Scholastic.com: Top 20 Teacher Blogs - I subscribed to a couple of these already and will give the others a try.  I’m passing it along because on of my good friends is highlighted on the lists: #14 Best for Media Specialists – TechnoTuesday. Way to go Cathy!

Center for History and New Media – “Providing free access to primary sources, building high-quality online teaching modules, and offering instruction on critical thinking skills.”

PrimaryAccess – “PrimaryAccess is a suite of free online tools that allows students and teachers to use primary source documents to complete meaningful and compelling learning activities with digital movies, storyboards, rebus stories and other online tools.”

Smithsonian American Art Museum – Classroom Activities – “These American Art Museum online features contain interactive or media-rich assets that can easily be used by educators in the classroom. Students can learn by viewing media or taking part in various online activities.”

Lastly, here are a couple of online graphic organizers:

• Lovely Charts - online diagramming program to create flowcharts, site maps, organizational charts, etc.
• Bubbl.us – great for mindmapping/brainstorming

Do some technical difficulties for which I couldn’t fix, I’ve had to move the Wagener-Salley HS podcast page to a new site.   Currently, the site contains podcasts for the 2009-2010 South Carolina Young Adult Book Award Nominees.  I hope to move last years podcast over  to the new site soon.

If you don’t already follow her blog or twitter feeds, you NEED TO ADD HER RIGHT NOW!

Go on.

I’ll wait.

Hmmm, Hmmm, Hmmm, Hmmm.

Done?

Good.

Once you follow her you’ll find she shares a bunch of excellent educational resources as well as thought provoking posts.  While I was over on her page just now, I happened to see the following YouTube video “Goomoodleikiog” (Google, Moodle, Wikis, Blogs), which is a great introduction to an ideal virtual classroom ala CommonCraft style.  I SOOOOO, would love to develop something like this with one or more of my teachers (ahem! Mr. Forston, you reading this???)  I’ve attempted to embed the video below, but it is YouTube, meaning it is blocked by our district and you’ll have to watch from home.  Sorry, it hasn’t been posted in TeacherTube yet.

There is also a “sequel” for students “Goomoodleikiog 4 students” that is just as good, if not better, with two sock puppet students discussing the classes virtual classroom.

I hope you enjoyed the videos and have taken a moment to subscribe to Angela Maiers blog and twitter.  You won’t regret it!  I’ve got a bunch more resources to share, but I’ll pass them along in another Odds & Ends post later.  I was just too excited to share these to do a “proper” odds & ends piece!

Updated 3/12/08 to add additional links and photo credits that I forgot.  Forgive me, it was late and I was in a hurry to get something posted! – Heather

Today marked the beginning of the 2009 SCASL annual conference in Greenville.  I am fortunate enough to have been allowed by my principal to attend,   Many of my fellow colleagues in the library world haven’t been as lucky.

Once again, I’ll be sharing my notes and thoughts from my experiences at conference.

I drove up to Greenville yesterday – after a side trip to Charlotte, NC.  I had to stop by the Apple Store to get a replacement battery for my Macbook.  Thankfully, it was covered under my warranty!  I couldn’t attend conference without my laptop!  But it sure made for a LONG trip – a little over 4 hours in total.  Anyway, here are the sessions I attended today:

Storytelling Through Pictures – Take a Walk on the Wild Side

Presented by Donna Goldsmith, Tim Van Heule, and Cathy Arnold – This pre-conference session was an all day experience beginning with a morning ride on the trolley to the Greenville Zoo.  We were met by a zoo guide who provided a very enjoyable and informational explanation of the animals: how they came to the zoo; their care and feeding; endangered species renewal plans; mated pare matching, etc.  Throughout the tour we were given the task of taking photographs to be used in our digital storytelling session in the afternoon.  In addition to my taking photos for the session, I also agreed to be a Roving Reporter for the SCASL IT Committee – I agreed to take photos and video interviews from our group to be shared with the folks who couldn’t make it to conference this year.  We are using the SCASL Ning to share information and live streaming of some sessions from conference.

