Week #9 - Thing 22

At first I thought "Who exactly would want to read a book on a computer screen? Or the new Kindle from Amazon? Or on your iphone? That is just weird." OK. I am the mom of two of those weirdos. My son, who in high school threw The Diary of Anne Frank on the floor and said, and I am quoting "I am NOT reading that. It is a chick book." is now reading Immanuel Kant on his Kindle. My youngest daughter downloads to her iphone indie books from around the world showcasing new art styles as well as fashion shows, etc. on that tiny little gadget that fits in a sock.

OK. I must be the weirdo. I like paper and the feel of turning pages. I can't pay attention to stories on the Playaways I have for the kids in school. I miss whole chapters because my mind wanders. I am a digital immigrant. Is there a Digital Immigrant Anonymous?

Well, back to the task at hand or thing, shall I say. I searched the Internet Archive and found the Masque of the Red Death (feeling a bit Halloween-y) The book popped up and I could use the arrows to page through the book on the monitor. Not bad. Not the same, but not bad. Checked out more composers than I ever heard of on IMSLP and found something from Bach. Useful perhaps for music teachers and a link to share. Was not entralled with Project Gutenburg nor the British site. Moved onto ManyBooks.net - liked the way this one was arranged. You could select genres, so I looked at Banned Books - interesting, and Fiction - found Anne Of Green Gables in audio with a variety of choices to download to including the Kindle and the iphone, as well as another favorite Wuthering Heights. Cool. This is nice, very nice. And LibriVox is free. Even better.

I will need to add these to the wiki pages.

Week 9 - Thing 20

Well, I looked around on YouTube and saw a variety of relevant and not so relevant videos. Some are quite clever and funny. Since I already posted the Librarian's Web 2.0 Manifesto from YouTube previously, I remembered this great video from the TED (technology, entertainment, design) site. What this brilliant man has discovered is that a $40 wii remote can be used to create your own Smartboard. In his presentation, he speaks of how quickly word was spread of his discovery/prototypes through the video's posting on YouTube. He hopes that researchers utilize the power and speed with which information is shared via sites like YouTube. And, that makes me think of one of the other videos that was posted for us to examine - The Machine is Us/ing Us. Since we are creating so much information, it is imperative that we as teacher-librarians ensure that our students are critical consumers of the information that is generated by us.

Anyway, back to Johnny Lee's Wii remote/Smartboard - if you would like to have that latest and greatest teaching tool, and the money isn't there, impress them all and create your own!

Week 4 - Thing 9

Catching up on reading magazines from the school year and found in Teacher Librarian's June journal from Esther Rosenfeld's notebook this wiki to check out. It was created by Dr. Baumbach and Dr. Lee of the University of Central Florida. The whole wiki discusses 2.0 tools and is appropriately named WebTools4U2Use. Here is the link. On the left side are lots of applications and what they are for - I only read the blog posting, and not all of that, but it really clarifies all of the uses a blog could be used for school libraries.

http://webtools4u2use.wikispaces.com

Checked out a variety of blogs and what is available; I am finding many blogs are like reading diaries for gossip. One blog I did check out, that lead to fame and fortune (and I know about it), is Diablo Cody's blog. Someone in show business read her blog and encouraged to write her book Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, which ultimately led to her writing Juno. Years ago when my daughter Leah (her image today) was living in Chicago she talked about her friend Brooke, who was dating her boyfriend's older brother, and how much fun they would have together. Leah shared that Brooke wasn't sure what to do with her life and was contemplating being a librarian, so Brooke and I talked a little about being a librarian. However, life took her in another direction to Minneapolis, blogging, screen writing, and now an Oscar winning screenwriter! I think she chose wisely. Not that there's anything wrong with being a librarian.

Reading the RSS feeds on anything you might be remotely interested in could consume all of the time available in a day. I limited my blogs, except for recipes right now, to technology or library. I still like to hold paper in my hands for most reading or indulging in mind junk food like Star or The Enquirer every now and again. All work and no play makes me dull. Checked out Technorati, OK; checked out Syndic8, OK; checked out SuprGlu, love it! I also put the "school library learning 2.0" in Google, found 33 matches which were basically entries like this. So, I guess we are finding ourselves. We need to expand our very, small library world.

Week 4 - Thing 8

At the bottom of the page are the blogs I have subscribed to by Google Reader. This was a much easier application than Bloglines, IMHO. With the Google choices I could add the RSS to my igoogle page and locate it where I chose. Then, when I was looking to see how to add the url for public access, Blogger does it for you when you add an element to the page.

I did, however, spend too much time trying to locate the tabs like shown in the 23 Things pages. I never did find it after multiple tries, etc. That is the frustrating part of technology. It is supposed to be the easiest, most logical thing to add or do, and you can spend hours trying to find or do it. When a tech person shows you where or how to do it, it only makes you feel that less competent. sigh

Using an RSS feed on the library page would be helpful for teachers looking for current information for projects, as well as students. Thinking about it more, a wiki page would be the best option. Content can be changed and modified as needed, not the timely process it is now with the web pages provided by the district. Also, if anyone is undergoing curriculum review, it would be beneficial to gather the latest information for that department or grade level. Another neat public relations aspect would be to have feeds for the local sports, music, and/or drama productions.

Week 3 - Thing 7

I do love the digital camera and how easy it is to upload pictures into the laptop and/or Flickr. One of my goals for this week is to explore google's Picasa and see what that has to offer.

Last school year our technology integration specialist showed us VoiceThread. That application is one I really liked to record book talks. Talking about the same books to four different classes to three different teams gets old. This allowed me to show it to the students, and they could look at the books that appealed to them on their time at home as I made it accessible on the library webpage.

Another application I love is MovieMaker, although I become so obsessed with cutting music at the precise time, I drive myself crazy. Windows should fix it to be able to key in the exact time like it is in Power Point...which I really find very annoying. Speaking of that, have you seen this YouTube How NOT to Use Powerpoint. Very, very funny.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLpjrHzgSRM

Some more technologies that I like, and need to learn to be more effective with are the new little Flip video cameras, which I just purchased for the library this year, moodle, and wiki pages.

So many applications and so little time.