Library Circulation on the Rise

According to a recent article in the Boston Globe, circulation is on the rise. As our economy spirals downward, more people are returning to libraries in record numbers. Many customers are also gettting movies because they cannot afford to rent them any longer. Some libraries have had as much as a 19% increase in circulation compared to this time last year. Hopefully, this trend will continue and library budgets won't decrease.

wiki's

I am working on getting my wiki up to date. I have had the account a while but haven't really learned how to use it. It will be a work in progress for now, but I hope to learn quickly how to make it visually appealing.

Reading & Writing

An article from NCTE was discussing the issue of teens reading books. As a librarian, this is something that always concerns me. These days kids spend so much time in front of the TV or on the net that educators worry they will not be competent readers. Well, I found a web site that may help ease our fears, fanfiction.net. This site allows users to read stories or write their own. It is organized into 8 different genres. Most are short stories. The few that I previewed seem to be well written which sort of surprised me. I guess I am getting used to hearing teens talk in "IM" language!

Things in Review

Wow, it is hard to believe I haven't posted anything since January. I have my iPod and it looks just like the picture I posted. I have uploaded music and now I am working on learning about the extras it offers.

As I think back on the 23 Things I realize I am already forgetting what I learned. I plan to take time this summer and go back over the "Things" I enjoyed most. My school has a wiki that I may work on also. I created one for the library, but I'm not sure if I will keep it going since we now have one for our campus.

My iPod

Summary

I finally made it to the end! What a journey I have been on for a few months. I have enjoyed most of the assignments and feel more aware of the services the Internet has to offer. I feel more confident with my computer skills and expect to be a leader on my campus. I am going to encourage my campus to take this course as well.

I must say Animoto was by far my favorite of all. I kept going back and creating more videos. Now my daughter wants to get started. Several things that will be useful to me and my campus are wiki's, mind maps such as Gliffy, social bookmarking, and online productivity tools. It is going to take time for me to learn these new tools and become comfortable using them. I think the one assignment I had the most issues with was creating a myspace page. I just have such negative feelings about myspace. I'm sure it comes from the negative tones set by the media, so I don't know if I will keep my page.

The "things" weren't difficult and the discovery resources were easy to understand and follow. They made the assignment easier to complete. I do think it would have been helpful to meet, as a group, about halfway through the assignments. I noticed several people had not done many assignments until the holidays and several had questions or needed help. I would love to see a PFK course later that builds upon this one or that is similar. Now that I have completed this course, I will begin sharing it with my campus.

Thing 23

This "thing" is really causing me to think hard. Copyright isn't something that is always simple to understand, but I do think it is good that Creative Commons has come about. So many people create, share, edit, and remix others peoples ideas all the time. I think CC is going to finally start giving people the credit they deserve. Frequently, we borrow, change, or share others ideas without giving credit. Maybe it is out of fear of violating laws or other reasons. CC allows users to edit content and share as long as they credit the original author. I have been reading Lawrence Lessig's blog and discovered that CC comes with several attributes. I clicked on two different attributes and the page was written in layman's terms. It described what a user was allowed to do with the work and what credit must be given.

I searched for sites with CC license and I found a helpful site. http://search.creativecommons.org/# enabled me to chose from several sites items that had CC licenses. I was even able to select it to show only items that I can modify, adapt, or build upon. I chose flickr and looked for White House photos. This would be a great way for students researching American Landmarks, inventors, inventions, etc. They could import the photos into their work as a final project.

Thing 22

Thing 22

I was so excited to get use this "thing." I uploaded photos that were already on flickr. I wanted to use my own music but I could seem to get the computer to recognize it when I tried to upload it to Animoto. I didn't have any trouble uploading my photos. It was so easy that I can't wait to create more video's. I know my daughter is going to love this as much as I do.

I'm not sure how students in elementary could use it, but I have several ideas for teachers and librarians. School celebrations such as Children's Book Week, book parades, etc you could quickly create a video and upload it to the school website. When I taught 6th grade, I would create a cd for each student with photos taken throughout the year. Then on graduation day I would play the video for the first time. Their parents got to see it with their children. Everyone loved it and to this day I treasure those cd's. I have also had fun creating end of the year slide shows or videos for the faculty. The one I created last year lasted about 20 minutes and the teachers thought it was great. I may check into fees for creating longer video's on Animoto. The first video I created had too many photos and I realized after it was created that the bride and groom were left out of the feed. I did a remix without removing any photos and it still left them out. Well, I plan to go back, create more videos, and figure out how to get my music uploaded. This was one of the more enjoyable "things" on the list of 23 things.

Thing 21

I didn't realize there were so many podcasts available. I looked at all four directories, but finally chose a podcast from the Educational Podcast Directory. It was broken down by elementary, middle, and high school. That made it much easier to find podcasts suitable for my school. I tried looking at the podcasts related to technology and thought I might have found some good lessons on using mac's. When I tried to open the link, it wouldn't work. That was really disappointing. So, I went to another link called Uncontrolled Vocabulary. It is really very intersting. First, it gives instructions for others to join in. It is held every Wednesday night at 10PM and regular callers are librarians from around the country. It is just an audio podcast, but it felt like I was sitting around the table discussing issues with them.

