Thing 4

Commenting is necessary to help a blog grow and thrive. Also, commenting is a way to share thoughts with those who are discussing topics either of interest to you or areas that you may be able to assist in enhancing a blog with your own insight.

I chose to comment on five recent Things that were of importance to me, or that I felt I had a weighted opinion on.

First, my classmate Amy Mills Thing 21 on Animoto because she and I both agreed on how super of an exercise this was. If a teacher made one of these for one of my daughter's classes and emailed it out say, after a holiday party at the school, I would be ecstatic. What fun.

I commented on Adriana Tate's Thing 18 on Twitter because I have personal feelings on the social networking discussion in Things. Personally, as I mentioned in the comment, Dr. Wall needs to integrate Google+ into this Thing. Google+ may well be the social network king of tomorrow, and frankly from what little I've learned of it thus far (I've had a hard time ditching Facebook simply out of habit), it is very handy about different circles of friends and who can see what post. This would be excellent for someone who has professionals, friends, and family on one "friend list.

I commented on Hannah Shearer's "Is It The End Or Just The Beginning," because I agreed with what she had to say. Some of the assignments were relatively time consuming and redundant, and I would love to see this project condensed down, if for no other reason that to truly appreciate and remember more of the assigned online tasks.

I agreed on Hannah Shingler's comment on Thing 22, LiveBinder, because I agreed with her that it was just too much work for what was involved. However I continued to say that I do see the importance of having something like this for children. Like a webquest, it controls what websites they are going to (assuming they stay on the websites that are put into the folders and subfolders), so it's certainly important to have, just a timely process to create.

Last, I commented on Emily Henson's Thing 20. Emily's an outstanding student and I wanted to check out how her blog was going since last I viewed it. Her YouTube video was too fun, and touched on two things kids love, cute animals and music, that was turned into an educational rap tune. YouTube is incredible. Keep YouTube on this 23 things. It's an essential tool for life, not just teachers.