All of these new sites!

Well I feel like I have learned so much over the last six weeks. I never knew all of these sites existed. I have to say I like Plaxo much better than LinkedIn. I like how you can pick what category your connections go into. This helps you know who belongs where and how to keep classmates separate from friends if you want to have a class group separate. I was not into LinkedIn very much, but I set it up like we needed. I don't think I will continue to use that site too much. I did actuallly find a friend that had Plaxo and I had no idea so it was nice to get in touch with her through the new site.
I like the google pages a lot. I have enjoyed working on my online portfolio. It would have been a lot easier if we were still teaching because almost all of my work files are on my computer at school. I was able to find some field day papers that had been emailed and some lessons that I had done at the begining of the school year to upload to the page. I think I could add a lot more to it once I was back at work because I could put an example of an entire unit that I use during the school year. I think I will keep this up and use it if I have to leave schools and interview somewhere. Thanks for teaching us all of these great tools! I look forward to trying a few new things next year!!!!

Professional Portfolio

http://sites.google.com/site/bowlsey1323/Home

Image Generator

I liked checking out the different things you could do with pictures or with words. This site was very interesting. I think it would be fun to use if students could create images with physical education terms or pictures from class. That would be a neat way for them to use the terms or pictures in a way that they can create something rather than the teachers always making the signs and posting them on the walls. I made a road sign with my name. We could use this to make the color zone signs or terms for different units. This is something that students could make in the computer lab or students that are injured or sick and sitting out could make signs while they were out of class for the day. I think there are endless possibilities for these image sites.

this is my site:http://www.streetsigngenerator.com/download.php

My Books

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/bowlsey1323

Library Thing

This site was really interesting. I am really not much of a reader. I really only read books about athletes or coaches because I could never get into reading books about random stories. This site can be very helpful to finding books. I always feel lost at the bookstore when I am grabbing a book. I just go and look for something that looks good. This site could make my time at the bookstore go a lost smoother because I could just type in a name and find the book before I even go to the bookstore. I usually just read when I am going on vacation or flying somewhere so it keeps me occupied. I do like this site, but I am not sure how much I will use it because I just don't read enough!

Podcasts

This site seemed to have a lot of great information. I think it would be a great tool for me to use to get some info on a topic before I taught a lesson. I found a lot of intersting podcasts on nutrition and fitness. This information was helpful and I think this could be a great place to go if I needed more information for a unit or I needed to do some quick research on a topic. I am not sure how I would use this in my classroom, but I may use it for myself to gain some information on health and pe topics. I guess if I found a short podcast I could show it in my class, but I really try to get my students active for the most time I can when I see them so adding in a podcast could take an additional five or ten minutes away from activity time. This may be something where I have to pick and choose when I want to use them very carefully so the students are actually intersted in the information.

Technorati

I thought this site was interesting. I got very different results when I looked up Kinesiology in the different areas. The blogs had a lot of medical posts. This site can be helpful to us to learn information about most any topic. I like the fact that you can read a blog or watch a video about a topic. I am amazed at how much we can learn on a site by just typing in a word or a short phrase. This site gives you tons of information that we could possibly pull up and use in the classroom or when we are planning a lesson. I found a few PE blogs about general info that were all connected to kinesiology and exercise. Technorati is a neat site that does a good job of organizing blogs. I am new to blogging so I am only used to what we have done in class. This site does a great job of sharing people's thoughts and ideas and I think we could learn a little from other people's blogs on this site just like we do on our class sites.

Del.icio.us

I think this site can be very helpful, but I am not one for saving a lot of favorites. I could make my life a lot easier if I had them all saved and then organized like I could do on this site. Now that I am just using my laptop for my school work I save the sites under my favorites since I can access them when I am doing school work or looking something up. I guess when I go back to work it will not be so easy since I won't have my laptop at work to look up the sites. This would be a great site to have at school to organize the sites by lessons that I find or by different PE categories. If I was doing a research project then Del.icio.us would be a great site to use to keep my info organized. I think teachers can use this to share sites with other teachers. I always feel like teachers don't share lessons and websites like we should! We even have a county site with lessons, but the lessons on there are pretty much the ones they make us do at inservice meetings. Maybe we can make some progress as a class if we start sharing sites with each other that can benefit us in the classroom. Then we could take that info back to our schools and counties.

