2 New Selection Tools Online

Today I received a new email newsletter entitled: Quick Tips from Book Links. If you haven't seen it, you can go to: http://link.ixs1.net/s/ve?eli=k160219&si=e182487167&cfc=3html to view it and sign up to receive future issues. In the newsletter, I found reference to the new ALSC blog from ALA. I haven't seen this before.

The Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), has launched an ALSC blog at http://www.alsc. ala.org/blog. The blog provides a venue for coverage and interactive discussion of time sensitive news in children’s librarianship, current issues in the field, programs, conferences, initiatives, resources and activities of interest to ALSC members and those interested in children’s librarianship. I found a great comment about displays that you can read in total on a post for Dec. 7, 2007 at http://www.alsc.ala.org/blog/?p=139#comments: "I have to admit to putting books on display in libraries that I don’t even work in. Kinda like committing random acts of kindness – I commit random acts of display." Have you tried this?

Winter Fun 2.0

It's here! Winter Fun with School Library Learning 2.0. I'm looking forward to being a peer cheerleader, especially after finally meeting some of the Summer Fun bloggers f2f at the CSLA Conference. I'm also looking forward to learning some new tools and tricks as we continue this adventure together. If you are hesitating to get started, come on. We'll help and it's lots more fun than the after Christmas sales.

More later from the PageSpace

Life Goes On in High School Libraryland

The first month of school had passed and we were still literally up to our elbows in textbook boxes, with more coming in the door. I think we need to have a category on the annual library survey in this state to indicate how many of us have to process, store, check out and retrieve textbooks in our CA school libraries. I also want questions for how much space it takes up and how much time it keeps the library closed each year. Oh well, my rant is over.

We are finally open for regular hours and service, and all of the 9th grade English classes have completed the library orientation. Life feels normal now in the library.

"Shift happened. The librarian divide"

From Joyce Valenza at her blog on SLJ, "Shift happened. The librarian divide" for September 27, 2007 - if you didn't catch this already, here is some interesting reading describing our journey here in Library and School 2.0.

Thinking back - the last thing, week 9, thing #23

My favorite discoveries and exercises were the picture things, Flickr and all the toys, YouTube for education (and fun) and the mash ups we discovered. They seemed simple to use as I learned how to use them. I feel that one of the strengths of this program has been the way the lessons progressed and built on what I learned as I went along. Even when I was using a tool I might have tried before, I still learned something. I'm going to enjoy putting tools together for lessons. I think it was important for me to always be reminded to apply each thing to education and note a way I might use it at school. I think that by collecting these ideas on the wiki, it not only showed us one way to use a wiki, but it's building a great collection of ideas that we are sharing with each other and all of the other school librarians out there.

If I had anything to add to this, it would be some kind of "water cooler" where all of the participants could more easily communicate with each other and with the team. Maybe it could just be a page on the wiki where we just post a question or share an experience. The team has been great about responding to email, but we don't get the benefit of their answers to each other's questions. Maybe I'll go make a page for this on the wiki and see what shows up. I am looking forward to being a cheerleader for others who are participating.

I would definitely participate in another program like this and I have encouraged others to join us. There are so many additional "things" for us to explore and make our own, finding more of these new tools has truly become part of my life long learning. The entire "thing" was always fun for me and NEVER BORING! Harder sometimes than others, but never boring. (You can quote me on this, if you want to)

I plan to keep on posting on this blog and reading the other blogs. See you all on your blogs and at the CSLA Conference!

What about the next blog post?

As I come to the end of this adventure of the 23 things, a note of comic relief. Have we all had this thought?

eBooks & Audio eBooks - week 9, thing #22

I've looked at Project Gutenberg before, but I have never downloaded anything. Right now, until Aug. 4th, over 600,000 ebooks are free to download at the World eBook Fair. I went ahead and downloaded "Sense and Sensibility" and it's interesting to read the preliminary information printed at the head of the downloaded copy of the book. This would be a good resource for students to use to find copies of classics to print out and mark up, particularly for Honors and AP English classes. I don't particularly like to read the books in this format, but it is an incredible resource.

The link on the SLL2.0 page to the Best Places to Get Free Books is a useful link to have. I've put it in del.icio.us so I don't lose it and I can find it at school.

LibriVox is another great resource for books used at school. They have a lot of the classics that are read in English classes, so this would be a very useful site to put on the library webpage and encourage students to use.

I'm trying to provide audiobooks for checkout and/or download in the library. I recently received a grant from our local education foundation to purchase audiobooks and I think I will be spending it on some Playaway titles for now, as I explore the various other ways we could be providing audiobooks. I got a lot of information about ways to do this at one of the sessions at last year's CSLA Conference and at an Infopeople workshop, but I still don't have it worked out. I have paid for and downloaded some books for myself from iTunes to my iPod and it was easy. There are so many titles available there, but there is no easy way to pay for this from school, so again, I still have a lot to work out. I would like to take advantage of that equipment that all of the students are already carrying around, like MP3 players and now their iPhones! I'll keep working on it.

