Don’t ask me why this interests me I’m not sure unless it’s the fact he’s an American. An American dad goes to Japan to try and get his kids back only to be put in jail…
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/09/30/japan.savoie.children/index.html
Reports of mistreatment in Japanese jail, attorney says…
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/10/12/japan.savoie.custody.battle/index.html?iref=hpmostpop
Released but nightmare not over…
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/10/15/japan.custody.battle/index.html
It’s very interested to see how the laws in Japan vary from America.
I have been playing around with the Mixbook website and it is great. I love to take pictures and play with photo software to see what it can do. I think that is why I liked to explore this site. Of course you would need to careful of the quality of the print if you choice to buy from them. So I’m thinking of something on the lines of Christmas gifts or a wonderful scrapbook of a vacation like the one we took our children and grandchildren on in 2008.
As for how you could use something like this in school it comes with themes or it has blank pages which students could each take a page and do a little report with a picture say each one take a different president put them together and you would have a book that your class created about presidents . It allows you to invite people to help and it allows multiple users to collaborate on one book. I do however think this feature would call for the use of an email address. It looks like a very neat website one you could invite family, friends, or your class to help you create a master piece.
This is an edit to my first post. It seems you can’t print the book on your own so I’m not sure how good this site would be after all to do a classroom book. So let me update my first post and say it would be good for personal use but not to sure about school. I guess the fact it was so easy to add the pictures got me so excited I didn’t look at the end of the project. 
This week was an adventure, the making of the slideshow was easy, the embedding part was a little difficult. Below you will find the links to the photos I used and the lady who took the lovely picutes.
photo’s by: Vicki DeLoach
I have heard of this site but never really took the time to look around it. I thought it was a site to upload pictures for printing and not much more. Since I use another site for that I just never explored this site. But in doing this week’s lesson I have come to see what a wonderful site it is and defiantly is more than what I thought. What a massive collection of photos from all over the world that teachers could use with their students. I did a search on butterflies and just went up to the search button took the time to save into a folder only to find out they were not under the CC license. So I had to start over with my search and this time went to the advanced search and did only the CC licensed search much better. If you read my “Thing 10” blog you will see I said I need a little more experience with the CC thing and this helped me to get a little better handle on finding the CC icon. I didn’t actually see it until I went up and choice the size I wanted and scrolled to the bottom of the picture then I saw the CC I was looking for. Good site that I will use again.
Creative Commons
Wow, I think this site would be great to use and hopefully could help you in making sure you are within the law as far as using copyrighted material. I have to say I have never noticed the CC on a website and if I did I would not have know what it meant but now I do. When I tried out the CC search on there website I got a little confused as to what I could use. I kept looking for the CC that I thought would be there to show me it was ok to use a photograph or music and really only found it once at www.teachingcopyright.org which by the way I found to be a great link to use including lessons you do with your students about copyright law. Plus I took the copyright quiz and failed. I think I need to read more about this or just use the CC site.
So my conclusion about the CC website is if CC has it posted on their site it would only be there if the owners are sharing their work. I have to say it could take a little bit to get the hang of how to use the site. At least it’s a great resource to know about.
I think CC will defiantly impact the way students create projects. The fact they can get contents they know they can use without retaliation will make it much easier for them.
A few years back I was ask to help put together a Power Point for a retirement party. I had a hard time getting music that I could use in the background. I had to consult with the media specialist for support as to the copyright law. Had I know about this site I think it would have made my life much easier.
A couple of the negatives to using Creative Commons are:
1. You cannot legally share back out on the Web, any great work you might created using other peoples stuff.
2. Once you publish anything to the CC license you can’t change your mind, it’s a permanent license.
Oh yes almost forgot to answer the question of “Who Owns your teaching materials?” It seems a fine line of when you made it, if on school time could be the school systems or if on your personal time could be yours. So I’m not really sure about this hope someone can enlighten me further. I did read from a couple of sites which are where I got a little info on the subject.
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/article-1G1-142297138/owns-your-lesson-plans.html
http://www.ivanhoffman.com/rights2.html and because this is a lawyers site and I want to be within the law hope it’s ok to add this link to my post.
Wikis what do I think about them. Well right now I don’t see one in my personal life at least not right away. Although I did post to my very first Wiki today. I found reading the post in the Schools in the Past very interesting. What it was like then and in our schools today and to know I remember some of that stuff was scary.
As for what I think about them in educations I can see some great uses for them in all grade levels just for different things. Right now I’m thinking of my son going to a friend house to work on a project. With a wiki they could have both stayed at home finished the paper and gotten credit for it and not left the comfort of home. Of course that’s me not leaving the comfort of home since I was the one having to drive him. He would much rather have gone to the friend’s house.
