Sunday, March 22, 2009

TweetDeck and Twitter

I have a confessions to make. Yes, I'm a twitter junkie. I have totally become hooked on Twitter. I twitter in the morning, at noon, and before I go to bed. I have twittees from all corners of North America. I follow education tweets, teaching tweets, fitness tweets, and alas, Coquitlam tweets. I am absolutely amazed at the things I've learned.

For those of you who don't know what Twitter is, it's a social networking site. It allows you to converse in 140 letters or less, what's going on and share different websites that are pertinent to your areas of interest. You can follow different tweeters whom you think are interesting or who seem to be helpful. One of my favourite tweeters is a teacher from Boston who tweets the best free sites for teachers. If you have a question about something, tweet it; someone will answer it!

If you haven't discovered this yet, check out the Twitter site. It's a great place to learn things and hear things!

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

I'm officially a 'newbie'!

I began this morning with coffee and my computer. I was determined to finish, or at least start on my lesson for SFU that's due next Wednesday. I'm supposed to take a lesson I've taught and turn it into a 'technology' lesson. So I got to work. Lo and behold, I figured out what I was going to do.

Now, I won't bore you with the lesson details but I got very excited when I actually figured out how to do something new. There was a page I wasn't able to copy that I needed for the kids. I took a picture of the page with Jing and then was able to upload that image onto my virtual classroom site. I was so proud of myself; for about five minutes. Then it started. The 14 year-old got up. When I excitedly showed her what I had done, she laughed and then said, "But mom, why didn't you just use paint? Everyone uses that!". Of course my answer was, "Paint? What the bleep is that?" Now, I've been spending an awful lot of my time exploring my computer and never come across 'paint'. Apparently, it's been hiding in my accessories section. The 14 year-old proceeded to show me that there's a button on the keyboard that takes a picture of the page. Then you open paint, copy the page in and voila! You can actually edit, draw boxes and other stuff. Then she wrote down in my notebook, step-by-step how to do this. Boy, was she patient and did I feel dumb!

Needless to say, I guess I'll be playing around with this program in the next bit. Who knew that teenagers actually have a purpose!

Monday, March 9, 2009

On Becoming a Techno-Geek


I've been thinking lately about how much I actually don't know. In fact, I really am down-right stupid. I have so many sites down-loaded onto my computer, but I can't seem to figure out a good place to house my e-portfolio.


What's an e-portfolio, you are probably asking (especially if you're family). My main assignment for Simon Fraser is to 'house' all my learning 'artefacts' in cyber-space. This sounded great when it was first mentioned. However, it's much more difficult. There are only a few sites that you can do this on. Seeing as I can't decide what to make for dinner, I'm finding this difficult. This e-portfolio has to have videos and pictures and writing and all sorts of other stuff (that's a technical term).


Maybe, if my life only consisted of trying to find this elusive site, I'd be finished by now. Alas, parents, teenagers, husbands, students, etc. seem to be taking my time right now.


Good thing it's only a pass/fail course!!!!!