Thing 17 - Social Bookmarking

Before this assignment, I had never heard of the concept of "social bookmarking." After watching the tutorial videos provided, and spending some time exploring the websites I feel I have a better grasp of what social bookmarking websites, and Delicious in particular have to offer. As a prospective teacher, I feel that Delicious has something to offer me in staying organized. One of the tutorial videos mentioned how a browser's bookmark tab can get crowded and unorganized in a hurry. One of the nice things about Delicious is that one can tag websites in order to fit them into a specific category. This way a user can sort his favorite websites by category so that it is easier to find and use them in the future. I'm uncertain of how social bookmarking can be helpful in the classroom, but I can see it's use when preparing and organizing future lessons. Given that I wish to be a math teacher, I could tag certain sites based on the content and lessons they have to offer. If there is a website I feel is really strong on quadratic equations I could use the tags algebra, quadratic equations, etc. in order to group that site with similar sites in the future. This is certainly a tool I can see finding its way into my tool bag in the future.

Thing 16 - Organizing with Web 2.0

There are a lot of different organizational tools available on the Internet. The first one I explored was the iGoogle homepage. I wasn't aware of iGoogle's existence until this assignment so it was surprising to see that Google will be removing it on November 1, 2013. Goes to show how fast the Internet is evolving - in five years its replacement will probably be rendered irrelevant as well. Anyway, iGoogle was easy to use. I found a couple interesting gadgets to add to the original template that would theoretically reduce my time surfing the Web for news. However, I'll probably keep my old homepage because as I stated before, I kind of enjoying each site individually to see what is new. I suppose it's just my resistance to change.

Online calendars and to-do lists have a lot of potential for people who need to stay organized and have mobile access. Since these applications are online they can be accessed from a variety of different points. While I don't use an online calendar or to-do list at the moment, it would certainly increase my organizational skills, which at this point is limited to things I do and don't remember. Thankfully I remember most things which has decreased my incentive to use either online or traditional calendars. In the future when more and more things are on my plate, I will probably have no choice but to change how I organize.

One of the tools I found from the list was the PDFConverter website. One of the benefits of converting a file to a PDF is that those who open the file do not need to have Microsoft Word, or any other word processor in order to open and read the document. This could be helpful when I put my syllabus or letter to the parents on my website so that it can be easily accessed by both parents and students whenever there is a question about classroom expectations, grading policies, etc.

Thing 15 - The Wide World of Wikis

I am a big fan of several different wikis on the Internet. I think it's pretty awesome that there are wikis devoted to several different subjects and non-academic hobbies like video games. The most famous wiki of all is Wikipedia, and I'd imagine that everyone in our class has looked up at least one article on Wikipedia. Personally I can spend up to an hour just reading about different articles on the site. For example, I may see an article on the front page about some event in World War II. From there I may see another link within that article of something else I'm interested in and then open up another tab on my browser. By the end, it is not uncommon for me to have six or more tabs open from various articles I cared to learn more about. Although the productivity of doing this could be argued, I find that it's an easy way to let an hour or so go on by.

I'm not sure how I would use a wiki of my own creation. Being that my goal is to be a mathematics teacher, I'm not sure how it could work in the classroom, unless there was an assignment about the history of a famous mathematician and I wanted the class to upload their articles onto a classroom wiki. That doesn't mean there couldn't be use for third party wikis, although a couple of the math ones I looked at seemed to be incomplete. Perhaps in a couple of years they will have enough content to prove useful in the classroom.

Thing 14 - Flowcharts and Mind Maps

I have to admit that I am not the biggest fan of mapping out my ideas in the form of a flowchart or a mind map. I'm not entirely sure why that's the case, but I imagine it has to do with hating to have to do similar tasks in school and this dislike has carried over into my adult years. Anyway, I attempted to put aside my dislike for such things and give a couple of these websites a try.

While making my mind map, I found the bubbl.us site to be easy to use. While on there I created a little map that shows some of the different disciplines that one could take an interest in by using math. It was very simple to export my creation once I was finished and then add it to this blog right here.

In order to make a flowchart, I decided to use Gliffy. Gliffy had a lot more user options that bubbl.us did, which made it slightly more difficult to learn at first, but it also allows for the creation of a neater, more professional chart. While on Gliffy I decided to make a flowchart for the different outcomes that can happen to a batter in a baseball game. I spent a few minutes creating it, and once I was finished I found out that I could not save it unless I signed up for a 30 day free trial. Perhaps I could have just signed up, saved my work and then immediately cancelled my account, but I figured it wasn't worth whatever minute risk there was that I would be unable to cancel and I would be stuck with a perpetual bill I would never be able to end. Chance of happening? Probably really really close to 0. However, I figured it was just easier to mention that I made a flowchart and then slightly complain about the whole 30 day trial thing. Just take my word for it that it was the best flowchart I've ever made.

