Thing #8 What is a Wiki?

I enjoyed reading about Wiki Wiki Teaching. It discusses what wiki's are about and it also discusses how a teacher trained her students to use wiki's.  It was very interesting as to how involved the students became with this.   I looked through the Code Blue wiki and found it to be very interesting.  It was a wiki that information related to the human body and lots of medical websites.  The students could go to various websites to find anything they needed regarding the human body. I also like another wiki called FHS Wolves Den. It had a lot of great information for an English and History class.  It had a sidebar for history and English notes, a project sidebar and a sidebar for games.  The Wolves Den had a lot of sidebars to direct the students to lots of information they could use for either subject.  There were also several websites the students could go to for History information.
I looked at several wikis and was very impressed with the way most of them were set up.  I have started a wiki for my PE classes, but I have not finished the finalization of it yet. I made it for the kids to get daily exercises from it to do at home.  The wiki site is Coach Quinn PE.  At Terry Middle School we have a website that our coaches update for our athletes and parents to refer to for schedules, calendars and other information regarding TMS athletics.  I have enjoyed learning about wikis because I hope to make my PE wiki better.

Thing # 7 Creating Community Through Commenting

There were some interesting facts that I read about when it comes to blogs.  The 1st being that 1 out of 100 people comment on your blog. It said in the article that 90% of users were readers with 9% contributing a little bit and 1% actively contributing.  I find this to be true because so many people are big users of facebook and one can tell by reading the blogs that most read and very few comment.   If someone on facebook asks a question they seem to get more responses which is also stated in the article 10 Techniques to Get More Comments on Your Blog.
I know commenting on blogs can be very important, but I believe it just allows people to converse back and forth sometimes.  Although at times I want to blog about something but cannot find the words I want to use. I always want it to sound good and not look illiterate or have bad grammar. I am also one of these people that find a spelling mistake when I first read.  Anyways, commenting can be FUN in a lot of different ways.  I LOVE FACEBOOK!

Thing #6 Feed Your Reader

Wow this can be so overwhelming!  Especially learning how to keep up with a Google Reader. There are some very interesting articles and I can use a lot of this information in my Physical Education class.  There is an article titled, "Evolution of Dance-Fun Moves For Your PE Class." This article has some interesting information about different types of dancing.  As we all know, dancing has changed a lot from the years of the past.  Also, in this reader there is a lot of good information about Physical Education.  It shows a trick play for football, an article about no timeouts for endurance sports, an article about concussions and many different videos pertaining to sports, PE topics, etc.

The best thing I like about this is being able to skim real quick to see what information may be important or interesting to me.  Now, I am wanting to subscribe to More and More

Thing #5 RSS

I have never heard of RSS and did not have a clue what it consisted of.  I think this is a really neat site for students or anyone to go to read articles.  If one wanted to set up many articles on an RSS it would be a great way for someone to go to one site for interesting articles to read.  This can be a big time saver for all to use. This article about 10 Reasons Students Prefer Learning Online caught my interest because I never thought there would be so many reasons a student may like learning online vs. learning in a traditional classroom. One of the main reasons could be a student could sleep in and be on their own schedule.  I also believe a student could focus on their work online wo distractions from others.  Some students seem to not be able to focus because of others around them. 
Since I am not very technology savvy I have found that RSS could benefit many and these assignments are getting very interesting and take some thought.

Thing #4 Blogging Begins with Reading

I believe blog writing is a way of forming an opinion and also someone writes about what they feel a lot of times.  Most people that blog also seem to not pay attention to grammar and/or spelling because they are talking from the heart.  I believe as a teacher it would be fun to allow the students to blog instead of writing in a journal or on paper.  This would make them more excited because they all seem to love Technology and being able to use a computer/laptop. The students would also be more excited to see what their teacher and other students were writing back to them or simply replying to other blogs.   I really liked the blog Patrick's Update.   This blog was started by Patrick and I enjoyed reading it because he was given positive feedback to read and he was told he could do anything he set his mind to and "The Sky is the Limit."