Thing 8 Delicious

Delicious website: http://delicious.com/rar1857

The stuff I will tag for school will be basketball and running related. In basketball I would probably have several different tags such basketballdefense, basketballdrills, basketballoffense, etc. For running it might not have to be so broken down. Maybe, fitnessnutrition, fitnesstraining, etc. My favorites menu now is so hard to navigate and there are so many things that I will put on this site to help me be more organized. I am unable to access all of the information now because it's so disorganized. This will help so much.
I will assign tag names in my own terminology so that I know exactly where to look for something. I certainly wouldn't want to confuse myself! If others want to see my stuff they have to think like me!
The delicious thing was a little confusing at first but it's just like any other "thing" we learned. You just gotta do it. I hope to explore a lot of social bookmarks of other coaches and find out about many more helpful sites to enhance my coaching and teaching.
Thanks for your time in teaching us all of this new technology. I really enjoyed it and feel like I can identify with all the techno geeks a little better now. : )

Thing 7

Pretty amazing how you all can edit at one time. I think in coaching, at least from my coordinator's position, this will be beneficial for our girl's staff when preparing documents. I am a stickler for grammar and spelling. I cringe when seeing some of the papers my coaches have sent home in the past. This will be a good tool for not only editing, but communicating what is going on at each campus.

This tool could be good for our productivity among the staff across the program. Coach Wiley and I could work collaboratively on the Athletic Handbook that we put out each year. Using Google Docs could also save paper--you don't have to print to edit. However, an iPad would help too! :) Could that be Thing 9?

Technology is quite amazing and I am learning a lot. I didn't realize how helpful the technology could be for efficiency and communication. The world is changing and I am hanging on by my fingernails....but now with the 'things' training, I have a better grip. Thanks for helping us "old-set-in-our-ways" folks stay hip!

I like Google Docs.

Thing 6

I already use podcasts to follow certain college coaches for basketball information. I also have downloaded some from itunes university that cover the environment, weather, and other things that interest me. I have downloaded others from NPR that deal with health and fitness. I can see myself sharing these with my fellow coaches and student/athletes through my blog or twitter.
I have viewed numerous youtube videos that show drills and skills for basketball. The ideas I get from these videos help keep my practices from becoming stale. The videos are actually taken from clinics and practices of major college programs. I really gain more from watching these than I do from attending clinics.
We plan to get the technology to organize videos so that we can email clips of individual players--that would allow for instance, our point guard to take a look at her game from her iphone while sitting on her couch. We would be able to get more individualized with our video sessions. Our men's staff already does this. We just need to get the technology. My assistant teaches video tech at the HS and she would be in charge!

Thing 5

Wikis are pretty cool. Can't think of much to use with my athletes except forming an itinerary for out of town/overnight trips. With my coaches I'm thinking that practice organization would be great. They could add to a list of drills that could help improve a certain skill that we are lacking in. They could help me build a better practice when we aren't all together in the office. I wouldn't want to put our offenses or defenses on there cause everyone could look at them, yes?
I had the opportunity to use a wiki while on vacation and didn't even know it...I needed to look up a certain highway that I'd never traveled on. I googled it and the site I picked happened to be a highway wiki. It had lots of information on the highway such as how many lanes, speed limits, what towns it passed through, and road construction alerts. The latest post was almost a year old so I wasn't sure about the accuracy as it stated road construction for 9 miles. It was accurate although the construction was at a standstill. I would've added that fact to the wiki but my signal was minimal so I was unable to.
I use wikipedia quite a bit but never knew what the "wiki" part meant! And now I know! I really enjoyed Thing 6.

Thing 4

Hi--sorry so late but the latest greatest technology is very primitive where my vacation has taken me. I was unable to create the flickr account due to my lack of a decent connection. This is a picture of my dog Buckeye with his favorite toy! He is an Australian Shepherd and he LOVES to play ball...I uploaded this photo from my camera. The picture of the basketball jersey at the bottom of this post is from imagechef.com. Pretty nifty site.
I do take many digital pictures on a very nice camera and most of them never leave the camera! It was interesting to find out that they can be stored in cyber space and shared with whoever. This will be great for our athletic blog--many times we will be at a competition and someone will have their camera and get all the historic shots. We all want copies and intentions are great but we never get the copy. I'd be interested to find out if all of us athletic folks could share photos on one site. Many parents enjoy games yet don't get to take pictures and would love to be able to get some. Or what may be "safer" would be for folks to email me photos and I upload the appropriate ones to our site.
Our photo guy has all of our pics online now and our kids are able to log in and purchase their picture packages. That is very cool! And it saves those who forgot their money!
As far as the creative sites go.....I can see my younger coaches jumping in and promoting games, events, etc. very well as they are really into the latest technology. I have learned some new stuff from them already.

