Flickr & YouTube

Flickr is a popular web site to share personal photographs.  Anyone can set up an account and upload images and videos. Some of the key features of Flickr are tagging, marking photos as favorites, allocating the photo where was taken on a map.

Flickr provides both private and public image storage. While uploading an image one can set privacy controls that determine who can view the image friends, family or both. Privacy settings also can be decided by adding photographs from a user's photostream to a "group pool". If a group is private all the members of that group can see the photo. If a group is public the photo becomes public as well.

I like this website because I love to take photos. The entire process in Flicker was relatively easy. I enjoy uploading the photos for my trip to Dubai in Flicker.

Here is the link to my flickr account:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/naelahalmuqwishi/

You Tube is one of the famous websites in the world. It is a video sharing website where users can upload, share, view, and save videos by having a google account. Videos uploaded to You Tube are limited to 15 minutes in length and a file size of 2 GB, however, user can upload and share unlimited videos.

  

 The process of uploading and sharing videos via YouTube is pretty easy. YouTube has a lot of great features for example, the ability of users to view its videos on web pages outside YouTube, the ability to save your favorite videos in your YouTube account, and the ability to fallow specific channels that you like.

  

YouTube has many educational advantages that teacher can get. However, teachers should be careful because as much as YouTube provides great videos, it also has inappropriate videos. In addition, Teacher Tube is a video sharing website similar and based on YouTube, which provides many educational videos that might help teachers and students.

Social Bookmarking & Social Website

Social Bookmarking and Social Website are very powerful and popular sites. I think using these sites for educational purposes is an opportunity for teachers and instructors to make their classes more interesting and organized.

First, Bookmarking services are websites that allow users save, organize, publish and share links to a variety of Internet resources for example, web pages, web sites, blog posts, articles, music, and video, etc. In addition, professors, teachers and instructors can use social bookmarking websites to see what information other teachers use in the studying process and learn from others experience. It is very easy to find relevant bookmarks as most of them are tagged with keywords and have description. I think social bookmarking is an amazing tool. I started to use bookmarking last semester. I use Diigo to save and organize my work especially with all the online work and searching I have so I don’t have to carry my laptop all the time or do the old way that I send it to my email through my email! Since Diigo is saving my work online in the cloud.

Second, Social Website, I have been using social website for a long time. In 2006 I set up a Facebook account. I can’t found many ways that we can use social websites for educational purposes except that teacher can open an account for her/his class subject so students will get the opportunity to communicate with their classmate, discuses topics, and share articles and videos. I think it will be helpful and fun especially that students will use a site that is familiar for them.

   

RSS

          RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is a great tool to save time and track all of the websites that one are interested in. simply it is like you tell every website you like to let you know every time that they update.

            These days the internet has so much content; it’s time consuming to get to different places to read and check information form each one. RSS offers a great way to read all the website that one fallows in one place! And one can even save it to read later. This application allows one to subscribe to any specific site to automatically receive new posts from that site for a quick access in an aggregator like, Google reader.

I believe this tool is really helpful for everyone and especially educators as Richardson says, “if you're an educator, I think it's the one technology that you should start using today, right now, this minute" (Richardson 2009 p.71).  So they can save time and track all the websites, especially those who have a lot of work online with students.

           It is a great tool, I like it and I’m using it now, it makes my day easier!