YouTube Thoughts

I think this site has a lot of great videos, but it is not something I would use to let my students search on in school. I think it has to be monitored very closely so the students do not come across something inapropriate. I picked a soccer clip because it was pretty funny. I think if I spent some more time on the site I could find some useful videos to pull up in the begining of class for a demonstration. This could be a part of a PE website if we put some clips of our students doing a specific skill, playing a game or maybe participating in field day. There are a lot of things that would have to fall into place to be able to post students online, but if we just used students that were allowed to be photographed we could make a few useful videos. We could also make videos that could be used the following year for demonstrations. I did this one year with a VCR tape for gymnastics skills because I had a gymnast in one of my classes who was much better at demonstrating than I was. If I did it now I could save it to my computer or put it on YouTube with parental permission so other teachers could use the video. It would be nice to have access to videos related to PE that we could pull up real quick for a lesson. We have a county PE site with lots of lessons, but having video clips to demonstrate skills or strategies would be nice to have especially for the skills (like lacrosse) that I am still learning!

Man Down!

Twitter Drama

I saw on the news yesterday that a man wrote on twitter that he was going out of town. Since everyone could see he was out of town someone decided to rob his house...I think this goes along with what we have all been saying about safety concerns with the internet and microblogging!

Web 2.0 Awards

I thought this website was really neat. I enjoyed clicking on the sites to check out what the offered. One of my favorites was Last under the music category. I was sitting here with my husband and he was giving me names of bands that we can't even find songs on itunes for and they had info and songs on the site for the bands. We were surprised that they had info about smaller bands. I also liked the iMedix site. I am not much for writing about my health issues, but I have had serious back issues for the last year. I have yet to find anyone that has been through what I have been through. This site allowed me to pick specifics about what I was interested in discussing about health. I am not sure that I will get on there and ask questions, but for someone like me that has back problems I think it would be a cool way to communicate with someone who has been through what I am going through. This seems like it could be helpful to a lot of people who just want to post a question about something and not join a group for discussions. I also liked the istats site. It seemed like something we might be able to use in class because it uses fitness, exercise, and nutrition so people can track their workouts. This would also be a tool we could introduce to teachers who want to workout and follow along without a trainer or nutritionist. We have teachers that are always looking for workout clubs so we could incorporate this into the clubs that they use. I think we could introduce it to our students as well so they can see what happens when they work out and what different exercises and sports do for their bodies.

Google Docs

This was a very intersting site to check out. I loaded a spreadsheet on there and played with it for a bit. This could be a very useful tool in sharing ideas with other teachers such as powerpoints or other documents. I also think it would be nice for grading. We currently use an excel sheet to do our grading and this would make it easy to access from home and to allow the other PE teacher to work on the same files without being at school. As far as I know our county is going to an online grading system next year so I will not be trying this out with grading, but I do think it is a great way to share ideas with other PE teachers. Everyone could share their powerpoints and documents that could be useful to other teachers. We have a PE website for the county, but it is a pain to get stuff loaded and posted on their. This way we could save a lesson that we want to share and hit share and other teachers could check out what we were teaching. It doesn't seem like too much work, but it will taking some testing out to get everything figured out.
I think this website would be helpful to coaching. It would be nice to post information to players like papers they need to download and print for preseason. We could also use it to store info like emails and phone numbers in excel. I am thinking it would be really nice if we could share our scouting reports on something like this or on a blog, but I doubt that will happen. I guess we still have to use the phone and email to make those contacts.

How can I use technology in my career and in the future?