Thing 3

I'll have to admit that I'm anit-social when it comes to social networks. My distant friends are frustrated with me because I don't have a facebook page. I think if all of this technology had happened when I was younger I would've been more open to it. I've just seen all the negatives and frankly some people put some really stupid and inappropriate stuff on there! It just doesn't appeal to me at the most social level. Random folks will send me facebook posts containing pictures of my athletes doing inappropriate things. We now have a rule in our discipline policy pertaining to inappropriate internet activity. I'm just not a facebook kind of person -- so I opted for Twitter. I can see using Twitter a great deal in the network of athletics and coaching. We will Tweet our scores, our stats, updates from tournaments, etc. I kind of like Twitter and am eager to read and learn more so that I can understand the terminology and "rules". I'm still trying to figure out how it works on my iphone. And according to one of the articles, young people don't get into Twitter so I assume I will have to ask most of our athletes to open Twitter accounts. But it sounds much easier than sending out multiple text messages when I need to get in touch with the whole group. So, I'm still researching it and am very interested in it as a way to communicate with my staff and kids.

Thing 2

I'm a little overwhelmed at all of the possibilities in web 2.0. I have said many times in the past year that if you want your kids to learn a new play (basketball), you'd better text it to them. Ha!
I'm not sure how each resource differs but I know they do. I also know that they can be used together. My interest is in establishing a blog for our girls athletic program, then using either another blog or other resource for our various teams that would be facilitated by the head coach of the sport. I can envision us using the various resources for practice calendars, playbooks, video highlights, scouting reports, etc. I'm not sure which would be appropriate for each....I just don't understand them all yet. And I'm not sure how they tie in together.
For myself...I already research EVERYTHING but having access to cross country/basketball coaches blogs, etc. is an unlimited resource. I would rather attend a "virtual" coaches clinic on a specific sport than leave town for 3 days and attend one or two sessions that are already too crowded and have limited resources.
I have been somewhat resistant to the digital world when it comes to kids learning. But thing 2 has really opened my eyes to the "way the world is" and how our kids need to learn in order to survive and how we teachers HAVE to utilize all of this technology or we are NOT teaching our kids. Instead of fight them we have to join them. Does this mean that we will eventually allow cell phone usage in the classrooms? If we don't then some of this cannot happen. But will that make the "police work" even more challenging? I know that I learned better in collaboration but back in the day it was sitting in a circle brainstorming or talking about the subject. Digital collaboration can include so much more information....but we have to change some rules and upgrade our technology......, yes?
I can see the day that there are no textbooks and everyone has a Kindle-type device or an
I-pad. That will definitely change everything. But what happens when those devices break or we have some sort of network hiccup? Oh my old-school mind can run wild with negative possiblilites yet I know it's the way we are going.

Response to blogs

Oh yeah, I did get a little caught up in creating my page...just couldn't pass up the chance to express a little frustration with some fun.

I have an iPhone and use it a lot to view the internet and check on things that interest me - the common statement in the office is "there's an app for that". However, sitting at the computer keeping a blog up-to-date may be one of the tougher aspects of blogging for me. It would be nice if other coaches could help with keeping the blog updated. Would they need my sign-in or would they create their own on my page. Definitely something to explore.

As for the athletic blogs you've listed, I did check them out and it looks like they've been doing this for a while. I would like to keep our blog simple at first...just hope the parents and kids will view it. This may be an answer to my problem with kids informing their parents of game changes, departing times for tournaments, etc. I'm not sure about this twittering thing but I am interested in learning. Thanks for sending me some blog sites to view.

(I replied to your comment, but wasn't sure if you would get it with so many blogs to watch. In the future should I add to the comments when you have a follow-up question or should I add a new post?)

Thing 1

Well--
"Thing 1" was "Miss Thang" if I may say. The first time I attempted to create the blog page I just breezed right through. Then when I closed everything out and tried to visit my newly created page I was taken to a page of some horseback riding expert. It even had a pink background and everyone knows that I do not like pink so I couldn't have done that. So I just started over and now here I am actually blogging away about nothing. Oh, fact is that I haven't gotten to ride my bike in 2 days so I am a little irritable--so much for Cyling Summer. But I bet it quits raining and starts droughting soon. Afterall, this is Central Texas.
I am excited about learning th 8 things and will soon have a blog page for LT Athletics.