Only one more thing left to do.

Another EduTechie Article

4 Things Good Teachers Do to Get Students REALLY Involved in Projects http://www.edutechie.com/2007/04/4-things-good-teachers-do-to-get-students-really-involved-in-projects/ This is a great article and at the end, there is an awesom video from Google video posted on the blog. It is the creation of a 12th grade class that presents "Macbeth" in a Star Wars format. As the article says, these students went way beyond their assignment and it's amazing. I am going to use this at school. They want to release part II this summer, so I will watch for it. Enjoy!

8 Ways to Use Camera Phones in Education

I came across this at EduTechie.com and thought it would be interesting to share. You can see the blog at: http://www.edutechie.com/2007/06/8-ways-to-use-camera-phones-in-education/

Podcasting - week 9, thing #21

Exploring podcasting has been fun. I checked out the podcast list at Yahoo and it's easy to search. I found a lot of links to podcasts that included book reviews, but none that I particularly want to subscribe to at this time. Some included interviews with authors that could be useful. I did go to EPN, the Education Podcast Network and searched the secondary list of podcasts. There was one series on "The Great Gatsby" and the Twenties that might be fun to use as a resource or an example with junior English classes when they are reading the book next year. I have added David Warlick's podcast, Connect Learning, to my Bloglines feeds. Next, I'm going to try to make my own podcast. Watch this space (or should that be listen to this space?)

YouTube and others - week 9, thing # 20

This was fun. I can see how you can spend hours watching clips on YouTube. It's blocked at school, so we can't use it there, but hopefully TeacherTube might pick up a lot of what we could use with classes. We have a subscription to UnitedStreaming at school, and I want to encourage the teachers to use it more, as well as finding things on the web and creating their own videos. Recently I found a great set of videos and clips in UnitedStreaming when I searched "Great Books." It has videos and clips from the movie versions of several of our core literature books.

I uploaded this video from YouTube and it worked very easily. I chose this one for this exercise because it's short and it reminds me of all the periodicals I used to be responsible for when I was a serials librarian way back in the olden days at CSULB. This looks to be a good use for a lot of them! It also reminds me of what the kids working the late shift in the university library might get up to in the wee hours of the night.

Library Dominoes

This reminds me of late night in the university library and no one is around...

LibraryThing - week 8, thing #19

This was so easy to use. I heard about this awhile ago, but I hadn't tried it for myself. This whole course has been so good to make me follow up on things like this. LibraryThing could be the easiest thing to add to the school library site to highlight new books, and I will go on exploring other ways to use it. Meanwhile, I can get those new books out there one more way!

Below you can see just a few of my favorites by Anne Perry in the sidebar. These are the Christmas books she has written that involve some of the side characters in her other series and one of the books in her World War I series.

LibraryThing has one of the lowest learning curves of anything we have done in this course, and it has so much potential.

Notes on thing #18

So far, Zoho Writer didn't upload my blog post, but ZohoShow did a great job with the presentation. Google Docs tried to upload to the blog, but the correction hasn't come through yet. I will try again tomorrow.

ZohoShow - answer to the final question

Yes, you can edit the presentation slide show online. This would be very useful when you need to make last minute adjustments to a slide show for things that come up during the presentation such as new information, dead links, scaffolding for different learning styles, etc. I created a text box on slide 3, answered the question and saved it in Zoho. It didn't update on the slide show embedded in the blog, because the original slide show is what is embedded. It would probably be good to use the link to the presentation stored on ZohoShow in blogs, wikis and websites, so you would always be linked to the latest version of the presentation. Here's the link to the latest version: http://show.zoho.com/public/janhasbro/Uploading%20a%20Show%20to

ZohoShow - a place to share presentations

I just created a 3 slide PowerPoint presentation to upload to ZohoShow to see how it all works. Here's the result.


All of the slide themes carried over. I didn't add any animations, etc., but it was pretty seamless and easy to do. I will try this at school and tell others about it. I didn't discover the answer to my final question yet, but I'll let you all know what I find out.

Editing the Google Doc

I was able to edit the trial doc from my school email, but the doc has still not been posted on this blog. It will be interesting to see if the edited version of the doc shows up, if one does. "And the beat goes on..."