When we started this class I thought I knew a lot about technology. I have quickly learned that I know about different areas of technology. This class has opened my eyes to using the internet to make my life easier. The microblogging is taking some getting used to, but it is an easy way to see what people are doing without having to pick up the phone and call. I have already talked with the other PE teacher at my school and we are planning on blogging our newsletters next year. We hope to get our website up and running this summer for PE so we can use some of the new technology to communicate with parents and students. I teach at the elementary level so I am not sure that I will use Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace in the classroom. I have also been thinking about using audacity to record the lessons each day. Students that missed class could click on the link that had the lesson for the day online and they could hear what was taught while they were gone. We have had a few students miss weeks or months at a time with health issues and being able to record the classes would have still prepared them for the standardized PE tests that we have to give to 3rd and 5th grade students. A lot of times when students are not dressed properly or they are injured they sit out and do an assignment related to the unit or they read an article or book. I am thinking that these students could now post a blog about what they learned from the outside of the class when they are injured. They could also blog about how the students can remain safe during the lesson. I think there are many directions that we could go with microblogging in PE class. One of the issues I am concerned with is keeping the students safe on the internet. Another issue I have is I am on medical leave from work so I do not know if I can open these sites at school right now. This could impact what I use at school because it may be more difficult to keep a weekly blog from home because I would have to remember to post every week. Hopefully we can access some of these sites from school. I also have to talk to my principal to make sure she is okay with us using microblogging in the classroom and to communicate with people. We have used audacity in school so I know she is supportive of that!! I am looking forward to hopefully going back this fall to try some of these new pieces of technology.

I like Bloglines

I think Bloglines is a great website. It is a great way to follow info that we like without having to go to 15 different websites. I am not sure if I would use this for my students, but I will definitely use it for my personal use. I think it will save us a lot of time during the school year when we are trying to keep up with our website interests while trying to get school work done. I am mostly following sports and news and I enjoy going to the site to see all of big news related to sports and news in a matter of seconds. This site is geared to saving us time and I think we can get caught up looking online for hours to find info about news and sports. I really like this site and I look forward to learning more about it as I get more used using the site!

IHow Microblogging can be used in the classroom and in the future!

I am a fan of Facebook. This probably only the 6th or 7th month I have been on and it is a great way to find old friends. Facebook has gotten a lot of my high school graduating class together and now they are planning our 10 year reunion using Facebook to contact people. As for twitter, I am new with this and I am not sure if I am a huge fan of it. I think if I was going to use twitter or blogger in school then I would use blogger. It would be a great way for PE teachers in our county or anywhere to share lessons and bounce ideas off of each other. I think technology is moving forward very rapidly and we as teachers need to try to incorporate more of these things in our classrooms and programs. The blogger would be a great way to communicate with parents and tell them what unit you are on that week or what activities are coming up. It could be a link off of our school website and it would be a lot easier to update than to send out newsletters and replyto a lot of emails. Our school is always trying to save paper so I think I may have to try blogger next year to inform the parents and staff about what is going on in our program.

Web, Library, and Teen Services 2.0

The concept of this article moves right along with how technology is moving forward. This new Web Library 2.0 seems like a way for people to get more involved in the library. They seem to want to reach out to the community and help people use the resources. When I go into the library now I feel like it has to be a quiet place and I am not really comfortable doing work there. In college we were thrown out of the library a few times for being too loud while working on a group project. There are only so many places that you can go in college to have a quiet work place with few distractions. If we could have all libraries meet the needs of teens, college students, children, and adults people would actually get something out of going to the library. We are so used to just checking out a book and going on with our way. It would be great to be able to learn from the librarians about microblogging. The idea of customer service people actually coming out on the floor to help you with more than getting a book seems like a great idea. This would really help people learn a lot more and want to take their children to the library for more than just checking out a book.