The wiki page Salute to Dr. Suess had several things I noticed from advertisement of his books and where to buy them along with the price, PDF files in the projects and a collection of websites giving information, and projects you could do. I guess I’m saying I realized you can add just about anything you choose on a wiki.
My favorite wiki I found was called Smart Board Revolution Files that had some interesting stuff on it. It’s mostly about sharing Smart Board files lesson plans and even notebook training files. On the front page of this wiki it says, “Why create files from scratch when so many quality files are already created.” How true when teachers already are so busy.
Well what to say about feeding my Reader. I need to stop or it’s going to get pleasantly plump like someone I know.
This thing could get addicting I got starting on Smart Board lessons and technology and before I knew it I had to say slow down.
One site I ran across had some wonderful no beautiful pictures of the solar system it was call Fantastic Photos of the Solar System.
As you can guess since my job is technical assistant I love checking out new things. One site I found was http://wigflip.com/automotivator and on this site you can take pictures and turn them into posters that have a motivational message. Really cool site.
Google Reader now I could get into this. This is a very interesting way to receive current information about particular topics that interest you. At first I said no way am I going to read all this stuff that I’m not interested in (referring to Staff Picks) but later found out from Stacey you make it your own. Subscribe to what you want and delete what you don’t. So that is what I’m in the process of doing.
I’ve known about this one site for sometime as I’m sure some of you have and probably like me have sent an e-card from http://www.123greetings.com/. But how many times have we also meant to send that card to someone and forgot until the occasion was over. But today when I opened Google Reader and checked my updated feeds I saw that today October 2nd is “Give A Smile Card” so I was able to make someone smile a little today I hope by sending them an e-card, that is if I sent it outside MCS because it seems our Spam catcher caught my e-card but doesn’t do a very good job “catching” a lot of other stuff. So I will continue to add to the Google Reader to keep updated on things that interest me. Hope you are enjoying it as much as I am.
I read a few of the blog post but the one that hit home with me was the one: Andy Carvin/Learning NOW: An Open Letter about Cyberbullying. What a good blog he was very blunt and down to the point about bullying and what he feels to be a real threat to our children. . I guess what caught my eye and made me want to read this article was the Cyber”bullying“. When I see bullying any where it makes me so upset be it at school, home, internet or where ever. I have first hand knowledge of this as my son was targeted by a gang of kids when he was in middle school and he didn’t want to admit it but I knew he was afraid of them. He could not walk down our neighborhood street for almost a year before we finally gave up and let them have it. They shot out his bedroom window, busted out my car windows, and the last straw was when they caught him at the bus stop and jumped him. All of them had bandanas one had white all others had black. The police confirmed what I thought to be true. The one with the white bandana was probably getting initiated into the gang and his job was to fight with my son. So I commend Andy Carvin for his stand on protecting our children from bullying and for writing his comments to the Wired Magazine. Below is the link:
Thing 2 – Thoughts about Web 2.0
My initial thoughts about Web 2.0 were I didn’t have any, yep that’s right I never gave it a thought. But after using one of the “tools” in my Tool Box “the internet” to get some explanations of exactly what it was, I now have a little better idea of what I “think” it is.
Web 2.0 to me is basically an update of Web 1.0 in other words it’s just the World Wide Web updating getting more sophisticated.
It used to be we went to the website and just read whatever was on a site that someone else had put out there. Now we not only can read what was posted but can in many cases interact with what is out there.
It seems as though without knowing it I was using Web 2.0 technology and didn’t even realize it. I just began using Facebook really to share pictures with my family. I use My Space sometimes but I would have to say now I mainly have switched to FaceBook. This is the “Social Networking” which is one part of Web 2.0. I have never used You Tube but my grandchildren do and that also is part of the Social Networking component of Web 2.0.
Then there’s “Web Services” another component of Web 2.0 technology like Paypal, and Worldpay I don’t use these but if you do you have been using Web 2.0 technology.
Last but not lease there’s another part called “Software as a Service or SAAS”. This weekend I discovered a website called Pixlr a picture editing site where you have all kinds of tools to edit pictures. SlideRocket is another piece of software I found for online presentation I don’t know that I would use it but it looked interesting. There is so much out there you could sit at a computer all day just searching the web.
It’s been very interesting to see all the things that are out there. I can’t imagine what else this class holds for us. Since I’m just a lonely technical assistant and not a teacher I won’t be using what I found to teach students but I now have a better idea what Web 2.0 is all about. As for how it would benefit my learning I already can see I could get into this blogging. But my goal again is to learn in order to help others who might take this class.
