Thing 10

I can definitely see a value for Twitter for those interested. I believe it to be a great tool to stay in "the loop" with friends, family or others. It's quick to look at and the posts are short. I did sign up and posted a tweet. However, I don't see myself visiting Twitter often. I honestly don't care about what people are doing at random times during the day and don't have time or the energy to tell my thoughts or what I'm doing. I've been on Facebook for over a year now and I much prefer using that to keep in touch with others. I actually get annoyed with Facebook friends who feel the need to tell everything that they do during the day -which seems to me what Twitter is about.

I checked out both the Best of... and Time's 50 Best Websites. I definitely prefer the Best of Web 2008. I loved that it was categorized. If I didn't care about the category, I didn't check out the sites. Time's 50 had no organization to it and I found myself checking out sites only to find that I had no interest in them. While I'm familiar with many of the well known or more popular sites, I found that there were a lot of great sites that I didn't know about. I first started to look toward educational sites such as PB Education that dealt with Wikis, but realized that we will be focusing on Wikis later. I also knew that we would be looking into Delicious later as well so I avoided that. Being that I'm at the beach on vacation, I focused on two of the more fun ones. The first was Yelp. I actually have this on my phone and have used it quite a bit to look for restaurants and stores while on vacation. The one site that I had never heard of was Last. While at the beach, pool or even back in our condo, I've been using my IPhone to listen to playlists as well as my Sirius radio. What I realized is that I'm quite limited in having a lot of new music. I've probably added less than 10 new songs to my playlists in the last year. Last interested me since it takes what you listen to (on your phone, ipod, or computer) and is able to make suggestions based on your listening choices. It also lets you know when favorite artists will be touring near you. I just registered on the site. I'll have to see how it all works as it starts to recognize my favorites. (Since half of all of my playlists are Springsteen songs, I'm sure that will be an easy one for the computer!) While I like a variety of artists, I find that I fall back to my favorites when choosing songs. I also love hearing new music, but never know who sings what by the time I'm looking for new music on Itunes. This should help considerably. I'm curious to see how different from Pandora it is - since I've used that in the past, but don't love it like some other people do. Since I focused on a music site, I'm not sure what the educational implications might be. The only thing that I could think of is that if I had educational songs or raps on my computer (there are some great ones out there) it might be able to suggest other ones that I'm not aware of. Carol - if you're reading this, you'll have to try it with all of your great songs that you use with your class!