The Google Docs Trial Cont's

I sent myself an invitation at school to collaborate on my trial document in Google Docs. This is the message I received:
I've shared a document with you called "Trial of Docs and spreadsheets": http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfgzcs4m_1hcv4hj&invite=fvhngqb It's not an attachment -- it's stored online at Google Docs & Spreadsheets. To open this document, just click the link above. --- Try Google docs - a collaborator

When I clicked on the link, it said that editing was currently not available, but I could read the document until editing comes back. Maybe that's why I am having trouble getting the item posted at this point in time.

To be continued...

First trial of Google Docs & Spreadsheets

So far, not so good. I typed a trial doc and set up my blog site settings and the program posted the document to another old blog I have on Blogger. It picked the first one on the list. I deleted that post, made sure the settings said PageSpace and now I am waiting to see what it does.

Zoho Writer - week 8, thing #18

I am using Zoho Writer to write this post. It is a great tool, for all of the reasons listed on the sample page linked to the SLL2.0 description of thing #18. I created an account on Zoho back when we were exploring the award winners in thing #11 in week 5. I signed up for an account and tried the Zoho wiki they are now offering. It didn't seem as easy to use as the wikis we have been exploring for this course, but I haven't spent a lot of time trying to use it. Notebook looks good too. If you go to the Zoho home page, they have many tools to try. I want to explore the presentation tool they have, as I am always looking for an alternative to PowerPoint. Zoho lets you insert pictures, but I can't find a way to format the text around it.

Once again, this looks like a great tool for collaborative work at school, both for teachers with students, students with students, and teachers with teachers and whoever. The work would be available to all members who are working together and a history would be created that allows the people working on the project to edit and go back when necessary, without a lot of disconnected email, etc. It seems much like the wikis we have been exploring, but I guess this would be one document at a time.

Let's see how this post works. I'm going to try Google docs next to see how they compare.

Oops, it didn't find my blog to transfer it directly from Zoho, and the picture didn't come along when I cut and pasted this post. I will have to explore this some more. TTFN!

Family Wiki

I just created a family wiki on Wetpaint. I thought I should try this out for myself before I tried to teach it to someone else. Part of the family moved out of state this week, and it suddenly seemed like a great idea to create a place where we can share events and pictures and whatever is happening with far off family. I made a home page and a page for each family or couple or kid out on their own, and invited them all to join. We can keep it private, just for the family. It wasn't too hard, but I don't know if that is because I've made it to thing #17. It will be interesting to see what kind of response I get from everyone.

California Curriculum Connections wiki - week 7, #17

The calcurriculum wiki has some great ideas collected on it. It will be absolutely awesome by the time everyone finishes this SLL2.0 adventure and contributes ideas. It will surely be a valuable resource for us all to find ideas of how to use the new tools we are discovering this summer.

I posted an idea on the Wiki page about reviewing the projects that have been worked on in the past at my school with various teachers and their classes, with an eye to creating the projects next time with wikis. I am going to try this myself and be ready with some suggestions and training for the teachers in my school in the fall.

meebo me - a sidebar to thing #16

I was checking out some of the links under thing #16 and I followed a link from "Using Wikis to Create Online Communities" to a wiki used for subject guides. This would seem to me to be a great use of wikis and I want to go on exploring the information on the wiki. However, I got sidetracked by a chat box on the subject wiki called "meebo" and I went off and created one for this page. You can scroll down and try it out at the bottom of the left column. If you click on "get meebo" at the bottom of the widget, you can create one.

This could be used for online reference or homework help with students. The LMT could post hours of online chat service on a wiki, blog or website and then chat with students and answer questions if needed. For now it is right next to the post about IM in the classroom. This could be one of the ways to use IM effectively in education. Something new to try!

Notes from the ALA Conference in Washington D.C.

I just received my latest email from ALA Direct. If you don't subscribe, you can read it at http://link.ixs1.net/s/ve?eli=3130100&si=098434649&cfc=3html

It has news of the many events, including the premier of a documentary about librarians and I wish I could have been there. You can follow the links to the film's webpage at http://www.hollywoodlibrarian.com/index.html as well as to the blog written by director and to the review of the premier at the ALA Conference written up in the Washington Post. The film sounds thought provoking and like a lot of fun. I hope it comes to a library near me. Maybe for our CSLA conference in the fall?

Longest Acronym in ALA

For those of you who belong to the American Library Association, here's a link to a fun short video on the longest group name and acronym in the organization. The ALA Wheel of Confusion #2

Tagging and Folksonomies for Real

I just had an interesting experience. I either hit a wall or I had an epiphany. When I found the article in my previous post, I tagged it in del.icio.us and then before I went on, I thought I would also bookmark it on my computer. I guess I was just being conservative or old, maybe. This digital immigrant sometimes reverts back to the old ways. Well, the point I am trying to get to is that I couldn't find a place that the site fit in my many bookmarks, and del.icio.us was such a better solution for keeping this place for me. It's nice to have this kind of confirmation of usefulness for something new one is using. I think I need to clean out my bookmarks!

