Thing 18

I have had a Facebook page for a few years now and I think it is great to keep in touch with people that you may not see on a regular basis and may not have time to pick up the phone and call. My page is located here Rachel Funderburk I am not as hardcore of a user as some of my friends but I use it pretty frequently.

I think it is important to know how social networking works because as it becomes more common practice we may at some point be using it in our classrooms. Or we may have students using it in our classrooms. As teachers we may want to use it as a tool to stay in touch with parents or colleagues. I do have a twitter account but I do not really use it for tweeting, I do follow some people and it is a good way to gather information and ideas as well.  I think I could see myself using Facebook in the classroom more so than twitter. I could set up a class page for our classroom and invite the parents and students to join so tat they can keep up on the daily happenings in our class and it would be an easy way for them to stay in contact with me with any questions or concerns they may have.

Thing 17

I think that the practice of social tagging and book marking is becoming much more common. I had not heard of any of these sites however I do like the delicious site after searching for educational technology so many different things came up and you get to not only see the sites but see other users reviews of the sites so you can differentiate what has been effective and what hasn't.

I think another site like this that has gained in popularity would be Pinterest, I use that site a lot and it very similar except you can bookmark and tag or "pin" and they say so much more than just websites you can pin almost anything you can think of. I have used it in the past to gather ideas for writing lesson plans, I think it will be a great site to be able to use as a future educator because there are some many ideas on there that fellow educators have shared, lesson plans, activities, worksheets, just so much that can be helpful in the classroom.

Thing 16

I used igoogle for my home page. I use Google for almost everything else so I just figured it would be the easiest to use for this activity as well. I like that it really only took like 10 second to get a homepage up and running and then I could change it to make it the way that I wanted it after that.

For the online calendar I choose to use 30 boxes. That was easy enough to set up but I don't think I would every really use it. I have a calendar set up in my email that I use that is already right there in my email that I check many times a day and to have to go to a separate location to check my calendar only seems like an unnecessary step.

While the to-do list seems like it would be a great helpful tool and it may be for some to me I just think it is more unnecessary work. I think it would take me longer to create the to-do list than it would to actually just go do the items on my to-do list.

The tool that I like the most and would probably continue to use is the igoogle home page because I can customize it and make it my own, I can have the information that is important and relevant to me and eliminate all of the other clutter from the page.

Thing 15

To be honest I didn't really care for this activity. While wikis may be great for some people to use I just don't really care for them. I am not a very big tech person so I was a bit confused by just adding something to the APSU sandbox wiki thing and I am still not sure I did that right. I can't imagine having to try and create and manage one to use in a class. Wiki is not for me except maybe to read through and gather information and ideas.