Thing #7

Flickr!

I have to confess that until today, I really had no idea what Flickr was.  I had heard about it, of course, and knew that it had pictures but I didn't understand what it was all about.  Overall, it was pretty easy to navigate my way around the site.  I really enjoyed the Getty Images Gallery, which had a huge collection of historical pictures from all over the world.  What a great way for teachers to give "some ol' dead guy" a face and personality to help students understand who this person is.  I browsed some of the other collections and oogled at picture after picture and had a lot of fun with that.  Then I started searching more specific photographs.  The picture I decided to share from Flickr encapsulates three different aspects of me: I am a devout follower of Christ, I love to travel and have a love of art history.

St. Peter's Cathedral, The Vatican - Looking down the Nave                                                   (photo by John Dalkin, 2012)

During my undergraduate study at Ohio State I minored in Art History and my absolute favorite thing I ever studied was the great cathedrals built throughout Europe.  There are many that I love, but I do not have such a connection with any like I do with St. Peter's. This picture looks down the Nave of the church.  Cathedrals were traditionally built in the shape of a cross, and the Nave is the name of the hallway of the longer part of the cross (the one that goes "up & down").  The brown structure straight ahead is called the Baldacchinno (ball-da-kee-no), it is the monument that houses the church's relic, the chains St. Peter wore while imprisoned before his death.  St. Peter's Cathedral was built over the course of many years, but was completed by Michelangelo.  It was intentionally built to be the largest cathedral in the world and if you visit St. Peter's you will see silver lines set in the stone floor with the names of other cathedrals below, designating where that cathedral, literally, stops.  It really does give you an idea of just how much bigger St. Peter's is than any other church.  I was fortunate to visit St. Peter's and the Vatican in 2004 with my dad. Walking into the cathedral, I had never in my life seen something so grand and all I could think was This is a church worthy of being called God's house! It happened to be Sunday morning when we visited and as we were leaving, after having explored as much as we could, the Sunday morning mass also ended and the organ started to sing throughout the church.  Now, if you have ever heard an organ you know how it can fill the room with sound.  Imagine that sound reverberating throughout a building completely made of stone.  Yes, we were stopped dead in our tracks.  Not only did this church literally look like the house of God, now it sounded like it!  My dad and I just stood there in awe as tears rolled down our cheeks.  It was one of the most moving experiences of my life and St. Peter's will forever be a special place to me because of it.  

Kind of neat to relive experiences like that from just finding a photo on Flickr.

Thing #6

Discovering Web 2.0 Online Tools... and they're free!

Have you ever seen the wall of paint sample cards at a home improvement store?  A wall covered in little, colorful squares just barely different from the one next to it.  At first you are a little mesmerized by all the color, but then you realized you can only use one and you just wonder, where do I begin in picking just one?  That's how I felt when I first opened the Web 2.0 Tool webpage. I had no idea the shear amount of sites that were available!  The neat thing was that with a little creativity, teachers could make a lot of these sites suitable in their classrooms and the only thing it would cost them is their time.  I spent a fair amount of time perusing different links trying to find a good site that I thought I might really use in my classroom someday.  After trying quite a few options, my favorite site I landed on was QUIZinator.

QUIZinator is a website designed to help educators create, manage, and store tests and quizzes.  A unique feature to QUIZinator is that the site stores questions individually, rather than whole test documents, allowing the user to drag and drop questions to change the test difficulty or add variability between test versions.  The site can also automatically rearrange questions or answer choices on a particular test or quiz to reduce the likelihood of cheating.  There is quite a bit of storage space on QUIZinator, which prevents that panic of losing the test with a lost memory stick or hard copy.

I really liked the ease of test and quiz creation this website offered.  It is free to sign up, and appears to be really user friendly.  I thought this was a great tool for teachers to use to store a large test bank and make one part of teaching just a little easier.