Thing #12

I have always loved Google Translate. What's great now is you can type and it automatically translates into what ever language of your choice as you're typing. You don't have to wait and press a button to see the translation. No doubt this will massively help me in my ELA classroom when we are reading text with portions in other languages. Students will easily skim over portions of a text in different languages, but that is not acceptable. It obviously must be of some importance or else it would not be there. Both Google Scholar and Google Books have helped me in my research for my paper in another graduate class. I'm writing a research paper on violence against teachers in our country, and many books popped up just by me typing in "teacher violence". If excerpts are available Google will even give me the pages if they happen to contain my search term. I'm able to grab a little bit of research without having to search far and wide for a book and the particular pieces of information that I need. Google Scholar helps with finding periodical journals regarding my research topic--not just for my paper on violence against teachers but for any subject which requires the proper educated viewpoints and research.

Thing #11

I found doing a simple google search for "english teacher rss feeds" seemed to be the simplest route to see what was out there. Technorati seemed the most confusing since there was no option to search for anything, and my impression was that it didn't have anything to do with searching for blogs. To me the title of a blog is what will initially draw me in and one that drew me in was It's Not All Flowers and Sausages, and of course I had to click on it to see what it was all about. It's about a public school teacher who loves her job but has the typical frustrations we all do at our day to day jobs. As I've said before in a previous post, it's just nice that we're not alone. Not all teachers have the cute, decorated classrooms with constantly engaged students and teachers willing to collaborate at a moment's notice. Another good one I found was The English Blog which is just a great blog filled with resources and tips for English teachers. I subscribed to both RSS feeds via feedly so they're all in one place for easy access!

Thing #10

RSS seems like a really handy tool, because in Blogger you can follow various blogs and see which ones have been updated via your dashboard but that's only true for others in Blogger. Just following various blogs via Feedly I like seeing everything I'm interested in all in one spot. I started following some education blogs plus a few blogs on running and baking (yes, I see the irony). I can get fitness tips for when I go to the gym plus that awesome recipe for what to make at the next church potluck all at one stop! Teachers can take advantage of this technology by keeping track of certain posts they want to use by clicking the bookmark icon on Feedly which puts the post under the "Saved for Later" section. We can do this for different posts from different blogs and have them all in the same place rather than having many different browser windows open.

Thing #9

The Happy Face Generator, Image Chef is definitely a blast and much easier to navigate that the other sites. Here's a nice, corny picture I made featuring myself and my boyfriend. That aside, this would be a great tool to use to create personalized notes for students, to help with relationship building. Even something as small as picture with "Happy Birthday (insert name)" will mean a lot.

The Comic Strip Generator was fun as well and great for personilization rather than searching Pinterest for the the school/teacher memes we are growing accustomed to seeing all the time. Here's a little something I whipped up. For all of these it's pretty much as simple as clicking on the picture, typing in your text, and clicking customize. You can either right-click and save your picture or upload it.

Thing #8

I used the Spell with flickr generator. I used it to spell out my daughters' names (Autumn and Hannah). Online generators can definitely be fun since you never know until you click the button what is going to come up. I would definitely use online generators as a way for my classroom decor and since I'll be teaching language arts, I'll definitely incorporate it into my teaching. As far as sharing photos online, I feel pretty okay about it. I've never shared anything that would be considered indecent or question my integrity, but it's weird to think about that any photo I've put out there of myself or my family it's essentially out there forever no matter what I try to do to delete it. All anyone has to do is do a right click and then that photo is in their possession. It's a bit of a double edged sword.

Thing #7

I've seen and heard various references to Flickr, but I have never thought to check it out.  As far as photos go I basically keep them on my phone, post them on Facebook, and that's pretty much that.  I always tell myself that I will go to Walgreens, print off copies, and get back into the scrapbooking game but that has yet to happen.  But I digress.
I didn't type any search keywords into Flickr. I simply clicked on Explore and went to The Weekly Flickr, and I saw this. I thought it was very sweet. Both my daughters love bears, so I thought I would pay a bit of homage to them. Whisper by Flickr

Thing #6

As a future English teacher, I'm drooling on myself a little over GrammarBase.  This goes beyond the grammar and spell check on Microsoft Word.  It tells you if you're being redundant, using passive voice, and just general punctuation mistakes.  Copy and paste a whole text into a box and in a matter of seconds you have words and phrases underlined in different colors depending on the mistake. One thing I do not like about this program is that it does not give you options on how to correct the mistake.  It gives you an offer for their professional proofreader to fix the mistakes for you at the price of $15.45 per page which I personally did not care for. This could be a great teaching tool since it does not give away the answers. A willing student could have his or her assignment put into GrammarBase and as a class go over the mistakes together. Knowing middle school students like I do, they would most likely turn it into a game to see whose assignment would be underlined the least. As long as they're taking in what is being taught that is perfectly fine with me!