I’ve challenged some of my colleagues to take the 23 Things challenge to become more invested in online learning this summer. This website includes a 10-week game plan for learning some online learning and presenting methods that are useful for teachers, and that are appropriate activities for the age group we teach.  There are other 23 Things lists out there, I know, but this is the one that we’ve chosen to work with, and that I’ve decided to complete.

The previous entries in this series are here:

1. Getting Started
2. Discovery
3. Setting Up a Blog
4. Starting with Flickr
5. Find some Flickr Toys and Tools
6. Blog about the role of tech in your classroom
7. Initial experiment with RSS Readers

As I mentioned last time, I got set up with the new RSS reader at Feedly, and I discovered that I already had one built into WordPress, which I actually use from time to time. For exercise 8, I’m supposed to add a bunch of new sites to my reader, and start making use of them, and maybe share some links.

The most interesting tool I’ve found so far this way is Larry Ferlazzo’s lists.  Here, he talks about how Google has made 28 years of satellite photos searchable by us ordinary mortals.  And I’ve also shared this article on choosing a classroom blog-hosting service with a couple of colleagues already.  Karl Fisch talks about joining a Stanford University class on “How to learn Math“.  Sounds like a class I’d like to take! Someday, not this summer. Wes Fryer talks about Google Fusion tables. Given that I’m going to be learning and teaching using Google Apps this fall, this should be interesting.

In Humor, the darkly-funny Onion reports on a new charter school with awesome funding, and a brilliant new strategy for success: No Students.

In the news, I’ve been interested in this payroll cards scandal, where the New York Times has found that big banks and fast-food restaurants are scamming employees by charging them high fees to collect their own pay.  Apparently, finally, the attorney general has gotten involved.

My biggest challenge is remembering to use the feed.

Keeping Up With Earlier Efforts

Returning to an earlier thing about Flickr, where setting up a user account was one of the earlier 23Things activities, I’ve gone through my entire feed and tagged the nearly 380 photos that were not tagged. A database of images that have no tags is neither particularly useful nor searchable, and so that’s done.  I still have to assemble them in sets and groups, but that’s part of my summer plan, too.

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