Here’s something interesting, especially in light of what we have all been doing this fall. Take a look at the post of Vicki Davis on nonlinear, visually active (cognitively engaged) learning at her Cool Cat Teacher blog. I know I feel like my old linear learning style is being shattered by Web 2.0 tools and the tidal wave of information and input that is now sweeping over me. Does anyone else feel this way? By the time we finish these 23 “things”, there probably will be 23 more that we should know about that are impacting the way information is obtained, organized, mashed, reconstructed and communicated. I’m feeling pretty hammered by the volume, so I know that I have not yet fully mastered the nonlinear learning style needed to maneuver through the digital universe. (written December 7, 2008)
Thanks to our course leader, Shelley, and to all my fellow participants! Thanks for all the insightful comments, the encouraging words and the generous spirit of collaboration in our Web 2.0 adventure. I’m ready to try 23 more things — how about you?
Already, more to know and more places to go (digitally that is)! Classroom 2.0 has a special group for elementary educators which will be a great place to collaborate on age-appropriate technologies. I’ve already found resources on information fluency and digital storytelling. For me, the challenge will be to participate – I know I will benefit more from actually participating through posts and so forth, rather than just by being a lurker. So, although I have signed up for Classroom 2.0, I guess I better go back and introduce myself. Can one add posts in a Ning to his or her Google reader? Right now, I see more professional learning applications for me through Nings. By the time I am more familiar with Nings, there probably will be more “things” involving Nings for elementary or library use. Then, hopefully, I will be ready to use them!
Pageflakes turned up several months ago on one of the blogs I am following. At that time, I signed up for an account and gave it a try. Seemed fun and easy! I was looking forward to working with it again on this “thing” and assumed I could just jump right in and get going. Wrong! I found it very difficult to keep track of where I was in the program. Was I on a copy of the page? Was I working from my account or had I clicked out somehow? At one point, I think I had four Pageflakes windows of various sorts open at the same time. No doubt, I should have paid more attention to the help videos!
After several tries, I think I have successfully copied the template and created from it a page (which I have renamed) that I hope to use for a fourth grade project in January. I reduced the number of flakes to four — a sticky note explaining the project, a Delicious window to direct the students to links for the project (which I will tag), a message board for students to offer feedback on the project and a Flickr window to add a little visual interest. I hope this page will serve as a nice project portal for the students. Seems like just about any research project could be introduced through a Pageflake page — also students could present results of their work to classmates through a Pageflake page. This might be particularly useful when the results have visual or collaborative aspects.
The spreadsheet and forms features of Google Docs are new to me. I am excited about the potential offered by these features. Next week I plan to survey teachers at my school with a simple survey form that I created in Google Docs this weekend. I’m really curious to see how the individual answers are tabulated in the related spreadsheet. I can see using Google Docs to increase professional productivity. My colleagues and I have used it previously to collaborate on an outline for a joint presentation and to work together to create administrative documents for our library. It also would be a great way for older students to produce group homework projects.
I searched YouTube for “library books” and came across the subject “library book cart drills”. Pretty amazing stuff and not at all what one would expect of librarians. Would you like to see a library book cart drill?
On a more serious note, I was very interested to find that YouTube has a number of children’s book trailers, great video clips to introduce a number of well-known picture books. It would be fun to use these with students in the library.
Ideas for producing video to support library learning? I can envision video demonstrations of how to read library shelves, how to locate books, how to use an index and so forth. Perhaps TeacherTube would be a place to contribute this sort of content.
I explored the Foreign Language, Teaching, Language Arts, Early Childhood and Technology directories shown in the widget. I was delighted to see Coffee Break Spanish in the foreign language section — I have spent many an hour with Mark and Kara and love their podcast format for foreign language instruction. A new podcast for me is Storynory. I think it is so well done – the audio is clear, the podcast jumps straight into the story without any long, boring intro and the stories would be great for fun, extra activities in the classroom or maybe even for listening stations at the library. I’ve tried using booktalk audio podcasts in the library, but I find that some students have a hard time listening without a video component. Also, I have posted some audio book talks through our school library page, but I don’t believe students listen to them often, probably because I haven’t built up enough content yet to make the site meaningful. As I have learned in this Thing #17, however, these audio files are not truly podcasts, because I have not added RSS capability. Another thing I learned is that Google Reader can play podcasts — a great piece of information for me as I am now much more comfortable with Google Reader than I am with iTunes and usually listen at the computer anyway.
So far, I have used Library Thing in a couple of ways for classroom learning and for professional purposes. I created a small library of fiction books related to a topic currently being studied by our students. Then I changed the view on the library to book covers and showed the students the library on the Smartboard. We then talked went on to use the books in a lesson, but just having the visual of the “library” by cover made it more interesting for the students. I have also used Library Thing to create a list of books in languages other than English that I needed to catalog for our library. Then I exported the book information to an Excel file for import into our circulation system. This process saved me a lot of time — I still needed to work on the records to add information not available through Library Thing, but at least the basic data was already in the system. I look forward to using Library Thing in other, perhaps more typical, ways in the future.
Did anyone else find Delicious confusing at first? I have a feeling that I will need to spend a fair amount of time on Delicious to truly appreciate its capabilities. But I also have a feeling that once I master it, it will be a great tool as well as one that is essential for the literacies of the future. I want to learn to use it to make information come to me through its subscribe features. I also want to use it to synergize my information gathering by linking with favorites lists of colleagues. Lots of ideas — but I am entering this area slowly, because I don’t want to be overwhelmed.
My first few tagged sites include the homepages of several libraries in France. We refer to the online catalogs of these libraries from time to time for information about books in French. Having these sites tagged on Delicious will make it easier to access them quickly from any location.
I can see using Delicious to help students “classify” websites for various units of instruction. Seems like it would also be a great way to encourage students to work on tagging skills and managing their own information gathering.
I just attended the K-12 Online Conference — about a month after the fact (one very attractive feature of this type of conference) — and while there I viewed the presentation by Canadian teacher-librarians Carlene Walter and Donna DesRoches on using emerging technologies to promote teacher-librarian leadership. The presentation was very interesting, most particularly for their repeated exhortation that librarians must retool to survive. Take a look at the included video clip of a library from the mid-20th century and this will become painfully obvious! I’m delighted to know about this conference and will share it with the teachers at our school. As a consequence of being involved in this course, I’m as interested in how the organizers are using wikis, podcasts, Voice Thread, Flickr, creative commons licenses, tagging and so forth as I am in the conference content. I think I have found a couple more blogs to subscribe to also. Lots for me to think about here!
