Thing 11.5 Reflections

I made it! This was quite a journey. Although I didn't have time to do it this past summer as planned, it worked out ok to do it during the year. But I will be glad to get some time of my own on the weekends here before the holidays. One advantage is I feel that I have retained more doing it now, rather than if I had done it at the beginning of last summer.

1.Favorite Discoveries:
I am always looking for more image generators and quick, easy,fun things to show kids and teachers. I loved wordle and bookr, and have used them with several grades related to curriculum they were studying. I also loved Voki, playing with the iTouch, and exploring SchoolTube.

2.Affected lifelong learning:
You know the saying--"The more you learn-- the more you realize how much you still need to learn"-- or something like that. That is how I feel with technology. Every time I feel like I really get something down-- it changes or something better comes along to learn. Such is life in the 21st century library. I definitely want to explore more with slideshare,and I will be able to use screencast when I need that type of tool--I didn't own camtasia or snagit and had wanted to learn this one. And of course, this is all a great prerequisite to our new Mac equipment and training I will be attending in Dec.
3.Take-aways or unexpected outcomes/ surprises:
I was surprised at the amount of discussion and effectiveness of lessons I presented at my school on digital citizenship and online safety. I was so surprised how easy it was to install and use skype right away. I was definitely surprised at myself for my interest in second life-- I have never been a person to get into walking around and communicating with people in virtual worlds. I have to say that once I learned a few basics and got some cool clothes, I was enjoying it.

4. Improve program?
The 11.5 things did seem more manageable that taking on 23 things in a chunck. They still took many more hours than the credit given, but some of that was my extended "playing" on my own . The directions and links still are so very helpful and easy to follow! And I don't know if it was intentional or not, but it did seem that the pacing from longer to shorter things was good-- not a lot of longer complicated ones in a row-- so we didn't get bogged down or frustrated. Thanks for leading me through this step by step! Please continue to leave all of the 23 and 11.5 things on the web page so we can refer back to them as we use them and review them.