23 Mobile Things: Thing 1

Reviving this old blog for the new 23 Things challenge feels like a challenge in itself.  It has been 5 years since the last entry and I really am relearning the Blogger platform since I didn't spend much time with the 23 Things Challenge.
My media colleagues and I have taken on this 23 Mobile Things challenge due to the direction our district is going with technology.  Since operating a 1-to-1 device program is expensive from a district owned equipment standpoint, we are strongly considering a BYOD approach to technology access. Many of our students already bring their own web capable device to school so this make the most sense for our financially strapped school district.
I advocate for device neutral applications for our students so am loving that 23Things Mobile is set up for iOS and Android users.  I will be using an iPad, but am also hoping to get my hands on an Android device to try the 23 Things in both OS. I think this will help ease teacher fears of not knowing the devices the students have in class--knowing that I have a bit of knowledge with both OS.  I believe I can reassure them that it doesn't matter the device because our applications are device neutral.
My goal is to get through two challenges a week to be done by the end of the school year. I will encourage our teachers to go through the 23 Things as well--just for the experience--as I think the BYOD program is going to happen sooner rather than later.

Book Fair at DHS

Check out the book fair going on this week.

Thing 7: Communications

E-mail, no problem, long time user, love it. In fact, I probably have more e-mail accounts than I need, but what I love about gmail is the ability to pull all of my e-mail accounts into the one, so I read everything in one place (with the exception of my work e-mail). Instant messaging I do not use very often, probably because I prefer e-mail. I have used it at home if I am on one level of the house and the kids are on another level, both of us are online and I want to tell them to do something more active. They tend to respond more quickly to an IM than to me hollering up the stairs... go figure. Used ichat occasionally when I was at a Mac laptop school, but still preferred e-mail. . SMS I use mostly to communicate with my children. I still would prefer to pick up the phone and talk to them--its faster. But if I don't want an argument I send a text. Meebo is blocked by our web filter. Twitter I am still trying to figure out WHY TWITTER? Another way to waste time either reading a twitter or responding to twitters..

More Things on a Stick

I am going to try to finish the 23 things of the first round while simultaneously working on the 23 things in this More things round. I have been having lots of fun using image generators and learned of this new photo editing site called picnik. I told my 14 year old daughter about it and she is in love with it. She is having a great time editing picture to post to her Facebook page.

Thing 6: Online image generator

What a great way to make photos fancy. Lots of fun to be had here. I can see kids getting really creative with their photos using these tools. Big Huge Labs is full of tools, and Image Chef allows for lots of creativity.

Thing 5: More Flickr

I made a group for my family to share photos. Discovered a cool mash-up on world disasters courtesy of wikipedia and passed that along to a few teachers. Neat stuff. Still trying to get a handle on mashups... Some of the links are dead in the 23 things blog (like the 10 best flickr mashups) but thats ok, since I may not have time to explore those anyway. They can all be found from the Flickr site anyway--just don't know what the 10 best are.

Flickr

Playing with Flickr today. I started an account last summer (2007) after I returned from Poland and intended to upload all the pictures from that trip to Flickr to share with the campers at Ocwieka. Internet speed at home prevented me from attacking that work. We have faster internet now, so I might get going. I did upload a few from this past summer's trip to Poland. Today I created a group for the family to upload pictures. Will see how it works...