IM at School

I subscribe to eSchool News, Tools for Schools, and I found this article from a link in one of the items on the June 18 issue. https://my.cosn.org/mycosn/resources/CoSNIMminireport.pdf It's a report from a series entitled, EdTechNext on "Instant Messaging" and goes along with a post on 2CoolTools from a member of the SLL2.0 team. Very interesting. I am all for trying to use the "tools" the students already have if we can use them effectively and safely, and get them past our IT gurus. It will be interesting to see if we could actually utilize cell phones and IM the way it's being described in these articles.

If you haven't seen eSchool News, you can go to http://www.eschoolnews.com/toolsforschools/tools4schools062007.htm

It's Flag Day!

Today, Flag Day, is my younger daughter's 23rd. birthday. I wanted to mention it as we celebrate it in our family today. Our children's birthdays are very special to mothers, I feel, and I have been thinking over how much the world has changed in the time she has been alive.

We usually use flags to decorate the house and family celebrations for my daughter's birthday. This is a picture of the large flag displayed at Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove CA on patriotic holidays. It's awesome. I snapped the picture when we visited at the service on Memorial Day. That's pretty awesome too. I took a picture with my phone and posted it here on my blog to share with all of you.

Today was the last day of school and the last day of long lines of students returning textbooks. Once again we had wonderful volunteer parents who helped us accomplish this gigantic task and I truly appreciate them and their hard work.

Happy Flag Day to you all. Long may it wave.

Wikis and libraries - week 7, #16

There is a great collection of links to wikis to explore here. I could spend hours and will probably go back and do so. I particularly like the SJCPL Subject Guides, using a wiki to collect pathfinders. I can do this. This set my mind whirling with ideas on how to develop a wiki for my pathfinders.

I also really liked exploring the Blogging Libraries Wiki and spent a lot of time on the school libraries list, exploring how other school libraries are using blogs and wikis. It was great to have del.icio.us to tag the interesting ones to come back to. I also found a count down clock to the latest Harry Potter book on one site, but after exploring it, I decided not to download it. You can find it at Scholastic online if you are so inclined. I am going to be messing around with this "wiki thing" for a long time.

Finally, I came upon this video again, and I am going to use it with the teachers at school. These guys do a great job.

Wikis in Plain English

Library 2.0 - thing #15, pt. 2

This exercise asks us to reflect on: Library 2.0 - It's many things to many people. What does it mean to you? What does it mean for school libraries?

It would seem to me that Library 2.0 is an exciting place. It’s that “life-long learning” place. It’s going to be the place I want to be, and the place the students want and need to be. If the library doesn’t grow into Library 2.0, and even move on to Library 3.0 and 4.0, as suggested by one of the authors we read here, it will be left behind and no one will come there. I don’t think I want to be there if it is not a continually changing and evolving place.

Future of Libraries - week 6, thing #15

Library 2.0 and Web 2.0 are cropping up everywhere. Several of the journals and now of course the blogs I read are all about these subjects. Once again, things seem to be converging at this point in my tenure as a school librarian. The ideas suggested by these authors are compelling. They are talking about libraries in general, not specifically about school libraries, but I think much of what they write is applicable to today’s LMT and school libraries.

Without mentioning all of the points they made, here are two that resonated with me from just two of the authors:

Michael Stephens, Librarian, Blogger, “Into a new world of librarianship”
http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/002/3.htm writes about the Librarian 2.0:

“The most important traits of Librarian 2.0 include:

Librarians 2.0 plans for their users - This librarian bases all planning and proposals for services, materials and outreach on user needs and wants. User-centered libraries breakdown barriers and allow users access wherever they are: home, work, commuting, school, or at the library. This involves users from the get go in planning and launching services based on their needs. This librarian asks what new technologies or new materials users need. This librarian proposes building projects and involves users in designing those places.”

Right now, my high school is working on the plans for a large facilities building and remodeling project. The library will not be torn down and a new one built, but will be gutted, rebuilt and considerably enlarged. I am trying to take a serious look at what the library should be. Mr. Stephens’ words challenge me to plan for my users and ask them what they want and need. I read somewhere that I should take special note of those areas that users create for themselves in the library and try to incorporate those spaces in our plans. This seems to truly be what is suggested in this article.

Rick Anderson, Director of Resource Acquisition,
University of Nevada, Reno Libraries , http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/002/2.htm - warns us to keep “Away from the icebergs”:

“The ‘icebergs’ that I see threatening our progress, indeed our existence, are these:

The “just in case” collection - Crazy as this may sound, the time has come for us to look skeptically at the very idea of a library “collection.” … it no longer makes sense to collect information products as if they were hard to get. They aren’t. In fact, it may no longer make sense to “collect” in the traditional sense at all. As a Web 2.0 reality continues to emerge and develop, our patrons will expect access to everything – digital collections of journals, books, blogs, podcasts, etc.”

