Thing # 12.

For this assignment I chose google alerts and to explore Picasa Web Albums further.

A link to my public web albums can be found here: Snow Day album!

I occasionally use Picasa when my Dad sends me something from his web album, but I have never used it to upload pictures. To my surprise the pictures from this blog and my family blog are both in their own folders, however they are private. Creating a new album was self explanatory. It was easy to upload the photos I took of my dog, Rusty, during playing in the snow today! After uploading them to the album I gave each photo a comment and then saved them. When creating the album Picasa gives you the option of who you want to share your albums with, so I made mine public for this class. In the future, I will probably keep these visible to only my family and friends.

I also chose to explore the google alerts tool. Since I am already an avid google user, it was easy to sign up. I just had to search for a key word, select what I was looking for, I choose world news, select how many times a day I wanted it-I said just once, and then how many I wanted it to send. As soon as I completed this, I received my first google alert. I also added a google alert for chemistry. As of right now, I am not sure what type of alerts I will receive for chemistry. I am hoping its news related and research related so that it could be a possible use in the classroom when I begin to teach.

I think both of these tools have a good possibility for being used in the classroom. Picasa could be used to keep the families involved with projects, labs, or other things going on in the class. It could also be a way to post pictures from a field trip. A public Picasa album could also be used by the students in class in order to upload real world examples for the subject they are learning about, such as well water testing for chemistry-I did this once and it was so interesting and fun! I am sure I have pictures of it somewhere! As for using google alerts in the classroom, I feel that having a chemistry alert will allow me to get up to date information on news and research that I could share with my students!