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!
Visited Library Thing. Nice, but I am already part of Shelfari and I am not sure how many of these sites one needs to be a member of. I have so much trouble remembering names, passwords, that I feel I need to resort to keeping an actual paper notebook with all of the information. Honestly, there was too much to look at, read, and consider to do it justice. It will have to wait until a rainy, cooler day, because right now the pool is calling me..."Come swim...back to school, back to school you go!" I should be thankful that I am employed unlike too many of our library colleagues out there in the country.
Created an account on Zoho, uploaded a PowerPoint, revised it, and placed it on the library wiki. Here is the link to the ZohoShow on Web Page Evaluation.
These applications become more and more important as we create information together. The learning curve for some of the teachers in my building is going to be steep this year. A Ning has been set up for our building as a learning community, and our forward thinking principal will expect all to participate in some fashion. It makes so much sense - sometimes I can go weeks without seeing some of the others in my building, much less the library department colleagues in other buildings.
Using GoogleDocs, I created this Short List of Summer Reads - got distracted (story of my life) and failed to write the annotations for the rest of the books I read. sigh
I posted #60 entry in the California sandbox. It is about a wiki for a school district's teachers to use to quickly access those site everyone needs - like differentiated instruction, learning support, ELL, etc. Since wiki means quick - quick easy access, one stop shopping for the hurried teachers. My colleague and I plan on doing this for our independent proposal this year.
Also, like Mary, I too could not sign into the PA sandbox since we did not receive an invite key. I sent an email to PBwiki and being impatient, decided to post now. Too many things to do since summer is ticking away too quickly. BIG sigh. What I would post under applications is VoiceThread. Last year a teacher asked me to book talk 30 books (2 literature circle units combined) in one 40 minute period. Well, I can talk fast, but doing the math, that just wasn't going to work out well at all. Enter Voice Thread. I could record my booktalks, the students could access on their time and listen to the books that appealed to them, or not. This was very successful and I didn't have to booktalk the same 30 books four periods. Time saver!
Checked out many of the links from the posting. Great ideas, good information, some links not available any longer. Such is the web. Notice the gizmoz to the left - saw that on a blog from a link on a wiki. Of course, I got distracted, had to play with that. Too funny!
I like the use of a wiki for research pathfinders. We have a district website and the capability of creating pages using this SchoolWires software...it is horrid and cumbersome. The wiki is so much easier to update as needed.
I've started a wiki for my library information...following Joyce Valenza's lead (and my colleague's - Allison the Amazing). Here is the link to it - a work in progress.
Been giving LOTS of thought to Thing 15. I read most of the postings, looked around on my own, and have been thinking about this off and on for two, maybe three days. Well, I did go see Get Smart, Indiana Jones and the Nuked Refrigerator, and read The Pretty One, but I was thinking about this too. And what it made me realize is that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
The kids I work with have no concept of life without a computer. Our grandson, at two, turned on the TV and DVD player using the remote, put in the DVD, and pressed play to watch Miss Spider. Can he read? No, but he seems hard-wired to anything technological. The world these kids live in requires them to be technologically competent. We need to prepare them for their future, whatever that may look like, but it certainly is not going to look like our past. Earlier this summer I read the book A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink. To summarize this book quickly, school and society, have celebrated the left-brainers and the right-brainers have been overlooked for too long. If his supposition is correct, and I do think it is, we have to radically change education, and the library along with it to prepare these students for their future by stimulating and promoting creativity, collaboration, communication, and computing skills.
Which lead me to the conclusion - if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. For years I have been beating my head against the wall to have teachers schedule time in the library for research. Visions of showing the databases and the students preferring them over the internet and having wonderful, meaningful, relevant projects with real learning occur just never happened...often. What happened was I gave myself a bloody head, alienated some staff, and the kids kept using the internet. If you were at PSLA, Allison Zmuda annoyed many in the audience with her keynote address, if I remember correctly, by saying something to the effect of "Don't waste time stressing over working with the teachers. Work with the kids." When she said it, I was annoyed because we have worked so long to be seen as teacher-librarians and now what?
Well, the now what is teach the kids to survive in their world by preparing them to evaluate information. Try as we want, we are not going to have them stop using the internet. The important skill I am going to focus on is information fluency - author's purpose, accuracy, relevancy, currency. Sure, I can create links, provide databases, and buy books for projects, but does that really help them in real life? As Rick Anderson said, we cannot buy enough of books (they don't use them anyway), there is one of us (usually, if we are lucky), and they may or may not come (or their teachers don't require it).
Last year I had some conversations with darling seventh graders and asked them how I could improve the library for them. They looked around, and in that voice of a 13 year old girl, one of them said, "I don't know. There is so much woooood." Truer words were never spoken. As we brainstormed, they suggested that I move the fiction section to where the non-fiction section is because that is what they like to read, provide more comfy chairs for reading, and paint it lime green. (Building and grounds wasn't hot on the lime green) The rest I am going to do. I loved Dr. Wendy Schultz's comments after all of the technological changes, the library should be a retreat, a sanctuary, a pampered experience with information—subtle thoughts, fine words, ... rustle of pages.
Kids need a safe haven and someone to help them make sense of all the information with which they are bombarded daily. So much of what I now believe, and ultimately hope to implement and practice, is in this video from YouTube titled A Librarian's 2.0 Manifesto.
My ADD must have kicked into overdrive because I cannot develop one iota of interest in Technorati. Tags are useful, practical cataloging for the individual and if you want, you can see what others use too. Nice. Easy. Practical. Got it. The rest of it? Not really caring right now. Shortest post ever.
My philosophy is "A day without reading is like a day without sunshine." Being a middle school librarian and encouraging students to read and providing outstanding literature for all of them is my mission. Once in a great while I will read a grown-up book, too.
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