Alan Levine: I Didn't Know You Could Do THAT With Web Tools!

Summary and reaction to:
Alan Levine: I Did Not Know You Could Do THAT With Free Web Tools!

To start, I found it very difficult to understand what we were supposed to do. It took me over an hour to find all the pieces and figure out what to do with them. Once I got started I found it to be very interesting though. I liked that it gave us a chance to learn and practice with many different tools.

It started with a brief podcast introduction on YouTube to the 'expedition' that Mr. Levine has set up for us. He talked about how to use YouTube, advised that if you are webcasting to use a script and then talked about some safety suggestions. Using pseudonyms was my personal favorite. I worry about the safety of my students online and like the idea of them hiding their identity when online.

I then moved into his wikispace which helped me to understand what I was doing. He gave a nice overview of the layout of the 'expedition' and had links to where to find everything. I think that I would have preferred to start there rather than with the YouTube video.

Next was Flickr. Before using his hands on tutorial I had thought that Flickr was a site to post my picture to share with my friends. Now I realize that it is so much more. I like that I can organize and label my pictures. I like that I have access to others' pictures and can search though them using labels and if I find one that I like I have permission to use it. My two favorite parts of Flickr were the Retriever and Spell with Flickr. Retriever was fun to play around with. I drew a few things and found multiple pictures that resembled what I drew. When I tried Spell With Flickr I spelled Ms. Katz Class. I thought that it was very cool that it was different each time and you could also change the letters individually if you didn't like some of the ones that they chose.

I'm like Mr. Levine and can't draw. So, Gliffy was a very good find for me. I played around for a little with it. I really could have used this tool recently when I created some charts for my students to use. I created the ones that I did using the drawing tool in Word. This would have saved me a lot of time. I created the same chart that I had already created in Word in under 10 minutes. I'll definitely use this tool in the future the next time I need to create charts and possibly other things.
Here is my chart:http://www.gliffy.com/publish/1207020/

Next came del.icio.us. Mr. Levine tagged so many interesting sites. I looked at many of them but realized that I was getting distracted from my initial project so I decided to come back and look at a later date. Of the ones that I looked at my favorite was http://www.zamzar.com/. I had been looking for a site that can change the format of music. I know that this trial wasn't directly related to school work but you never know when you might need a file change for the classroom. The best part was that it worked which so many other programs that I tried recently didn't!

I was unimpressed with Mr. Levine's presentation in slideshare. Maybe I just didn't understand it. It seemed like a slideshow without the commentary. Maybe I just couldn't figure out how to play the commentary. I did try though. He did introduce some new and interesting sites to look at in the slide show.

Overall I liked the interactive experience that Mr. Levine provided very much. I learned a lot, got to try new things and found many things that I will continue to use in the future. I found that I was very involved and at times got carried away with all the new things to look at and try out.