Sunday night-Tool #3

It seems that electronically uploading, posting, e-mailing, sharing, labeling and sorting pictures has become a world-wide past time. Companies that make photographic film (or cameras that use it) have been either move to the electronic media or disappearing.

For my first image generator I used from Big Huge Labs (http://bighugelabs.com/) the
Map Maker program, showing the 10 states that the 1st graders are supposed to identify.

http://bighugelabs.com/map.php

A teacher can generate several cards(maps with one or more states highlighted)for the students to identify or list the states.

My second choice was a small slide show of landforms, for the students to watch. In the blog it would look something like this:





To access the page independently, showing the pictures bigger, so you can actually read the labels, you can follow this link:

landforms by teacherslikeus

Looking for pictures of the landforms was kind of slow, specially since if you look for "hill", you'll get pictures of planes and cars first (from Flickr images). If you want to use your own pictures, I guess you'll have to upload them to Flickr first.

Tuesday night- Tool #2

Learning communities seem like an excellent way to grow as teachers. However, the blog by itself is not a learning community, is just one of the tools that can be used in the community. How big can the community become? 10 members, 100 members, 1,000 members? How can we really get information(or help) out of it? What else can we incorporate to the learning community? Like any tool, it will take some effort to figure out the best way to use a blog to share information and learn from it.

It is interesting to note the last point in the commenting advice says to "make it easy to comment". We actually have to login in (or register) to be able to post comments in the blog. This gives certain "protection" to the learning community from unwanted comments, but I am sure it curtails a lot of "visitors" from actually commenting on the posts.

I am not sure who am I going to follow. For now, I'll follow the ones that are following me. I'll edit this post to provide the entire list.

Sunday night-Tool #1

I am looking at this blog for the first time. Not sure who is going to read this, or if it can be deleted later. Computer technology, milestone of our times, evolves quicker than the speed at which I can learn. Here we go...