Thing 14

I spent some time learning about tags and how to use them in Technorati. When I put in School Library Learning 2.0, there were quite a few pertinent posts that were listed. When I put in music education, thousands of posts came up and most of them didn't have anything to do with music education. Then I searched the blog directory and that yielded better info. Searching the tags had way too much stuff and, again, many weren't really connected to music ed. I've already found some music ed. sites by using the google tools, but I can see that this is a good site. I claimed my blog, even though it doesn't have much that is valuable right now.

Thing 13

As I tried the 3 different sites, Magnolia and Furl worked better for me because you could use 2 words in the search and it narrowed the search better. To be useful, I needed to search "music education", not just "music" or "education". Using both of those search engines (is that what they are?), I was able to find some useful sites. I haven't registered yet, but I believe that I will. I think this might be better than the Google tool that saves sites. When I come back to this, I'll compare.

Thing 12(con)

It's happening. I'm getting "roped in" to this idea of blogging. I thought it was just self-centered people writing about themselves, but I've found some blogs that are thoughtful, intelligent, and really helpful. I commented to 5 of the people on the list to the right, then I went to some of the blogs that I'd found and kept on Google Reader. I googled quilts and found an entry that spoke about connections and it mentioned a new series of mysteries centered around quilts! I responded (mostly thanking). Then I googled "piano teaching" (another of my jobs) and found a site that posed questions. I responded to 2 of them and it was easy! That same site led me to a video of a talk that was so inspiring about guiding people to love classical music. Now I'm trying to figure out how to link it to my blog.

Thing 12

The things that stand out in the articles I read about blogging are: There is more "structure" than I thought. I guess it's like most things--a culture develops with its own set of accepted behaviors. Secondly, I've been trying to decide whether to use my real name or an "alias". I'm inclined to want to be private when I express opinions. For one thing, I seem to change those opinions sometimes. I guess I don't want to be held accountable. Whatever the reason, I'll probably respond only to blogs that don't require registering. We'll see.

Thing 11

Cataloguing books is a valuable tool and it will be interesting to see if there are other people with a taste for funny murder mysteries. Changes will need to be made often because I learned years ago that I don't have enough room in my house for all of the books that I read. I try to sell to Half Price Books or donate to other locations fairly often. There are a few that I can't part with, however, so I'll try and get them catalogued. I'm trying to get the first 5 books to my blog, but it's taking me a while. That's the story of my tech life. I'll keep trying. This tool seems like it will be fun, but I can't see a use in my (elementary music) classroom.

Thing 10

This is kind of fun, but it takes a lot of time because I never remember exactly how to do each task. I think I'll do some more. This one came from the cartoon link, but it didn't have very many music cartoons. I'm going to try to do a composer trading card. We could also make the cards for instruments of the orchestra. I'm wondering about making posters.

Thing 10

Thing 10 is kind of fun. I plan to do more than one example, but here's one.