editions listed. Their collection dates back to August, 1923.

I have to stay focused now. I could browse those newspapers for days. I love that kind of thing. I’ll make myself stay away until this semester end. Wish me luck!

Parking

I just received my new edition of Community College Journal and found a very interesting article on campus parking. I know we have an issue with parking during the first few weeks of every new semester. Every space is full, cars are on the curbs and the grass. I hope that someday we’re able to have a parking deck. And, I’m all for assigned parking for employees.

The article, “Parking Smarter” talks about how community college enrollment is up due to increasing expense of attending a four year school, military personnel re-entering the private sector, and displaced workers changing careers. No longer do we have traditional high school students. So, parking has become a huge issue. Not to worry though, you can hire a qualified parking professional. Who knew!: There are professionals for everything now days. I was surprised to learn about the existence of these professionals. Some are even specialist in community college parking. Oh well...I guess “there’s an app for that” too.

Office Tour

I have a quick tour of my office in this video. This was filmed after a very long day at work during the first day of on-line registration at our school.

Fun Group Project

Wow, this video titled “A Day at the Office” was great! I sure wish I had thought of this. The group of people I work with would have done this. Since “fun” was a requirement for this project, I thought office pranks would be funny to do. Here’s an example. This one is a little extreme, but I could pull one off with my co-workers. Hiding the camera would be the hard part.

A lip sync/dancing video would be hilarious as a group project, but thank God we decided not to do one. I was afraid I would have to drop out of school! This Barbie Girl lip sync video reminded me of when my son and daughter were young teenagers. They did this song for me, Kevin did the lead and Kristin did the guy’s part. I sure wish I had videotaped it. They made me laugh so hard my sides hurt.

Resume Promo Blurb

Looking for the perfect social media candidate? Do you want help in getting your information into the hands of your customers and the world? Let me show you how I can promote your business to be the front runner in this Web 2.0 world in which we live! I love to blog and share information on Facebook, and Twitter. I am an energetic social media guru with outstanding writing skills and a strong desire to work in this field. Let me create and maintain your social presence today.

Internet Safety for Children

In a recent video I mentioned identity theft. This morning while getting ready for work, and listening to the local news channel on TV, I heard a report on how small children are now being targeted for identity theft. Facebook being the most popular way people share pictures of their kids and grandkids, criminals are capturing information about children and using that data to get credit cards with their names.

To help protect these kids, the report said to never give the child’s birth date and never ever give their full names They also said when posting pictures of children, not to have identifying locations in the background.

Makes you wonder don’t it? I love sharing my family pictures with my friends on Facebook. But is it worth putting our children at risk? Probably not…I may start cleaning out some of my albums today.

Junk Mail

I get so tired of dealing with junk mail. Even with everything I do online, I still get tons of credit card offers through the mail. That mail isn't something you can toss in the trash. See my video for how I handle it all.

Tie the Worlds Together

This has not been an easy assignment for me. I sent a friend request to a friend of a friend on Facebook. As weird as it may have sounded, she befriended me and agreed to meet with me to have a picture taken. We have talked several times on Facebook, but due to our busy schedules, have yet to meet in real life. I’ve been working extra-long hours the last few weeks and she has had a death in her family. Hopefully we will get together very soon. I’ll post a picture and add to this blog when that takes place.

Objectives Met?

I revisited an old blog entry for a list of my objectives. Here is what I wrote at the beginning of this class.

1. To get a better understanding of Web 2.0
2. To learn how to incorporate Web 2.0 technologies into education
3. To complete all assignments correctly and on time
4. Get to know my fellow classmates
5. Enjoy the journey

1.    My first objective was to get a better understanding of Web 2.0. I definitely have done this. I didn’t understand what Web 2.0 meant when we first started. It took a while to grasp the concept. But, with all we’ve done in this class, I know I have a better understanding. At least now I know what it is. Because I work in the IT field, I thought I was on top of technology, but this somehow got by me. I appreciate this class and all I have learned. Since I was recently appointed to the Technology Committee at my school, I’m glad this class came around when it did.

2.    Objective 2 has also been met. In this class my classmates and I will definitely be using Web 2.0 tools to collaborate on our upcoming projects as well as presenting them with the same tools to show off what we have learned. I have also been able to poll some instructions at my school to see if these tools are being used there. The use of this technology is being used more that I suspected. Many of requiring their students to blog about assignments, use videos to show what they have learned, and some are using twitter with their students.

3.     Objective 3 is still in progress. So far I have done a good job of completing my assignments on time. And, I think they have been done correctly. We’ll see how the next few weeks go…

4.    Objective 4 was to get to know my fellow classmates. By the nature of this class, there is no way this couldn’t have happened. With so much collaboration with my classmates, we have grown to know each other. The videos allows us to see and hear others. I think this has been the single most effective way to connect with my classmates.

5.    Objective 5 was to enjoy the journey, and a journey it has been. We’ve all come a long way. There has been so many time consuming assignments to complete. I didn’t understand at the beginning of the semester of how everything we have done ties in with another. It has been fun, and challenging.

I wouldn’t change any of my objectives at this point. I think I set realistic goals for this class and so far I am accomplishing them.