Plaxo Linkedin Portfolio

The pros of these three methods of technology are that they allow you to get information out in a professional setting. With so many employers looking for technology backgrounds, you can set yourself ahead of other applicants by your use of these sites. You also control the information that goes on these sites. The portfolio to me, is the easiest to control because you do not have to worry about other people posting information on your profile. You can always go back and delete posts that you don't want on there, but that just creates more work for you.

The cons of course is that, depending on your settings, anyone can see your information and post things that could potentially harm your chances of getting or keeping your job. It call comes down to being smart and maybe overly cautious about what information you allow on your professional networking sites. It may be best to keep the party photos to the facebooks and twitters.

Peace, Love and Go Bonas!

Digital Portfolio

Here is the link to my digital portfolio. I enjoyed using this technology once I figured out how to create the different pages to show up along the left side. I had one an electronic portfolio while finishing my undergrad and while this was not as extensive, it was considerably easier in terms of creating the site.

http://sites.google.com/site/pmnoel83

Library Thing

I've never really been much of a reader. That being said, my favorite author is Mitch Albom. I read "Tuesdays With Morrie" in high school but never paid any attention to it until I read it again one summer while lifeguarding and realized how amazing a story it is. That made me want to get his next book, "The Five People You Meet In Heaven," which again was a fantastic read. As a basketball coach, I've thorougly enjoyed books by great coaches, specifically John Wooden and Pat Riley. I like how you can categorize your books and add them to your favorites in Librarything, but I'm not really sure what else you can do with it. I guess I haven't spent enough time playing around with it. I've been busy with grades at the end of the year and field day, but I will try to get more time on there to see what else I can use it for.

Anyway, here's the link to my library if you are interested!
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/pm_noel


Peace, Love and Go Bonas!

Image Generator

So I created my image generator using http://www.fototrix.com/. It was interesting and fun to use, but it was annoying that everytime I clicked on a link it opened up a new window and most of the time brought me to the same page I was just on, a little confusing. I decided to use the http://www.fakemagazinecover.com/ link to create just that, a fake magazine cover. I picked one of my pictures from the basketball league I played in during the fall of one of my favorite pictures and found a Basketball magazine cover to put it on. I think it came out pretty cool. I tweeted it and then it wouldn't let me blog it from the page so I had to save the picture and I will add it on here. Just like that!

Peace, Love and Go Bonas!

volleyball bump and set.wmv

I have found that YouTube has a wealth of potential for student learning. This clip I found demonstrates the volleyball bump and set, 2 skills that I just finished teaching in my own classes. If students are having difficulty or are absent for a day, I can find a video and refer them to that so they can see some of the content and demonstrations that were taught in class. This can allow them to stay up to date if they are out, or give them pointers when they are at home as a review.

However, as many of us who have been on YouTube know, there is tons of videos that students should not be watching. It is a difficult task to try to monitor their usage especially if they are being asked to watch a clip on YouTube from a home computer. There is no way of making sure the students do not venture off to other videos after they watch what you have asked them to, but there definitely is a use for the clips as an educational tool.

Podcast Directoy

For my podcasting searches, I used www.podcast.com and after some searching for "fitness" in their search box I found some that were ehhh, okay. Then, I came across one for BeachBody Revolution which I found very interesting since I have been using the P90X workouts for the past year. I decided to subscribe and found some exciting podcasts to listen to.

These have been useful in terms of my personal interests, but I am not sure how much I'd be able to use them in my teaching career. Again, part of this has to do with teaching on the elementary level but I can see how useful podcasts would be for teaching on the secondary or collegiate levels.

Technorati??

I was not impressed at all with Technorati. When typing in Kinesiology and other such references, all I came up with was "no results found." Does that mean there is nobody out here in web 2.0 land that has a blog about Kinesiology?? I find that hard to believe, especially when I am following at least 6 others. I don't know, I'm not sold on it but that might be because I couldn't find what I was supposed to look for. I guess maybe more to come as I play with it some more.

Peace, Love and Go Bonas!
Coach Christmas

Delicious

So I went on to Del.ico.us and found it to be pretty easy to use and neat in the concept of it. I don't know how much I would use it if I am on the same computer all the time. However, I definitely see its usefulness in terms of being able to tag your favorite websites and find them no matter where you are. I like that I can tag all the different emails I use by mail and get them all in one place, or link all the sites I pay my bills on to do the same thing. I do think that it could be helpful in the classroom if you are extremely careful with what you are tagging and what else will come up when searching for those tags. Overall, I think I am convinced on this one.


Peace, Love and Go Bonas!
Coach Christmas

Champions!

rising freshmen
Originally uploaded by pm_noel

Down by 11 at the half, force Overtime and then win by 6 to beat the only team that beat us during the regular season and win the Championship!! Go Stallions!!!

Where Amazing Happens St. Bonaventure University

Here's my YouTube video....

Peace, Love and Go Bonas!

Coach Christmas

KIN 710 Technologies in Elementary Physical Education

I would have to say that the 2 most useful pieces of technology that we've been introduced to during this course are what I found from the web 2.0 awards, and having to create a fan page for Facebook. As you can see from my other post about the iStats page, I can't wait to start inputting my exercises into there to see just exactly how it can work. I think I might end up showing that to my students so that they can keep up to date with what they are doing and have that be a summer project, starting a group or team of Gunston students/teachers. I think it would be neat for the students to see how the teachers are exercising as well as their other classmates.

As one of our weekly assignments was to create a fan page for Facebook, I didn't really know what kind of page I wanted to make. I've been using Facebook since 2005 so I'm pretty up to date with what it has to offer but had never felt the need to make a fan page once they introduced that. I started my fan page for the basketball team I coach, South County Stallions Freshmen Boys. Now that I have, I am really glad because I can post announcements and updates for my guys to check and see what time our games/practices are. I think it will be a helpful tool, especially because I am dealing with high school freshmen and hear the "I didn't know what time practice was" excuse at least 5 times a season.

