Task 1: New Tools
You want to know how to create an email account and virtual bookmarks?
Creating a new email account and virtual bookmarks.
With the beginning of the "New Media" class we were introduced to several tools that can be useful for us as teachers to be. In order to be able to use all the upcoming new tools we began the class with creating a yahoo account on yahoo.com. It was not especially difficult but as I was a greenhorn it took me a while to figure it out. I am used to a different kind of E-Mail program and yahoo seemed to be a bit overwhelming with all the extra features at first. In retrospect I realize why it is very useful to have an account especially for our work in this class.
After we successfully completed the account registration we continued with delicious.com. You can not only bookmark online but also tag all the things with personalized key words. This way you can always search within your own virtual database for certain bookmarks. Furthermore, you can contribute your results to other users and also have a look through their bookmarks as well.
After we successfully completed the account registration we continued with delicious.com. You can not only bookmark online but also tag all the things with personalized key words. This way you can always search within your own virtual database for certain bookmarks. Furthermore, you can contribute your results to other users and also have a look through their bookmarks as well.
Organize your own dashboard.
Organize your frequently used websites on a customized dashboard.
Another experience was creating our own dashboard on netvibes. This website enables to have all the existing blogs, bookmarks, feed etc. on one dashboard. You can add so called “widgets” like the weather forecast, the news or a friend’s website for example. It is really helpful to see everything important all at once and you can organize your frequently used websites on your own customized dashboard.
Follow your friends on Twitter!
Who else is on twitter?
A further introduction into the opportunities of the World Wide Web offered us twitter.com. I had heard of it but never used it before and I have to admit that I don’t experience too many benefits from using it, yet. All the other introduced tools helped me in specific ways and did not only enrich my own personal knowledge but my sense of media. Twitter only showed me the “wrong” side of using new technologies in class. But I am always willing to learn and find out more, so I am curious about its use and developments.
Websites for creating word clouds.
This is only one of many websites that enable to create tag clouds.
Concluding we started experimenting with several websites that create “word clouds”. You can simply make a bunch of words or even a face or a certain shape like a heart for example. But there is more behind those seeming random arrangements of words. The more often a word appears in the used text the bigger it is in the “cloud”. If a single word only appears a few times, its size shrinks in the created word bundle. If you are interested in finding out more about this useful tool and how to use it in the classroom click here.
All these was something new for me again and I really appreciate it as I can already see myself using it in class.
All these was something new for me again and I really appreciate it as I can already see myself using it in class.