Again, this caught my attention as I look at the high school library and try to decide what needs to be in the library to meet the needs of the students and teachers. What books need to be here? What print and digital resources do we need to support the curriculum and meet the standards? What equipment, what shared or quiet spaces do we need? This article made me consider the standard we have for how many books we should have in a school library. In our own CSLA standards, we have long said we need so many books per student in our school libraries. What books are we talking about? Who uses my school library? What if the fiction collection and the reference collection were the only books I kept in the library? What parts of the classified collection should I keep? Should we keep the same standard and still strive toward a particular number of books on the shelf per student or do we need to find a new standard? What can Library 2.0, Web 2.0 and even School Library 2.0 give me to replace or supplement the books if I no longer have them? This is an interesting scenario for me to contemplate. These articles would seem to fuel this discussion with my school and with you all, my colleagues on this quest we have set for ourselves to learn more about the tools of Library 2.0.

TTMs - Teacher teachable moments!

Last night at our high school retirement dinner, I happened to sit with the social science dept. chair and several social science teachers. They are not only my friends, but some of the library's and my personal best supporters and collaborators. I was telling them about this course I am embarked for the summer and we all got very excited about the possibilities for projects in the fall. We hope to make some collaboration time on creating projects using blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc. part of the staff development time before school starts. I am going to be ready!

It's not a particularly new idea, but the social science dept. at the high school has a password protected "file cabinet" on the server. The district is totally networked. The teachers in the dept. can share and store things in the file. They have been writing, rewriting, and aligning curriculum to standards this past year as they chose new social science textbooks. This can all be stored in the files so the entire dept. has access to specific lesson plans, bench marks, and curriculum as they are developed. They gave me access to the files as well, so there is a "research and resources" file. I can add things and they can too. As far as I know, they only have access to this when at school, so maybe we can work on a place to have Internet access to the files. If they want to keep it private, a password protected wiki could probably serve that purpose. We are supposed to be getting a district wiki site within the year, but no projection when that might be. I'll let you know what develops.

3 days and counting!

Only 3 more days, 3 half days of finals and 18,000 textbooks to go, but the end of school is in sight!

Note to the SLL2.0 Team

Thanks to any and all of you for your encouraging words. Something I have been doing is reading some of your posts on the 23 things and sometimes I leave comments. Do any of you have time to go back and read comments on your old posts or should we be communicating with you mostly through the email address?

Technorati - week 6, #14

Help! I feel like a mime stuck in one of those invisible glass-walled cabinets! I feel like I'm stuck in Technorati and I can't get out. I claimed my blog and chose some favorites, but beyond that I can't seem to go. This is definitely something I will have to come back to as I come across it. I went off to some interesting blogs, especially one about creating better presentations http://www.beyondbullets.com/

There is lots to explore here, but I don't see a great use for me right now. Del.icio.us is working for me for tagging and I might come back to this if I want to specifically search for blogs by subject. For now, I need to move on.

Del.icio.us for real - week 6, #13

I've been using del.icio.us for several months now and I really like it. The resources provided here by the SL2.0 team were very helpful and I have subscribed to the RSS feed from the SL2.0 account as suggested. The Otter Group tutorial was very informative (including how one pronounces the name, even though I still seem to think of it with a sort of Italian pronounciation - del.icio.us, as starting with "deli" and then an accent on the "o" as I finish off the word). It doesn't look like "delicious" as one thinks of ice cream, for instance.

Anyway, this has been a great tool for me. Not only is it accessible, but the idea of using a unique tag for a set of links has been very useful. I recently took a class and when doing research, as I found a site online, I tagged it, and when I was ready to use the articles and sites, I had them all in a list with that tag. When I was finished with the project, I deleted many of the sites, and the tag, as it wasn't of general interest to me and I didn't need the collection any more. I really like the ease of having the Bookmarklet on my toolbar, on the home and school PCs, and on my MacBook, and everything is in one place and accessible.

I made a cloud bundle of my tags and added it to this blog. It doesn't include all of my tags as that would take up too much space, but it can be color coded to the color scheme of the blog. Gotta love it. I read in the Seven habits article, that now (in 2005) that Yahoo had purchased del.icio.us, it would probably be around for awhile. That's a good thing. I would hate to lose it now.