While exploring the sites it appears that flowcharts allow for greater organization than mind maps. Mind maps seem like they would be useful when trying to find relationships between ideas, or when trying to break down a big idea into several smaller ones. Flowcharts, on the other hand, allow the creator to show a linear progression of events and thoughts. It seems to me that mind maps may be more appropriate for initial brainstorming activities, while the flowchart would see its best use during the outline creation phase of a project or paper.

Thing 13 - Web-based Applications

The Zoho Writer application was fairly easy to use due to the fact that the layout of the toolbar seemed similar to that of Microsoft Word. I found it to be very convenient that it is possible to export a document created through Zoho as a Microsoft Word or Open Office document, or even a PDF if one so desired to do so.  I've had some previous experience exploring Google Drive, but I have never used it to create an actual document or project. Browsing around the different features offered in Google Drive, I noticed that it also contains that same ability to export a document as a different type of file. I created a spreadsheet in Google Drive that shows how the number 'e' can be computed by both summation and by its limit definition. The summation result is to the left, and the limit result is in the center, while I have the actual value of 'e' towards the right side of the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet can be found here. 

After messing around with each for a few minutes I determined that I preferred the Zoho applications more than the Google Drive ones, which honestly surprised me. I felt that Zoho had a cleaner presentation than Google did, which made it a little easier to find how to perform different tasks both the word processing and spreadsheet applications.

Students can have the ability to work collaboratively with Google Drive through the ability to easily share documents. If students are working on a group project, the document can be set up to be able to be edited by all members of the group so that everyone has equal access to participate in creating it.

Thing 12 - The Wonderful World of Google

I'm fairly certain everyone in our class and nearly everyone else in the world who has Internet access has used Google at some point in their lives. A great majority of that usage was probably spent looking up information that falls somewhere between fascinating and utterly pointless. I know my searches fall near both sides of that range. Anyway, Google has more to offer than an easy way to look up information. Two of the Google tools I chose to explore further were Google Calendar and Google Translate.

I had never used Google Calendar before today. In fact I don't think I've used a calendar or planner of any kind since I left high school so apparently I am an organizational mess. It was fairly simple to use so I decided to create a schedule of my obligations for the week of 10/14-10/20. In the future as I have more meetings, conferences, and various other events to attend I can see it becoming necessary to use something like Google Calendar on a daily basis in order to keep track of everything going on. I like the feature where you can chose to send email or text message alerts even up to 10 minutes before the event, although that seems to be cutting it pretty close at that point.

Next I spent a few minutes messing around with Google Translate. I decided to "borrow" an idea I saw from  The Brennan Breeze blog and translate my blog post in a different language. I decided to translate it into Icelandic because its alphabet looks somewhat similar to ours, but its arrangement makes it look nearly indecipherable when comparing it to the English we use. In the future this could be potentially helpful if there is an English Language Learner in the classroom, and then we could have some accommodations for words that he/she may still be learning in English. On a lighter note, I also gave it some thought about how it could be used as a potential April Fools joke to have an entire lesson written out in a different language. It may not be fully formed yet, but I still have a couple years to figure it out...

My Google Calendar

My Google Translate

Thing 11 - Finding Good Feeds

I found that the Google Blog Search was the easiest for me to use. The largest reason for that is most likely due to the fact that the blog search works similarly to the Google search engine so it was very familiar. While searching on Google Blog Search I found the dy/dan blog - a blog mostly on math education. I browsed around the blog for a few minutes and then found this post on expected value that piqued my interest. I enjoyed the post due to the applications that could be used in an introductory statistics class, and it is something that I will keep in mind if I am given the opportunity to teach a statistics class in high school.

The Edublog awards site was interesting to look through for a few minutes. I was able to find one math teacher blog while browsing through the best teacher blog nominees called f(t). One post that I found interesting had little to do with education, but rather predicting Facebook's growth rate with regression analysis.

My Technocrati search brought up a lot of similar blogs that I had found while searching Google, but I did find this neat blog that explained a number of math concepts. This could potentially be a helpful resource later in the classroom and for some of the projects we will work on in our EDUC 5540 class. I didn't find much of anything of interest with Topix so I suppose that was the hardest to use by default.