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.