Discovering Del.icio.us and tagging - week 6, #13

I really enjoyed reading the suggested resources for this thing. While reading "The Several Habits of Wildly Successful Del.icio.us Users, which I really enjoyed, I discovered on the side, TwitterLit http://www.twitterlit.com/ - "twittering the first lines of books so you don't have too"

Twitter doesn't look like something I want to get very involved with, but this is fun. Twice a day, someone in charge posts the first line of a book, without the title, but linked to the book on Amazon. You can make it a contest for yourself and guess or just enjoy reading what gets posted. This could be adapted to use with students on a school site, doing this yourself or using this site. Librarians have used first lines for book talking for years. Now it's gone social and online!

Continuing comment on thing #11

I mentioned in an earlier post that I joined TeacherLibrarianNing at http://teacherlibrarian.ning.com. I commented on that site that I didn't know how much time I would have to participate right now, because I am working on the 23 Things. I have already had 3 quests the first day for information about this adventure we are embarked upon and I have encouraged those librarians to check out the program.

I don't know why I am always so amazed at the speed of this kind of communication, but it is fascinating. I want to encourage more CA school librarians to join this group, as there are not many CA librarians on the list or the map. I know about our terrible numbers here in the state, compared to the rest of the country, but there are still a LOT of us! We need to be a part of the voice of school librarianship and this might be one way to contribute to that.

Roll your own search tool, Rollyo - week 5, #12

I created a Rollyo search tool and added it to this blog (see below on the left). I included the links from the Holocaust pathfinder I use with students. I have titles and annotations about what is included in each site when I use this on a blog at school. This obviously didn't let me do that.

I can see helping teachers set one of these up for assignments where they want students to use specific websites. This task can also be accomplished on a wiki, blog or class site, but maybe this would be a way to keep these kinds of lists organized. Maybe it would be useful to organize lists of sites in a Rollyo and then paste the Rollyo on the wiki or blog? Maybe after I explore wikis more, I will have a better grasp of how I can use this or if I would want to incorporate it into a blog or wiki. I will have to explore it more to see if I want to use it with students. The directions on the site don't seem very intuitive, but you can eventually get it done.

Another #11!

I joined TeacherLibrarianNing at http://teacherlibrarian.ning.com/ I'm going to try it out for now, even though I really don't need another thing to read and write right now, while I still have half of the 23 things to complete. I'll let you know. There doesn't seem to be very many librarians from CA in the Ning

Week 5, #11 - exploring the award-winning sites

Useful or interesting sites I found on the awards page:

Biblio - for used books - new site for me; I can always use another site to search for textbooks

Flickr is on the list - one of the judges said "Flickr has an older audience than some other photo sharing sites and thus usually produces the best quality shots" - I thought this was a great comment

Yahoo! Answers looks like a variation of Wikipedia, in a homework help format - users can ask a question or search to see if it has been asked and answered already, or hope another user will answer. Once again, this seems like it is not always the correct answer, but one that is good enough which seems to satisfy people

Pipl - this was scary - I searched myself and found my Amazon wish list online and a young lady with my same name with a MySpace (I don't have one) - I went to Amazon and changed my wish list to private; it also listed my name from an article in our school newspaper - who knew that the paper was indexed online

iGoogle - I created an iGoogle home page for myself; it's similar to most other homepage design pages; whatever template you use, it changes color (darkens) as the time of day passes; nice for use now with the 23 Things and using Blogger, my gmail account, and other things Google

Another #10!

This is cute and something I might be able to use to advertise teacher workshops, staff development or staff training sessions. I don't know if the students relate much to the Dummies books, but it is eyecatching. I found the site on ImageGenerator.

More week 5, #10

This hollywood star could be used on library blogs, book reviews by students, etc. ImageChef creates the code for a blog or website or MySpace, and also gives you the code for the image to be used in other formats. They have a lot of different items to personalize and I have enjoyed seeing the ones other people have posted on their blogs here.

Week 5, #10 - Me as a rock star- thank you, Doug!

***Warning - Turn down your speakers***


Create Your Own PaloozaHead - Visit Lollapalooza.com

Note on instructions for #8, week 4

Just a comment on my experience in Bloglines: At the very end of week 4, #8, the instructions are given for "How to find your public Bloglines URL." On my Bloglines account, "Share" was not a tab in the right hand section, but one of the things listed at the bottom of the left hand column. When I did get to a place I could make the Blog roll public, it took some dinking around to get what I wanted. Maybe they changed the page slightly.

Watercooler on the wiki?

Could we have a "water cooler" page on the wiki where we can post general comments or questions? I am finding it hard to read everyone's blogs to try to make comments on my SL2.0 colleagues postings and this will get harder as we grow in numbers, but I will still try to do this.

If a page like this isn't a good idea, could the SL2.0 team create a separate blog where we could post questions, etc.?

