Organizing Tools

My student teacher & I taught a class about Pagekeeper, del.icious, and iGoogle yesterday. She created a great Powerpoint presentation linking them all together under the heading of social bookmarking. Several teachers loved the classroom applications possible with del.icious accounts, and the convenience of Pagekeeper. It will be interesting to see how all of them use it.

Podcasting

Wow, it was really easy to record this podcast on the phone. Can't wait to tell Deb about putting our Library Aide training for Destiny in a podcast!! That will make training easy. I'm sure most of our students are using this technology already! Sketchcast!! Gotta learn it!

United Streaming and more

Two weeks ago, I worked with one of our chemistry teachers, trying to find appropriate videos to demonstrate a chemical process. She had been having trouble finding something on redox reactions. I have only a small idea still of what this really is, but I was impressed with our ability to find something in United Streaming that will work for her in the classroom. They provided us with fairly simple indexing so we were able to get to the right thing quickly.
It was also great to be able to work for an entire hour, one-on-one, with her because my intern was here that day. I will be offering a workshop for teachers on Pagekeeper, delicious, and iGoogle next week; I have found Pagekeeper to be great for organizing myself. I have taught that to my new student teacher & she's using it now too. I have been unsuccessful in getting delicious to work on my home computer; this is where a laptop for MILI would have been extremely useful to me. My own computer is at least 6 yrs old, and that may be the problem with delicious. I am still quite interested in trying to get it to work.

Good Reads

A friend at school has invited me to join "Good Reads", a sort of chat site where you share books that you have read or are reading with official "friends" on the website. I know at least two other teachers in our building who are subscribers. For people who read a lot, or at least like to read for pleasure, this is a fun new thing. Someone donated a copy of The Labyrinth to our library, and it immediately caught my eye, since I loved The DaVinci Code. The best part is that it grabbed me in the first four pages. It has a similar theme & pace. The website, however, is a convenient way to share great books and to learn what others are reading. If you're interested in becoming one of my friends on this site, just check out www.goodreads.com. You can register & put me in as one of your friends. Looks like a lot of fun!

iGoogle

I really had fun with the delicious account, and with putting it into and iGoogle page! I can see how it can really make my work life easier by organizing all my "stuff" into one page. One of the fun things I added was fun cat photos; you get a new one every time you log in. As I am looking at my iGoogle account at home, I can't get into my bookmarks when I am on the iGoogle page....any ideas? Is it because I have and OLD computer? However, this is a great tool for teachers & students alike. In the next few days, I hope to add more things that I will be using all the time, and I love being able to put a beutiful scene at the top. Thanks to Ann for helping me at class tonight!

Journal Alert

Yesterday, I got my journal alert email for an alert I set up two weeks ago. The topic I chose for this alert was " institutional racism". This has been a topic for some of our faculty in-service meetings under the umbrella of "Courageous Conversations". For the last meeting we were asked to read an article that was published in 1990. It was annoying to me to be asked to frame our conversation on something so OLD, so I am determined to find appropriate current articles to address the topic. This article was very interesting, and I have included the URL here. It doesn't really address the topic in relation to schools, so I will be going back to tweak my search terms. I can see this service being really useful for classroom teachers looking for specific or additional classroom materials, and also for keeping current on favorite topics.

proquest.umi.com.proxy.elm4you.org/pqdweb?index=0&did=1434392771&SrchMode=1&sid=1&Fmt=3&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1204520022&clientId=45189

Smartboards--One New Thing

On Tuesday, I helped an English student teacher use our Smartboard in the media lab to display and teach about the great features of our new library system, Destiny. The Smartboard allows you to circle or underline with a special pen on a screen that looks like a whiteboard, but is connected to the computer. I was able to show students how to navigate in the library catalog, and point out features as one would do on a blackboard. Some of the new features include the ability for each student to create a list of desired books and websites for further research. The websites embedded in this catalog have all been reviewed by teachers & librarians, so they come complete with the proper bibliographic information. This is one step students won't get on Wikipedia. The student teacher was impressed with the idea and ease of using the Smartboard, and said her students got a lot out of my presentation. I still am insecure about actually setting up the board; you have to calibrate it according to the computer's physical location every time you use it, and I'm still new at this. But it is a tool I see so many uses for all over our building. We have a couple in classrooms, and many students remarked about using the Smartboard--they've seen it before.

Thing 13-Subscription Databases

Last week, I started trying to find reliable resources on genocide as it relates to Native Americans. I also wanted to compare that with the Holocaust. This search is to find materials for the classroom assignments Jim & Eric are using this spring. I tried both Proquest & EBSCO, and was disappointed in the lack of easy hits. I will be experimenting with different search terms. Most of the articles I found were too academic or only on the WWII Holocaust. It is a great concept for the students, and should make for interesting research. This is the tip of the iceberg in terms of research, I hope. It would be great to be able to create a webquest for this assigment.

Thing 6 and 7

In early December, my student teacher & I introduced the RPC to Laura Lanik's Humanities classes as they began an assignment to complete an iMovie on a social issues topic. At the first session, I had the students register with their email. As they ended the semester, Mrs. Lanik had them write responses on their use of RPC for me. Out of 47 responses, only 14 students had actually used the RPC and about half of them seemed to appreciate the help. Most students already use a daily planner & felt that RPC just was a duplication of effort. In our school, all 9th & 10th graders are given a daily planner and many teachers use it a way of giving students passes, so I think in a school where that doesn't happen, I can see RPC used more.
My own impressions of RPC are somewhat lukewarm. One of the problems with it is that there is no way for a student to actually look at RPC without registering first. It would be nice if they could look at the system first to see if it could be useful to them. I really like the links attached to the reminder emails, but these students didn't seem to use them. The visuals in RPC could be updated as well. In the future, I think I would use it only for really long-term projects, like History Day. I can see it used more effectively for middle school students.

MILI meeting

Today's meeting left me feeling that I am over my head in this online world. I will be checking out Atomic Learning to get some of my skills up to par. Jim's information on the music his students are using was really great to hear. It is really great to work with such tech-savvy & dedicated teachers as Jim & Eric. A long time ago, I was on several committees dealing with copyright issues. Problems with copied videos were the main problem then; this was over 10 yrs. ago & before Internet changed the world. I remember that one school district was sued because their classroom/library video collection consisted mainly of pirated copies. We were warned to not keep off-the-air copies longer than 1 year, which was the limit of copyright permissions. It seems to me that a district in the Twin Cities area was one of those sued over copyright infringement. Obviously, things have changed. United Streaming is something that many of our teachers use in the classroom now. It's great, because the quality of projection is so much better, and there is no problem with availability.
It's really sad that motivation of our students continues to be a challenge; students' lives are so complicated by poverty, over-stimulation, and the proliferation of negative influences (sex, drugs, gangs) on all media sources. Last night I watched an episode of "Law & Order" which concluded with the decision that a 14 yr. old boy was not responsible for raping 4 younger students (boys & girls) because he had been watching pornography on cable TV & thought it was OK for his victims to cry & scream in pain. It is so disheartening to me; we can't protect our students from this; how do we educate them when their parents are probably not paying attention?!!

Why can't I post an exclamation point? Are all special punctuation marks banned, or just in the titles. What a strange new world this is.

Well, I finally got back into this blog... It's been a long time, but meanwhile, I've taught the RPC to 5 classes with my student teacher, and am about to wrap it up with Mrs. Lanik's students. I have also finally met my volunteer from St. Cate's library media program, and she will begin working with me next Friday. It will be great to actually have some time off from supervising our very busy media center to meet with Jim & Eric, and to spend more time exploring our 23 things.