After returning to the convention center and a boxed lunch, we met back up and were introduced to various storytelling tools.  See the presenters website for the tools they discussed: Flickr, Glogster, Photostory, etc.  After uploading our photos to Flickr, we were to use one of the tools they covered and create our own digital story of out trip.  Sorry, I don’t have one to share as I didn’t get to that part – I was too busy talking and going through others photos!  I kinda got sidetracked by all of the giraffe photos everyone took.  I love the giraffe.  I don’t know if you can see it in this photo, but the female giraffe is resting her head on the male giraffe’s back.  How sweet is that?  Another highlight of the giraffe segment of our trip was watching the little kids try to throw crackers to the giraffes – not an easy feat.  We learned that a zoo worker would go out later in the day and collect all of the crackers that didn’t make it to the giraffes and then feed them to the pair.  It was interesting, if someone sad, to see how the giraffes had to contort to reach the crackers on the ground.  

Can We Work Together?  Using Collaborative Tools

Presented by Cathy Nelson and Fran Bullington – As a member of the IT Committee, I assisted Cathy, Fran and Anne Lemieux with streaming the session using UstreamTV.  This was one of our efforts to include folks who couldn’t make it to conference this year.  I was in charge of the camera and chat room (once we figured it out!)  I am by no means an expert and I apologize for the poor camera work.

The session focused on using Wikis and Google Documents to collaborate with teachers and/or students to collaborate on group projects.  If/When I get the links to the session, I’ll update this post with them.

Reflections

While I truly enjoyed both sessions – the Zoo and the picture perfect, beautiful day were wonderful and I had fun working the camera for Cathy and Fran’s session – I must say the highlight of the day was having dinner with Cathy, Fran, Anne, and Doug Johnson! Fran took us to Flat Rock where I had a tasty meal and we shared fabulous conversations and laughs together.  I bet we were the highlight of our waiter’s evening!  Doug is a HOOT and a witty fellow!  I’m looking forward to attending one or two of his sessions, as well as his keynote, tomorrow.

Well, its getting late and the first session starts at 7:45 tomorrow morning and I want to make it there on time, so gonna hit the sack.

Photo Credit:

Greetings from SCASL 2.0: Experience the Journey @ your library.

DSC01317 by Greenville Instructional Technology – FlickrCC

DSC01315 by Greenville Instructional Technology – FlickrCC

OnGuardOnline.gov – “… a multimedia campaign to help consumers be on guard against Internet fraud, secure their computers, and protect their personal information. …  Includes: tips, articles, games and videos in both English and Spanish. … Contains modules about … spyware, social networking, wireless access, laptop security, Internet auctions, and file-sharing…”  Created in partnership with the Federal trade Commission and other federal agencies.

BubbleComment – record a video comment on a website.  Would be a great way to direct students who were absent are homebound to areas or information on the site that you covered in class.

My friend, Fran Bullington shares “The Wally Principal” over at her Informania blog.  I’ve shared it with a few of my teachers, but think it is too good a point not to share with the rest of you!!  I agree we do our students a disservice by judging them solely by their ability to memorize facts.

My Brochure Maker – quick and simple way to create a basic brochure or flyer brought to you by DoodleLabs.  Could be a great way for your students who don’t have MS Publisher (or MS Word) at home to still create a brochure for your lovely projects!  Granted, you have limited choices and you cannot move the objects around, but sometimes, simple is better!

Suburban Journals: County library labels teen books with sexual content – Okay, this last item I debated on if I should post or not.  So I’ll just put it up and leave you with the comment, “WHAT!!!!” — Well, guess keeping my opinion to myself isn’t likely.  Hey, it’s my blog! — So if you get enough pressure from your patrons, does that mean you’re going to start labeling all of your books for each and every item they don’t like?  Too religious, too violent, crude language, promotes homosexuality, …  IMHO this is just another example of censorship – and isn’t that what libraries are AGAINST? Or am I off track here?

While I’ve been familiar with YouTube and TeacherTube for a while now, I have to admit that I’ve never actually sat down and browsed or searched them before now.  In the past I’ve always had a link someone else has provided or searched for a specific video that someone needed or that I knew was already in YouTube.

