Thing 8 - Communication Sites

These tools are addicting. I don't know that there's time enough in the day for anyone to get through all of the sites! Most of them are fairly user-friendly and link to many blog sites, which is handy. I could see kids using these sites to add flair to reports, or as a way of creating "yearbooks" or news sites. It does remind me of all the bells and whistles in the good ol' Hyperstudio program. You could hardly get the kids to enter text because they had to play with all the toys.

Most of the sites were pretty easy to navigate and understand, although the database gave me crashing headaches. I linked it, but Blogger wouldn't show the html code I added. It does show the database, but you have to guess where the code is.

I'd definitely recommend the Big Huge Labs site, Flickr, and Picture Trail. I'm a little iffy on the Zoho site, simply because it's dependent on Internet access. It's great for just adding a Powerpoint-like presentation to a blog or website, though.

The only other photo site I use consistently is Photobucket. It has some nice features - probably not as many as Flickr, though.

I tried out a number of sites for Thing 8. The database really irritated me because both of my browsers (Firefox and IE) kept crashing. These are the Things for Thing 8:

School
Originally uploaded by ckelly181

This mosaic is made from pictures of my school. I used the Mosaic Maker on Big Huge Labs. I posted it as a separate blog entry from Flickr and sent it to this blog.






Oh, how I love Flickr. The upload is fabulous. It lets you select a pile of photos, without having to grab each one, one at a time. Good stuff.

Zoho Slideshow: I created a short presentation for a session I do with new teachers. The text looks fine on the site, but it gets a bit askew when viewing from a blog, I've noticed. It's a nifty resource for people who don't have access to Powerpoint or Keynote. I'm not sure I would use it because it depends on having Internet access. That's not always feasible, depending on where one does presentations.


I would love to be able to add this Picture Trail flick to the school website, but we can't use scripting on our portal. Boo. It would be fun to change this every now and then. Perhaps it's too splashy for a front page, but kids would love to see this somewhere:

This is a database link I created for books for boys. I'm not really impressed with this service. It makes my browsers crash, the script doesn't show up on Blogger, and it's not as user-friendly as some other sites. I could see the benefit of an online database, though. I'm trying to amass a list of books that middle school boys enjoy. I'd like to be able to have an online site where boys could add information - as long as I can moderate it, of course. I couldn't do that on our local portal, unfortunately...again with the scripting issue...bleah.

UPDATE: I deleted the link to the database. It slows down my blog to an annoying level. If I can get the darn site to load, I'll just take a snapshot of the database. I don't like this site at all.

UPDATE2: Above is a snapshot of the datase that was on this blog.

I also created this resume on E-Folio. If I were looking for a job, I'd LOVE to be able to use this site. I'm keeping it up there just to have a resume available in case the powers-that-be decide to kill all public schools in the near future. Kidding. I'm a little disenchanted with our government at the moment.