Peace, Love and Go Bonas!
Coach Christmas

Google Reader/RSS Feeds

Wow....Google Reader, which uses RSS feeds has really made it easy to follow all the blogs of the other KIN members. All I had to do was go to the kines-tech.blogspot.com page that Professor Sailor set up for us and I didn't even have to open up each blog. I just scrolled over the hyperlink to it and right clicked, copied the shortcut, went back to Google Reader and added the subscription. Boom, there it showed up, all their posts in one place and I could read what I wanted to and figure out which ones I wanted to comment on! I always thought I was technologically savvy before this class, and while I am picking up on these new things pretty quickly, I still am realizing that there is SOOOO much more that I could be using that I'm not that would make things a lot cooler, and easier for life in and out of work.


Peace, Love and Go Bonas,
Coach Christmas

Web 2.0 Awards Site

So we were given a link to the best web 2.0 sites for a variety of categories. Naturally, I scrolled down to the Sport section and clicked on the first place website in the category, iStats.com. This thing is pretty sweet, it's an exercise log on steroids! It allows you to enter reps, weight, intensity, etc of just about any exercise you want (it has some default ones in there but allows you to add your own). Then, there's a tab for reports and it will tell you what you did in previous workouts, how much effort you're putting into your workouts, how your weight is changing, etc and you can print them out when you want! It also lets you join teams which is a super help because we all know that working out alone is not as effective as when you have other people around you to motivate you. Looking at the site makes me want to get up off my butt from typing this and go do some sort of workout just so I can plug in the numbers and play with the site more. However, work comes before play and I need to finish the rest of my weekly Grad work before I can get up and do anything. Hmm.....I wonder if there is an exercise in their database about having to move these God awful couches from my old place into my new one, ughhh.

Peace, Love and Go Bonas,
Coach Christmas

Google Docs

Ummmm.......I don't know if Google Docs is experiencing difficulties or not right now but all it is letting me do is create a new folder or upload one of my own files. I'm not sure I like that, what if I want to create a new presentation or spreadsheet, its not letting me! I can see the many uses of it and not having to worry about saving to a USB or needing to email something to yourself to be able to open it on another computer. I saw on Jody's blog that you can create a spreadsheet and send it out to people and when the populate different cells, it automatically updates and saves to your original file. Or something like that, since its not letting me create a new file, I don't know for sure that thats how it works, just taking what I read from her blog through Google Reader :-). I like that concept though, because you could set up a fitness calendar for your students to complete and rather than go through the headache of students losing their hard copy, you can have them go online to fill it out. You can put in the formulas to add up the total number of minutes they exercised throughout a given week or month or year!

If it ever lets me create new things and play with it more, I will be glad to update you on my findings and creations, but until then I'm not sure how much I can use it.

Peace, Love and Go Bonas,
Coach Christmas

Examining Social Software in Teacher Education

This article was interesting in that it shed light on the uses teachers have for social software in the classrooms. One of the things that stood out to me was the point in which you can incorporate this through the simple use of e-mail or you can take it to other steps such as Facebook, etc. I think it's important that every teacher embrace the fact that students today learn much better through the integration of technology. Whether it's doing research on their iphone for a project or simply sending an e-mail to the teacher at night to see what the homework is or what's coming up next in class.

Another thing that I thought was important about this article was the need to teach about the technology that will be used. The example used in the article was that if the teacher was going to use Facebook in the class, the students should be taught the ins and outs, rights and wrongs about using Facebook. Not only would that most likely improve performance in class, but it can also help them stay out of trouble when they are using these social media sites outside of school.

I guess it is time to set up a Gunston Elementary page on Flickr. I don't know how my administrators would like me asking to have my Kindergarteners setting up Facebook accounts. What do you think?

Peace, Love and Go Bonas,
Coach Christmas

Fun with Flickr

IMG_3394_edited-1
Originally uploaded by pm_noel

Before starting this Technology in Kinesiology class, I had only heard of Flickr before, but never been on the site or used it myself. I put up a few pics and tagged them as instructed but still hadn't played around much until now. I'm still learning the ropes, but I think its neat that I can do a blog post from the site and I don't even have to upload the image again.

Anywho, this is Spinny Johnson who used to play with the Harlem Globetrotters and I spinning basketballs on our fingers. Hope you enjoy!

Peace, Love and Go Bonas,
Coach Christmas

All Things Technology

I was working at the golf course yesterday and with all the rain the nightbefore and forecasted for the day, it was not very busy. This led to lots of random facebook checking and seeing what new stories I could read on Yahoo! I stumbled across an article on the New Jersey Nets new owner, Mikhail Prokhorov. This guy is worth between $15 and $18 billion, yes billion. The craziest thing about this guy, he doesn't even use the latest and greatest forms of technology! No e-mail, no cell phone, no twitter, nothing. Maybe that's just what I need to do, stop using all forms of modern technology and I'll become a billionaire right? I guess that will have to be put on hold until I'm done with my Masters, seeing how the entire program is done via this wonderful tool called the internet. Someday, maybe I will give it up. Then I'll be the next billionaire and I can buy an NBA team.

Peace, Love and Go Bonas,
Coach Christmas

Test Post 1

Hello blogging world. Welcome to Coach Christmas' blog. If you're wondering where the name comes from, it's simple. I love to coach basketball, and my last name is Noel, which everyone knows is French for Christmas. In case you are wondering, I am not the First Noel, but rather the third in my family.

Hope you enjoy!!


Peace, love and Go Bonas!