Thing 22

In Classroom 2.0 I watched an introductory presentation. It allowed me to watch the creator of the site navigate, answer questions, and discuss with others their use of the site. It was long, but I feel that it gave me a lot of insight for an hour long tour. It would have taken me much longer to learn that much on my own. I saw how groups are formed and discussions are started and tagged. I also learned how to have conversations on the net about various topics and in all sorts of ways. As far as use in my teaching, I am not so sure that I am ready for this type of site. I like wikis and pageflakes better, so I will probably start out with those. They seem to be a little more in line with the teaching of mathematics.

This investigation has also opened a door for me to finally look into joining facebook. My best friend has one with all of his family pics on it and is trying to twist my arm to join facebook. Maybe I will take that step, because this is interesting stuff.

I also looked into an eductional ning, but it appeared to be VERY similar to Classroom 2.0. I could not find much of interest there.

Thing 21

Pageflakes is a very cool site!!!! I really like all of the tools that it allows you to use in one place. I can see it as a very helpful site and it might even be able to do a lot of things that I wanted my wiki to do. I can post homework, make announcements, have an assignment calendar, post podcasts, and basically anything else that I want all in one place. I really enjoyed the weather flake and the podcast flake. I made my page fit my interests outside of school, but I can see how useful it would be to my students. I found flickr pics of my team and tried to post them (still working on that one), woodworking podcasts, local weather, and kept the calculator. I like having everything in one place. It is like having an on-line desktop of the tools that you use most on the web.

Thing 7c

I found an interesting page discussing dividing by zero. I liked the way the author broke down three problems and discussed the answers and why they were the answers. He also interjected quite a bit of his own opinions of math teachers that I found interesting and agreeable (most of the time). I have not thought about this topic too much so it was refreshing to see it described in such great detail.