Social Networking

I think it is so true that technology has come a long way. When I was in high school all we had was AOL IM and dial up internet. Now we have wireless internet and tons of other options for social networking. I think back to when I was in college on 9/11. We were not able to get in touch with people in DC on their cell phones. This was difficult because I had friends that went to school very close to the Pentagon and I had no idea if all was well with them. Now that we have more options like MySpace and Facebook it would be easier to check someone's profile to see how they are doing on a daily basis and in case of an emergency. I think that the newer technology still needs work just like the issues that came up at VT and during other emergencies, but we are well on our way to working out the issues to make it so people can communicate quickly. The internet has not had too many major problems yet so hopefully it will keep up the speed and ability to allow people to network with each other. I am sure as we move on we will have even better ways to keep in touch with people especially during an emergency.

Examining Social Software in Teacher

Anyone on this site
This artilce made some really good points about the pros and cons to social networking. I find it very interesting that the teachers could look up their students and see what they have been up to. I have heard stories of this being used at the high school level for students and athletes. Players have been questioned and removed from teams for posting pictures while doing illegal things like drinking and using drugs. This would be a good tool to use at the college level of coaching where I am, but to my knowledge our school has not tried to crack down on underage drinking and drug use by looking students up online. It is so true that these sites could be beneficial to students, but that they don't know what good and bad things could come out of using the sites. It seems to me like these new social networking sites keep coming up and people continue to sign up with them without being educated about some of the negative things that could happen as a result of posting inapropriate pictures or posts. I think the parents should first and for most be in charge of educating their children, but at the same time who is educating the parents about the pros and cons of these sites? If we as teachers are going to use these sites to integrate technology and social networking into our classes then we need to make sure we are teachign the students about the good things that could come out of these sites, the negative aspects, and the safety issues. I know there are blockers that parents can put up, but I would say at this day in age most children can figure out ways to get around these blocks. This can result in children networking with child predators or other dangerous people. My biggest concern with promoting the social networking sites is keeping our students and athletes safe.

Malibu in Bed

Flicker #1-The Dogs-2 011, originally uploaded by bowlsey1323.

This is what happens to my dog after a long day of laying out on the deck, playing with her sister, eating a bone, and snoozing in her dog bed! Somehow she ends up in her parent's bed. This can get a little crowded!

Why use the Nintendo Wii Fit in PE??

Using the Nintendo Wii in PE class can be very beneficial to the students. It is important to reach your students by teaching lessons that they will enjoy and apply to their lives. The Wii Fit is a great tool that combines fitness activities and video games. Video games seem to be a major reason that our students are not as active and that we have major obesity problems in our country. Teaching students to play video games while exercising is a great way for them to take an active lifestyle home. If they have the Nintendo Wii at home then they can play the games they have that keep them active like Wii Sports or they could invest in Wii Fit and learn how to exercise everyday with a video game. This is a great tool that can be used at all age levels to teach children how to be physically active without playing on a sports team or running around outside with friends.

Swinging from a tree leads to man down!

One day we had a student that did not want to participate in PE class. He decided to run away from the class that was out on the field. I followed him back towards the gym as he ran and walked his way closer to the school. As he approached the gym he went over to a tree that was right outside of the gym doors. He grabbed the branch and began to hang and do his best impression of swinging from a tree. As so as I got close to him and told him to get off of the tree, "BAM" he bit it. He could not hold himself up and he fell flat on his back! That is why you should not leave PE class to swing from a tree!

My first crazy story from PE

One day I was in the middle of teaching a PE lesson. We had all of the students sitting close to the TV as we reviewed the information for Jump Rope for Heart. All of a sudden a student yelled out, "Who lost their underwear?". I ran and got a paper towel to pick the underwear up from the floor. While I was gone the students decided they were going to find out who the underwear belonged to. As I stood in front of them they began showing their classmates the top of their underwear to show that they had not lost their underwear. We removed the underwear from the gym and had to calm the students down so we could continue with our PE lesson. It was an interesting lesson and one that I will never forget.