Thing 2 : Photo Sharing

This has been a fun topic to explore, and ended up branching off into lots of other areas and ideas as well - both for personal and school use! Below is an image of the horse my daughter sponsors at a nearby horse rescue. I went to the website for the rescue, found the image, downloaded it, and for the first time - just uploaded an image to a blog posting. Easy as can be! I never knew you could add images to blog postings!

I also explored Shutterfly. I did already have an account and used it for photo storage, but I decided to branch out and use it to create some photo-themed holiday gifts. I used my uploaded photos to create a 2015 calendar of my kids to give their grandparents, and also went to my newly engaged niece's Facebook page, downloaded some of the pics she's posted of her and her fiancé , and used them to create a very cool holiday ornament for her! So fun!!

I also really enjoyed exploring the site BigHugeLabs - so many things to do there with my students! Can't wait to have them create trading cards (which I used the picture below to create a trading card for my daughter's pony - again, very fun!) I plan to have my students create trading cards for favorite books they've read and post them on my library webpage.  There are several other activities on this site that I hope to use with my students.

I am really loving this course and finding so many things I want to use I don't know how to fit them all in the school year!

Thing 11: Coding

I found this "thing" very interesting since I've had no experience with coding at all. Exploring some of the sites even resulted in my signing up for the "Hour of Code" event in December.  I began by exploring Code Academy, where I worked through the activities and earned two badges. It was helpful to use the site to gain an understanding of how basic coding works. However, it isn't something I feel I could use with my 6th graders. There were times when I had to use the hint and still struggled to get it correct.  Next I investigated the Hour of Code site, where I signed up to participate. I considered pursuing it for my entire school, but then decided to scale down and do it with my own classes this year as a trial run. I love the idea, and the students I asked to test the sites I looked at were very enthusiastic. I investigated Scratch and the Flappy Bird coding site, as well as some of the articles about incorporating computer science into the library program. I will definitely be incorporating some of these coding sites and tools into my Digital Literacy curriculum, even beyond the Hour of Code program. I had no idea there were such simple sites to use!

Thing 1 Blogging

I have some experience with what a blog is, but have never got in the habit of blogging. As I've been scrolling through the list of resources in this first activity however, I am feeling motivated to try this with my Middle School students. I teach 3 classes every day, and one of them is an enrichment course called "Technology Enriched Literature". I think blogging would be an excellent addition to this course. Now it is just a matter of figuring out which service to use and how to set up a class blog...

I found the video "Shift Happens" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcZg51Il9no) intriguing, and plan to show it to my Digital Literacy students this week as a wrap-up to our 10 week course. It's amazing how quickly information and technology is being created and utilized!

 so off I go to explore some more of the suggested resources!