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!