What did we do this week that you can apply in your school or job and how might you use it?
I spent a lot of time attempting to create my Creative Commons license and my Flickr account. Creative Commons is a fascinating thing to me. The fact that anyone can get a license, for free, for how their material is used is wonderful. I'm not exactly sure how the settings of the license is enforced, as I didn't have to put in any of my information with the license, but perhaps that is something I can figure out. Also, I struggled a little to get my Creative Commons license into my Flickr account, but eventually figured it out. So far, I found using Flickr to be very easy. The uploading process is quite quick and tagging photos is very easy also.
I'm not sure that I would be able to use photosharing in my classroom. Flickr and Photobucket, as well as other photosharing sites, are blocked in our district. I think it would be very difficult for me to get it unblocked since so many photos are made public and could be of questionable content.
I set up my RSS feed with Google Reader. It seemed the easiest route to go since I already have Blogger and a Google account. The RSS feed can be very helpful from a teacher standpoint that I can subscribe to things that pertain to my curricular area and give me suggestions for my classroom. I also subscribed to a few track and field websites to see what is going on in my coaching world.
We also spent some time researching Google Sites for education. Google Sites is a very easy webpage designer that can be used by anyone, including people like me who are petrified by HTML. In a previous course, we set up a Google Site and found out just how easy it is to use. I liked it enough to create a website for my track team. It became a great tool for communicating with my athletes. I was able to post our schedule and results on the site, as well as schedule changes that occurred during the season. A Google Site could be very useful in a classroom if a district doesn't provide a site that teachers can latch on to or a learning environment such as My Big Campus, edmodo, or moodle. It is very easy to add a calendar to the Google site and have assignments on the calendar so students always know when things are due. Or documents can be added so students can access them anywhere. Google Sites could be used in so many ways in an educational environment.
