Friday, July 3, 2009

Thing 6: Mash-ups, Flicker apps and picture stuff

Wow, there sure is a lot to this flicker stuff. I looked at several of the sites and went through so many of these applications that make use of ficker or my own pictures. It could take days and weeks to go through all of this stuff. I particularly liked the calendar feature on bighugelabs.com.
I made a calendar page for myself.

How might I use this with my student teachers? I could produce a calendar of the fall semester months and try to put significant events on the calendar. The events would be related to school and thier student teaching responsibilities.

I would also like to show them the trading card feature because there are so many ways teachers of any grade might use the trading card idea.

Friday, June 19, 2009

Thing 5 - Flicker


As I have stated in my earlier blog, I play a lot. Golf is one of my hobbies. I started playing golf late in life because when you have children, there is always a shortage of both money and time. So I took up golf once my children were well on their way to college degrees. And now I wish I had taken it up much earlier and found a way to play golf with them.
My experience with Flicker was long and somewhat frustrating, but like golf, the more I worked at it the smoother the experience became. the difficulties I have sometimes are using the applications and importing those apps into the blog site. But I will work at that too.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Thing 3: Those Avatars

The avatar business is fun and easy, unless you are very picky. I'm not too choosy so after spending 30 minutes, I settled for whatever I had produced. I was able to import Mr M. to the right page, but later when I checked the avatar would not appear. Guess I'll have to work on that.

Thing 2 : Habits

Ok, I am writing my first blog. It is supposed to be about habits and the article we all read about lifelong learning. Learning comes easy for me. Not that I am smart, but because I am curious. The article defined learning as "acquiring a new skill or language." What about acquiring new information? It may not be a skill, but it may simply answer a question. Is that not learning also??

The easiest of these habits for me will be the "play" habit. If you notice, I may be one of the last to get started on this project. That's because I have been playing. I play a lot now because I am retired and I have lots of play time. I still work some, but it is less demanding and it is work of my choosing. I enjoy my work so much I could almost consider it play.

Probably the hardest habit is the one about setting goals. I see many applications for this technology I am about to learn, that I don't have a clear goal in mind just yet. For now my goal is to complete the "whole picture" and then see how I can apply it to my work and my play!