By George, I think I've got it (for the most part...)

Spent the day putting my money where my mouth is....reminds me of a joke about the big-mouthed momma frog and alligator...never mind. I was so excited to find out that I had to work through Photo Story, Audacity, Flickr, Irfan View, Power Point, Incompetech, TeacherTube, MovieMaker and a plethera of image generators. Overall, I worked fast and furiously to try to complete SOMETHING, ANYTHING that I could share. Must get rid of this perfectionist thing I have going on...anyways, I did try to post my audio file on the Learning 2.0 wiki and was unsuccesful....s-l-o-wwwwwwwwwww. Just shoot me. SO I gave up. Here is something though...just to prove that I really did something. OK. Never mind. Error in uploading. We have not had much success in uploading today :(

I started my Freshman Orientation presentation by gathering a few photos to construct a flipchart. That took a while because I wanted a mixture of backgrounds. I did find a good reggae mp3 to play in the background. So I really spent my my finding all of the components and didn't come up with a finished product. There's a partial movie, partial powerpoint, partial photostory - all saved in one file so I can pull from it to make a smashing orientation presentation.

WHEN I finish the flipchart, I'll post it here. Wish me luck.....
Toodles!

Yes, I'm still alive and well

Have you missed me? I can't believe my last post was in MARCH. It's like I finished my 23 things and just disappeared, eh? Truthfully, I didn't abandon USING the cool toys I picked up in 23 Things - I just haven't blogged about it. AND I've been reading. Actually READING. Those of you that know me well know that I'm always whining about how little time I have to read. Well, let me tell you. I've been working on that...I just finished Eaters of the Dead by my boy Michael Crichton. It was enlightening and disturbing at the same time. I read it in a day and find it so interesting that it all started on an argument that Beowulf could be interesting if the story was told in an interesting way. I agree. Something else I learned is that the Antonio Banderas movie The 13th Warrior was based on Crichton's Eaters of the Dead. Now I have to go rent it..TTFN

THING 23 - Good Night, Gracie

It's not the end - it's the beginning, right? I learned SO MUCH. I'm slowly but surely getting over the overwhelmed feeling. I don't have to do it all! I just need to be open to doing it all. It won't all work for me but I have to remember our students are living it. Right now. Social networking is EVERYTHING to them and we had better jump in or we're going to miss the chance to make an impact. I am walking away (see me? My Avatar does have on sensible heels, even though they are cute) with a considerable amount of new info to process. I need to figure out how to weave these tools into my life. I'm optimistic. But I have to give myself a break if I don't take to some of these environments immediately or easily like I'm used to doing. I have to remember way back to Super Mario Brothers. I could not get past that stupid 2nd level but my 1st grader could. That really still drives me insane. I'm not good at most video games - only the racing games. But I still want a wii...

And at least I know how to hook up a data projector...so there! HA!!

Thing 22 - Ninging it

Ninging it. MUCH better than that atrocious MySpace thing I got sucked into by my college-aged children who insisted I have a page of my own. NEVER got into that scene. But I did get to peek in on their pages so it wasn't a total loss. Found out that my daughter liked to quote me on her MySpace page. Cute, you say?? Nope. She wasn't citing my quips of maternal knowledge and wisdom. Noooooo. She was telling the bajillion people that visit her page about the FUNNY things Mom said and DID - in detail. And NO I'm not going to tell you how to get to her page. But back to the task at hand. Ning. Like I said, MUCH better. Very low CREEPY factor. I hadn't set paramters on my now-removed MySpace page so I regularly got, shall we say, invitations to share my space. No thank you. But with a ning - I'm in a specific circle of "friends" - explored the Librarian nings and then a golf ning and now I'm thinking I'll start a ning of my own. Subject to be determined at a later date. I could see using a ning for a specific school project - like an inter-disciplinary project. It's a bit more cool than just a wiki or a blog, you know? :)

Thing 21 - Podcasting

In case you've been in a coma for last year, I guess you know how HOT vampire books are with the teens and adults alike. Steph Meyer started it - and now girl-falls-for-werewolf, boy-gets-the-vampire genre is exploding. We can't forget Buffy, though - she did for TV what Bella has done for reading. Anyways, there are so many people out there wanting to tell a story and I ran across it looking for new vampire writers. The author reads it herself - and for free. Smart marketing move? But BEWARE - it's a tad bit on the adult side. OK, more than a tad. But perhaps this will be one you could recommend to the older students and not necessarily put it on the shelf? We'll see...it's Forever Fifteen by Kimberley Steele

http://www.mediafly.com/Podcasts/Episodes/Chapter_1_Lucy_Gets_a_Detention

I've done a couple of podcasts of my own but I still can't get past hearing my own voice. It's creepy. Next move will be to coax a student into doing one for me...

Thing 20 - YouTube

The YT video I decided to embed is hilarious - it's about the perils of powerpointing your audience to death....I wish I had his speaking skills..AND his powerpoint skills...LOL OK, maybe not so much. I found TeacherTube to have TONS more than the first time I played with it. I can't wait until You Tube is unblocked!

Thing 19 - Web 2.0 Awards

It's stuff like this that freaks me out and makes me crazy because I feel like I'll never catch up: "There are about 500 2.0 tools on the web. You have explored just a few so far thorough this series of activities. "
Anywho, I explored LuLu and shared it with a budding teen author that hangs in the library with me every chance he gets. Everyone has a book in them, as far as I'm concerned. Whether or not anyone else would want to read it...different story, but at least we know that self-publishing is an option, right? I also looked at WriteBoard - I could see using this and I could see kids using it for group projects.