I have to also admit that the whole YouTube thing scares me a bit – not the how to use/access it, but because of the content.  Yes, it has a lot of great original and educational content, but it also has a lot of copyrighted content that I’m sure was never given permission to be uploaded.  Which leads me to question if I use those uploaded items in the classroom, am I modeling good behavior?  Am I inadvertently giving my kids the notion that it’s okay to violate copyright?  Or have I taught them well enough to be responsible users and producers of materials?

Despite these questions, I can’t help but appreciate and get a guilty pleasure out of finding bits of nostalgia from my past such as “One RingyDingy“  I’m going to try to embed the clip, but since YouTube is blocked by my district, teachers, you’re going to have to take a look at it from home.  Sorry!

Of course, I wasn’t born when Laugh-In aired, but my Mom (who worked for the phone company) had the album.

Another example of the benefit of YouTube is using it to bridge the generation gap, especially with cultural references.  I was talking with some students the other day and we were talking about baseball and for some reason I mentioned Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First” sketch.  The kids didn’t know who or what I was talking about, so I pulled up YouTube and, sure enough, I found a bunch of clips of “Who’s On First.”  Of couse, I had to play it a few times for some of them to get the humor, and I don’t think they really found it as funny as I do, they were probably humoring me, but at least they know who Abbott and Costello are now!

“… now that many periodical resources are moving to limited print runs and/or to solely online subscriptions, how will we define them? Internet, free web, subscription databases…? Do (or can) blog entries be considered valid sources – do we simply apply the web evaluation methods for other websites to blogs, too?”

Are blogs credible/reliable reference sources?

Last year I had students performing research for their English IV papers who were citing blogs as credible sources. My initial reaction was – not acceptable! I’d like to point out that I hadn’t yet jumped on the Web 2.0/blogging bandwagon and didn’t REALLY know anything about blogs. The only blogs I had heard of were celebrity or rant blogs. So, being the smart librarian I am, I challenged the students to apply the same web evaluation guidelines (credibility, accuracy, reliability, relevance, date, sources, scope/purpose) to the blogs, that we do for all web pages – fully expecting blogs to fail the test. To my surprise, we found some of them to actually be acceptable – along with many that weren’t acceptable.

Subscription/Newspaper Databases

Recently a teacher assignment required students to find a current (last two weeks) newspaper article that related to their subject and write a summary. They had to provide a copy of the article with their summary. The teacher wanted them to use print newspapers. The problem was the library no longer subscribes to print newspapers. For one thing, no one ever read the daily paper. For another, I could count on one hand the number of times a student asked for the newspapers last year. So the newspaper subscriptions were a casualty of the library budget cuts I had to absorb this year.

Since we didn’t have newspapers for the students to use, and knowing DISCUS had the electronic database Newsbank, which, at the time, included The State Newspaper and a couple of other South Carolina newspapers, I showed students how they could access articles from there to use for the assignment. Some other bright students simply went to The State Newspaper website and found articles to use. You’d think the students would be praised for being resourceful in order to complete the assignment. NOPE. The teacher didn’t accept them because they weren’t what she asked for…WHAT!!! The explanation given by the teacher was that the articles were from the Internet and not from a print source. Students weren’t to use the Internet for the assignment.

(Picture me banging head on desk)

How could they not be what was asked for? – the articles used were all the same, whether they came from the print newspaper, the database, or the newspaper’s OWN website. They had all the same words, written by the same author, published the same day … *sigh*

If newspapers are no longer printed on paper, are they still newspapers?

Which brings me to print newspapers that have ceased print circulation and moved solely to online publications. I’ve read that many small town/city newspapers have already or are considering moving to online only publications. For educational purposes, are these online publications no longer acceptable sources because they are “Internet” sources? Are teachers going to limit the number of online newspapers students can use in research simply because they are online? You can also pose this question as it applies to print magazines and journals that publish their content on their websites as well as in print. And don’t forget about ‘zines – magazines that are only published online. Are all of these sources usable for student research?

Bottom line, evaluate!

