I joined Classroom 2.0 and am waiting approval. I’m looking forward to joining the librarians’ and the beginner 2.0 users’ groups. I’ve already learned about a free online conference on global education which I plan to take part in.
Not so excited about twitter. I like following my school to get news and alerts (weather cancellations are particularly helpful), but it doesn’t seen to me to do anything that I could do with other 2.0 tools.
Pageflakes is igoogle. I put a lot of the same “flakes” on my practice page that I have as widgets on my igoogle start page. I’d like to try creating a page like the one I saw for an elementary school class on the culture and geography of China. Our lower school does an in-depth study of a country/culture every year; this year’s country is Sweden. I’m going to create a project for upper elementary students to work on, providing resources for researching Sweden’s culture, geography, and history.
Our 7th grade science classes research various energy sources. As an alternative to the same old, tired powerpoint presentations, students could create a pageflake to show teachers and other students what they learned about their assigned energy source, as well as the information resources they used. Cool!
Darn ads!
I found a great video on how NOT to do something. It was also nostalgic and just plain fun!
I hope a request from a patron never makes me pass out!
I have subscribed to a couple of podcasts for quite a while now (NPR’s This American Life and The Moth Podcast). I like to listen to them when I run. I hadn’t used podcasts in my teaching, but I was thinking about doing a book review podcast with some of my 4th & 5th grade students this year. I’m considering using Voicethread instead, though, so if anyone has any thoughts on that I’d love to hear them. If you’ve used both with elementary aged students, which one did you prefer and why?
I subscribed to Just One More Book!, a children’s book podcast, and Snap Judgement, another storytelling podcast to add to my running playlist. It’s so easy to subscribe to podcasts and I love that they’re free, unlike the music on iTunes. I was surprised at how many podcasts there are. Once again, I got lost in exploring and spent way to much time browsing…
Yea, Librarything! The creator of this great site is a parent at my school and a volunteer in my library. When I first met him at an orientation that I was running for new volunteers, and realized who he was, I gasped and even lost my composure for a minute. To me, he is a celebrity! He’s also one heck of a great guy, and very helpful and generous. He’s all about this web2.0 thing.
To me, librarything is a way for everyone to get to do what I do every day: Organize and catagorize books so that others can find what they’re looking for. It’s a very satisfying job when you do it right. It’s lots of fun, too!
I plan to try working with students to put some of our Lower School classroom collections into librarything. Writing summaries/reviews and creating tags for books will give the kids a chance to practice critical thinking skills, vocabulary, and writing. And they love reading books that their friends have recommended, so it will be a great tool for promoting recreational reading.
I was introduced to google docs by my school’s technology director (and my coach for this class) last year. It’s been great to have documents and forms in one place that I can access from any computer. I also like the organizational features (folders).
Last year I needed to gather submissions for a cookbook I was compiling for a colleague. My technology director suggested I use the forms function on google docs. It was perfect for the task. I was able share the form with everyone except the person for whom the cookbook was intended (it was a secret) by adding them as collaborators. All they had to do was type their recipe into the form. No paper waste, and formatting the submitted recipes was easy.
A few ideas for using google docs:
Delicious! Well, it’s supposed to help organize my bookmarks/favorites, so information won’t be so overwhelming, but right now I feel even more overwhelmed than before I started. I know that’ll pass, though, once I play around wit it a little more. One feature I really like is being able to browse other users’ tags – the “social” part of social bookmarking. I usually can find a user who has bookmarked several sites on the topic I’m interested in. I’ve used portaportal in past to bookmark sites that I/my students can use, but delicious takes it to the next level of learning from fellow users.
While it’s not something I would use with my young students, I think there are teachers I can share it with who will find it very useful. Here’s my delicious.
I read an interesting blog post called “Top Ten (10) Social Media Competencies for Librarians (and Teachers)” from the blog Stephen’s Lighthouse (“Illuminating Library Industry Trends, Innovation and Information”). Thanks to this class I can check off a few more on the list!
As I mentioned in my last post, I used wordle after learning about it in the K12 Online Conference. Here’s the wordle I created based on the book Seedfolks by Paul Fleishman.
Today I visited the K12 Online Conference, and viewed a session titled Little Kids, Big Possibilities. The presentation, by Kelly Hines, was about web 2.0 tools that can be used with elementary school-aged students. There were some great tools shown that, as the Lower School librarian, I’d like to use with 4th and 5th graders. I’d also like to share the presentation with the 4-5 teachers at my school, who will have lots of ideas on ways to use the tools with their classes. The online, anytime delivery option will allow me to do that.
Here’s a wordle I created based on the Paul Fleishman book, Seedfolks, which was read by our 4th and 5th graders as part of a local foods theme. Wordle is one tool that I’m looking forward to using when school starts in the fall!