Searching for Library tools - week 4, #9

I used several of the suggested blog search tools to find useful library tools. Bloglines search tool is very easy to use, but all of these suggested sites provide so much information it can be overwhelming. That is probably the most difficult thing for me. Just from this exercise I added several of the Reader's Club book review feeds to my Bloglines. I get several print book review magazines, but I think that these online sources will be easy to use and Bloglines is collecting them for me in one place. I also added Kathy Schrok's site and the calcurriculum wiki to my RSS feeds so I can catch what you all add too!

The hard thing for me is having so much to try out and read. I want to try it all, but I will need to concentrate on a few that work for me, keep up with this for now, and not get too distracted. I think that RSS feeds and tags can help me stay focused. I know that the exercises and examples will provide a future stash of things I can come back to, as well as going on to the next new thing.

From a Bloglines search for Library 2.0, I found the 2007 Web 2.0 Awards, announced on May 9, 2007. http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0/short

So many of the things you are asking us to explore and use won on this list. I haven't even had time to look at all of it yet, and I've seen: Flickr, pbwiki, rollyo, and del.icio.us. I'll try read the rest when I've finished this post.

RSS Feeds - Week 4, #8

This week I looked at my Bloglines account. I had already set one up a year or so ago. I had feeds for David Warlick's 2 Cents Worth, for Dilbert, and for Librarian's Index to the Internet (LII). David always seems to inspire me and I wanted to keep up with him. Dilbert often seems to be lurking in my school, not just in his phantom business world. Someday, if you see me at a conference, I'll share my favorite Dilbert with you about a strategic plan, no budget and PowerPoints - he has to be talking about categorical funding!

Completing this exercise gave me so much to read about this useful tool and just in time. It is very helpful to keep track of all of the interesting sites and tools we are discovering while we complete SL 2.0. It would be impossible to deal with all of the helpful information I am finding without Bloglines, my del.icio.us tags, and tabs in Firefox.

I discovered Clipping in while working on this, and it's a great tool to save things collected on Bloglines. I also made my Blog roll public and you can find it here. http://www.bloglines.com/public/Librarymum

Technology for week 3, #7

For this thing #7, we are supposed to write about anything technology-related that interests us. Well, as I thought about this during the past week, I had two things “converge” on me. I got the new issue of Phi Delta Kappan, May 2007, and the new issue of T.H.E. Journal, also May 2007. In the Kappan, in the Technology column, Sebastian Foti writes, “Did We Leave the Future Behind?” He describes the simulation software of the past, such as “Oregon Trail” and “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” that were some of the first forms of computer-aided learning and suggests that we might want to develop new updated simulations to use in schools. Simulations are used in the real world today and he feels that they would be effective at all levels of education today.

What struck a cord with me in this article was his description of today’s students who communicate very well with the technology available to them, but that the productivity tools used by most students “let you express yourself, but they don’t encourage you to explore ideas you don’t understand. They don’t allow you to test ideas and fail.” (Foti, 2007, p. 714) He goes on to give some interesting suggestions to provide simulations to use in today’s classrooms.

The second article that grabbed my attention had a blurb on the cover of T.H.E. Journal that said: “Huck Finn by Cell Phone! And other digital content options, as K-12 breaks away from traditional textbooks.” That certainly caught my eye. Well, this article talks about technology and the “invisible elephant” in the middle of my high school library that we don’t want to talk about, textbooks! I know, a lot of us have them and nobody talks about them because we shouldn’t have them, but hear me out here. The article is entitled: “Out of Print” by John K. Waters. He discusses various digital options to replace those ever more expensive and heavy print volumes our students are carrying around. Because I have to manage our large textbook collection, articles like this interest me.

We no longer have lockers in our high school and 3 middle schools. For the past 20 years administrators have been promising parents that we would have digital forms of textbooks and students would no longer have to carry all that weight in their backpacks. Well not much has changed in those 20 years and the students are still carrying the books. This article describes some of the resources that publishers are beginning to offer ranging from complete downloadable books, to supplemental materials, constantly updated, and also describes student and teacher created “texts”. The article describes some of the copyright issues involved with digital resources and describes at least one digital collection that has been approved by the California State Board of Education and adopted by LAUSD for history-social science.

For the past 4 years, I have had some experience with online versions of textbooks. We have had Holt biology, chemistry and physics books in both print and online versions. In my opinion, Holt did a pretty good job with these online books. This past year, we adopted a Holt health book and purchased only a few copies of the print edition, as well as many copies of the text on CD in PDF format, along with the online version.