In a perfect world, teachers wouldn’t need to specify number and type of reference sources for their research assignments. Students would naturally choose a wide variety of acceptable and evaluated sources (print, subscription databases, websites.) Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world; therefore, students (and many teachers) need to be taught how to evaluate materials, regardless of format. As the teacher librarian, that’s where I come in – it’s my job to teach these skills to my students and teachers!

BBC News: “Earth enjoys full moon close-up” – Driving in this morning, the moon looked like it was within reach AND was huge!  I tried snapping a picture with my cell phone, but of course it didn’t turn out.  *sigh*  However, there is one in this BBC article.

Lifehacker: “Forty Inspirational Speeches from the Movies in Two Minutes” – Totally cool video…how many of the movies cliped here have you seen?

Ypulse: Speakaboos Beta – From the about page: “Speakaboos brings classic children’s entertainment into a digital world. Beloved characters and treasured stories are given new life through amazing celebrity performances, beautiful illustrations, and original music. At Speakaboos, children develop literacy skills while learning about technology in a safe and fun environment.”  While the little I’ve explored is cool, what I didn’t like was how The Christmas Carol by Dickens was adapted.  While the story is essentially the same, there were enough differences to upset me – since this is one of my favorite stories.

Library Stuff: “FCC commissioner: Warcraft is a ‘leading cause’ of college dropouts – BoingBoin” – Follow the link trail to see the comments of how online gaming is contributing to college student dropouts.

Once again, playing catch up.  Most of the items being covered I’m familiar with – and while I may not have used them all, I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on how they work.

#16: Wikis – Task, explore some and write about your thoughts and experiences.  I love the concept of Wikis and would love to use them with teachers and/or students.  I especially like all that Joyce Valenza is doing with wikis and the TeacherLibrarian Wiki.  Unfortunately, or fortunately depending upon your viewpoint, this requires a level of collaboration between teacher and librarian that requires pre-planning.  This may be an activity for us to develop for next year (or semester) and would hinge on the district allowing access to a wiki.

#17: Add an entry to the SCASL Wiki – I’ve already updated the SCASL librarians who twitter, blog, and podcast (although our podcast page hasn’t been updated in quite some time!)  Will have to think of something to add to the “Your Favorites!” section o.

#18: Zoho Writer – great thing about Zoho is that I can use my GoogleID instead of having to create a whole new account.  Zoho seems to do the same and more than Google Docs and I like the Notebook feature.  Can see using this to take notes at a conference and exporting them to my blog.

I’m already a Google Docs user and have advised some of my students to use them as well.  We have a huge problem with floppy discs and thumb drives not working in our school computers.  By using Google Docs (and as long as we have an internet connection), students have a way of retrieving their work.  Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten teachers to try it out, yet!

#19: LibraryThing: Kinda neat.  I’ve created a LibraryThing catalog to share on my blog (see the widget below the blogroll & links) to list the books that I’m reading now.  I’ve entered the six that I’m currently trying to finish.  All are available in the school library.  As I finish them I’ll write a review.  I’d be interested to see what others think of the books.

That’s all for now.  This week we’re to look at YouTube and other video sharing sites.  Should be fun!

Sue Waters – The Edubloger – shared a post on Crappy Graphs in regards to creating graphs for blogs.  You can create line graphs and Venn diagrams.  Would be good to create graphs for lessons/teachers; however, since the finished graph is saved to the Crappy Graphs site and anyone can create a graph (with some interesting titles and content), you may not want to use it live with students.

LibraryStuff.net: shares this little gem: “Is it going to rain?”

TwitTip: “10 Easy Steps for Twitter Beginners” – got this from one of my Twitter network folks (can’t remember who) and realize I’m not such a good twitterer.  I forget to open Twitter every day to post at least one tweet.  Just don’t feel people are interested in my day to day minutia.  It doesn’t help that some of my buddies are Plurkers and no longer use Twitter.  BTW: both my Twitter and Plurk IDs are HeatherLoy in case you want to follow me!  The only thing I can promise is that I wont bombard you with a bunch of tweet/plurks!

FORA.tv: “Guy Kawasaki on the Power of Twitter” – and the power of social networks.