Thing 15

I actually got involved in cloud computing when I first started working with this PD. I needed to be able to gather information from the various schools regarding absenteeism. In the beginning I was receiving daily emails from 9 schools and transferring that information to a spread sheet.  I developed a form for the schools to fill out which transferred the information to a spreadsheet in Google Docs.  This "cloud computing" made my life sooooo much easier. 

Thing 14

Social networking.  I joined facebook a while ago when I was looking for some previous contacts in the National Association of School Nurses.  I actually was able to connect with quite a few people whom I had no other way to contact.  It can be kind of exciting when you find someone you have lost contact with.  I am not the kind of person to be checking Facebook every day so I probably don't get as much from it as others do.  I know my thirty something son must practically live on Facebook.

I also joined Linkedin a while ago, but have not had as much contact through that as I have had with Facebook.

Thing 13

So, I set up an account on Delicious, it is easy enough to set up the account and add the bookmarks.  I think I will probably use this frequently, the trick is going to be to remember that it exists.  It is an interesting concept, so it certainly rates working with it for a while.

Thing 12

Social bookmarking is an interesting concept.  I like the idea that my bookmarks or favorites can move from one computer to another.  I have been in the situation where I know I had something bookmarked at school and wished I had it at home, or having crashed a few hard drives in my time, losing all the bookmarks along with the hard drive.  I'm not sure about the public part, but we'll see what happens when I try it.

Thing 11

I have kind of fiddled around with widgets before.  You can add them to your home page, and really isn't my Avatar a widget?  I added a Voki to my blog, as well as a health activity pack.  It sure makes things easy to ad these things to your blog when you can copy the HTML code and paste it to your blog.

Thing 10

Twitter-I am not a big fan of Twitter.  I opened an account and sent a tweet.  I don't think I am the type of person to spend that much time on the computer.  I don't text on my cell phone, email is more my cup of tea.  It is in interesting concept and I can see how the kids really like it, but I don't have an interest in keeping those I know up to date about my life minute by minute.

I checked out Time's 50 Best Websites 2009, I was somewhat surprised to see that I was familiar with quite a few of the sites: Flickr, Twitter, Skype, Google, You Tube,  Amazon, Netflix, Wikipedia, F,acebook, Pandora.  A couple others that I checked out were Supercook, Tripit and Aardvark.

Thing 9

Copyright!!!!!!!!  That disneylike video was a little hard to take, but seriously.  I think that for students there are a lot of blurred lines regarding copyright and plagerism, some of the things that are available on the internet will blur those lines even further. I am not so sure that even adults who are not involved in education really understand about copyright law.  I think it is important that teachers frequently not only remind students about copyright law, but what the law means.  I know that even when I taught in higher education there was a lot of misunderstanding about what copyright meant. 

The additional websites were helpful, although I wasn't crazy about the comic book.  We all need to keep copyright laws in mind when we are working on our blogs.