Tagging, Wikis and More

OK, this week is where I'm really feeling the generation gap between myself and those who are younger than me.  So far in my "12 Things" exploration, I have felt pretty comfortable with the activities, sites, tools, etc.  Lots of things were new to me, but in an exciting way. This week, I feel a bit overwhelmed.  Since I don't do any kind of social networking (at least not in a formal way, i.e. Facebook, etc.), the idea of "social bookmarking" is intimidating to me.  There is clearly a whole new way to interact with the web and to make better use of the gobs of information out there, but I'm a bit stuck in the old way.  So it might take me a bit longer to feel comfortable with things like Delicious.  

In terms of wikis, I can totally see the value of those for classrooms and for PS.  I would like to explore more classroom uses of wikis to see how teachers and students are getting the most out of them.  To be honest, some of the links to wiki sites (correct term?) in "12 Things" were also intimidating for me.  There is so much on a single page that I don't know where to begin!  It might be fun to have a brown bag lunch or other discussion about wikis.  There is no question that we could use them in our programs.

New Sites

There are some really cool sites and tools on the list of Web 2.0 Award winners. A few were familiar to me: Kayak, UrbanSpoon, Pandora. Most were brand new to me and it was difficult to decide on one or two sites to explore. I ended up joining Zoho.com, which has a bunch of office applications which can be accessed via the web. Basically, you can word process documents, create spreadsheets and even visual presentations via web applications which can be accessed from any computer. The interactive part is that you can invite others to edit right into your document, you can chat with others WHILE editing a document, etc. It seems like this kind of thing would be useful to almost anyone (teachers and students among them) just from an access point of view but also for the collaboration in document editing/creation that it allows. There are also notetaking tools and much more.

Google Reader

One of the videos in our "12 Things" exercise about RSS feeds warned about how addictive news readers can be.  After a short exploration, I can TOTALLY understand that sentiment.  It's really cool!  Anyway, one of the things I subscribed to is called "Intelligent Travel".  One of the posts included a link to "One Shot China", which is part of the National Geographic web site.  Take a look.  I think teachers could use this...

Flickr

I just spent some time exploring Flickr. What is amazing to me is the sheer quantity of photos that are posted there. A search under the word "Taiwan" brings up more than 2.5 million photos. Wow! It's a treasure trove (and a bit mind boggling). Anyway, I decided to post a photo here of Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan (photo by Harry Huang) since it's one of my favorite places there. I'll be traveling to Taiwan in late November/early December, but I don't know if there will be time to visit the lake this time around. At least I now know where to find thousands of pictures of it!

Travel

I decided to occasionally share some links or other information related to travel so that this blog might actually have something interesting on it. Today I discovered www.worldhum.com, which seems to be a collection of writings about almost any aspect of traveling you can imagine - cuisine, the environment, places to visit, etc. Take a look!

Here we go.

I think I'm in business here. I'm excited about all of the tools and sites we will explore over the next several weeks. In particular, I am looking forward to trying out ITunesU, since I use ITunes but have never really tried to download a podcast. Wellesley College makes some lectures available to alums through ITunesU, but despite my good intentions, I have not downloaded any of them. This is going to force the issue for me, and I'm happy for it (not sure what that says about me). I have included a quote of the day on this blog (quotes not selected by me), so check back to read new words of wisdom (or stupidity, as the case may be) each day.