Now I come to my observation on this experience. The parents want the texts in this format and want to relieve their children of another heavy book to carry, and the teachers and administrators feel they are doing well by finally providing the digital format they promised for so many years, but an interesting thing has emerged. The students (those digital natives!) don’t like the textbooks online or on CD. Who would have thought it? I ask them all the time about how they use or don't use the digital formats. They have all kinds of excuses, but finally a few confessed what some of us feel are the real reasons. When students are on the computer, they are connecting with their friends, not reading their biology or health textbook. Their parents often don’t think they are doing their homework if they don’t have a book open. It is my opinion that what Sebastian Foti said in the Kappan article is true, students can communicate very well with technology, but many are not learning and problem solving, let alone reading by using technology. They also don’t want to admit that they have trouble using some formats, and they don’t want to ask for help.

I am trying to set up dialogs with the teachers, department chairs, parents, students and administrators to talk about these issues. There are expectations here that are not being met and I don’t think they will be met given the various viewpoints of the stakeholders in this situation. We need to do some training and some investigating of these issues before we discard or adopt any particular formats. It won’t be the same in all content areas. I think that the students are perceived as being so involved with technology that any technology would fit, while the “grownups” didn’t really find out how the digital resources might be used most effectively.

Anyway, while I haven’t talked about any particularly new and cutting-edge technology here, this is how two views of technology “converged” for me this week.

I did find another new toy and created the transparent, revolving cube I put in my previous post. I think it’s cool. I really have to get off week 3 and thing #6 and move on.

Only 10 more days of classes before finals and graduation and so much to do!

______________________________

Foti, S. (2007). Did we leave the future behind? Phi Delta Kappan, 88 (9) 647, 714-715.
Waters, J. K. (2007). Out of print. T.H.E. Journal, 34 (5) 31-36.

Another new toy - week 3, #6.5

Library Reading Room - more thing #6

Library reading room 2,
originally uploaded by Librarymum.

We don't have enough seats for all the students who want to use the library. In the next 5-6 years the library will be remodeled, modernized and expanded. We might even get windows!

Flickr Toys - Badges, week 3, #6 again

I got it! I made a badge of my library photos on Flickr and actually copied and pasted the html code into this blog and it worked the first time. Thank you, Tom for inspiring me, and to all of you for creating this to REALLY inspire all of us. I think I might actually get to creating a podcast for my library orientation after all when I get to that thing in a few more weeks.

Flickr Toys - Mosaic, week 3, #6

It was fun to play with this mosaic maker, but I got frustrated getting my pictures where I wanted them in the arrangement. I will go on and try some of the other toys. The magazine covers look like something we could use at school, as suggested by other posts here. I will now attempt to get the mosaic of library pics up on this page!

The Remarkables, Queenstown, New Zealand, part of week 3, #5

The Remarkables, Queenstown, New Zealand,
originally uploaded by bridgepix.

I found this beautiful photo on Flickr from Queenstown on the south island in New Zealand. It reminds me of our trip to NZ a year ago when we saw this same view.

I would like to join "365 Days of Library Pictures" on Flickr and I will consider doing that. In the next few years my high school library will be totally remodeled and would be great to have a before, during and after record of the library as it is and as it changes.

I have a Smugmug account that I created for my pictures from our trip to New Zealand and I really like the site. They charge a nominal annual fee, but you can keep the pictures private or share them, and their printing service is beautiful.

Librarymum @ NASCAR, my avatar, week 2, #3

This was too much fun to pass up. I grew up in a car family and I thought I would take this chance to try out an alter-ego as a race driver.

I didn't need to copy code for this, so it seems too easy, but I won't worry about it and keep moving.

New Blog & Registration, week 2, #3 & #4

Here's the new blog and I registered it, so I am officially started.

It was fun to come to Blogger again. I started a blog here several years ago at a workshop lead by Gary Price, sponsored by InfoPeople. I also have 2 blogs at school, but this one is the one I will be using as a place to write about the things I am doing on School Library Learning 2.0 and reflecting on what I am learning.

My blogs at school are used for library news and for posting pathfinders for library research for the students at the high school. Students have access to them through the school district portal and the library research blog has been a quick, easy and useful tool for library research lessons.

Now on to an avatar.

Week One, #1 & #2

Hi to all! I am excited about this online adventure. I have tried some of these 2.0 tools, but not really learned to use them in the ways they could maximize learning in my library.

7 1/2 Habits was good. I have now become a half Mac, half PC person. I just realized, if you count my PC at school in the library, I'm a 2/5 Mac and 3/5 PC person. Ha! I am using the Macbook right now, and it involves a learning curve for me, but it's part of life long learning for me.

Goal setting and planning are the hardest habits for me to stick to. I don't necessarily like some things to change, but if they are changing, I want it to happen now and not necessarily want to wait for each step of a long range plan or even make a long range plan.

Accepting responsibility for my own learning is an easy habit for me, and frankly, participating in this activity is playing for me. What a bonus that I'm going to develop some tools to make my library teaching more effective.