I looked around podcast.net and was a little disappointed. I didn't find much that would be useful for elementary schools. Plus, on the side bar it said you need to download special software to fully enjoy the podcasts. I decided to move on and look at other podcast directories. I went into podcastalley and looked under the education tab. I chose one about vocabulary. Oh my, was I surprised. The speaker was not dressed appropriately for any educational setting and although she was talking about words, there is no way I could ever show that at school. I finally chose a podcast from Jamestown Elementary School. There were several podcasts that would be useful for my campus. They had math word problems, a trip to Jamestown, letter writing, as so much more.

Thing 20

I started looking around youtube for something I would like to show in my post. I love Mo Willems' Don't Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus so I started searching. I wasn't sure what I would find, but I did have a few hits. It was mostly parents or schools reading the story. My favorite was a father reading to his two girls. It was great because one girl kept telling the pigeon "no" to everything he asked. I love to see parents reading to the children and getting the kids involved.

Our teacher's use powermediaplus frequently, but it is limited. It would be nice to have video clips of children's books being read for younger children. For high school this might be a great tool for theater classes or, as a project, students could create commercials based on books.
Below is a video about Strega Nona by Tomie Depaola.

Thing 19

I created an account with mindmeister and looked at other individuals work. I like that it had tags to help narrow my search, but the majority of examples are from another country and written in a foreign language. I do like the idea of using mind maps. My campus is implementing Thinking Maps this year and mind maps are very similar. Mindmeister only allows straight lines and sometimes I prefer to use bubbles or t charts.

Gliffy looks wonderful on the home page, but once I registered I couldn't figure out how to make the samples shown. I went to the home page and watched the demo. When I went in to create a document, I still couldn't find a help button. Flowcharts are similar to the mind maps. Flowcharts allow more freedom with the set up and I like that much better. It is also more attractive which is important when working with students.

Thing 18

I am loving this "thing" so much that I'm having trouble moving on. I have explored several links on the Web 2.0 Awards list. One site I found to be very interesting was Confabb. You can search, track, discuss, and review any conference, speaker, or session. You can also add a conference to the site for others to view.

The section about fun stuff was really fun. I checked out One Sentence and it is for users to post one true sentence. I read several posts and some would be inappropriate for a school setting. I can see this being very useful in the classroom, but it might be better to use a wiki for this so that posts can be controlled. The teacher could create a page and students could go in and work on writing one sentence. This would be a great way to practice summarization skills. Another fun site was fuzzmail. Anyone can type a message and send it to their friends. Their friends can watch exactly how it was typed. For example, if you are typing and then you have to use the back space key, they will see all of this on the screen. If you go back to add a word or change the spelling, they will see this as well. I can't really see and educational use at this time because it moves so quickly, but it could possibly be modified for writing skills. The students could watch to see how the teacher would modify their writing project.

Thing 17

I love the idea of being able to work offline and it automatically makes my edits when I log onto the net. Sometimes I cannot access the Internet and it is frustrating not to be able to view necessary documents. With Zoho, I can make changes on my most recent projects even when I am not connected to the Internet!

I created my account with Zoho and started work on my first project. It was very easy to create a spreadsheet and I used Mockingbird books for my first test document. I am still working on how to post a link to my blog. I felt like I was working with my regular Microsoft Office applications. The toolbar was familiar and I had no difficulty in using the application. Now I am off to explore Google Docs.

Thing 16

After viewing the discovery resources, I see that it is very easy to use, edit, and create pages using wiki's. Wiki's allow users to do almost anything on a page. This would be an excellent way for my campus to post our school faculty calendar. Each month our secretary prints a calendar for each teacher with events for the month that affect staff members. It would be great if it were online where staff members could add to it as necessary. Teachers already deal with so much paperwork, so putting it online would be a great way to always have the calendar nearby.

I just discovered another wonderful wiki site, Curriki. It offers a place online where educators from anywhere in the world can post curricula and lesson plans for review and use by fellow classroom teachers. It is very user friendly and has lessons categorized to make searching easier.

My campus has clubs that meet after school every other Monday. The Writing Club could really use a wiki to help produce the school newspaper. They could type their articles between meetings and the teacher(s) could go online and edit or make suggestions for changes. This would cut down on the length of time between printings.

Thing 15

I was unsure just exactly what a wiki was until this assignment. I know I've seen them in the past and I've certainly seen Wikipedia, but I never really understood until looking over the discovery resources. There have been many times I could have used a wiki to coordinate plans instead of using email. I can see the benefits of using a wiki for small groups such as the Mesquite Librarians, but allowing the general public access to some wiki's would cause me to question the validity of the information.

My campus has a grade level meeting every Monday with the principal. A member from each grade must attend and take notes. I think it would be useful to have a wiki detailing some of the items we will be discussing so we can start before the meeting. So much time is spent after school trying to work out the details of some new situation or program and I believe it could be easier on everyone to have more time to think and plan if we knew in advance what needed to be worked out. Another use for wiki's on the elementary level would be in ESL classes. ESL students do a lot of writing and I think it would be much easier to have it on a wiki where the students and teacher can access it anytime and make changes. Students can track their progress by looking back at the history of the paper and seeing the changes that have been made.

Looking at some of the discovery exercises, I really liked the idea of teachers using them for students to interact. I didn't realize wiki's could be set to allow only certain users to make changes. This would be an excellent way for educators to reach their students during the summer. I know several advanced classes that require summer assignments. What a great way to get feedback before the school year begins.