Movie and Zen habits

My husband and I watched a good movie last night. "The Soloist" with Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. It held us from beginning to end and had a message we thought was powerful. I would normally tell you what I thought that message was but if you read this and haven't seen the movie I would hate to ruin it. So go see it. It is about a homeless musician who is befriended by a journalist and it begins to change his life.

I also was told about an interesting blog by my son. It is Zen habits. Little tips on how to live more simply and enjoy life. Uplifting and insightful I am going to follow it and see if I can add some of the suggestions to our life. We are at the point where we need to re-invent ourselves for the older chapters of our lives. We need to think about convenience, health and what makes us happy. We have started to declutter and that is an energizing feeling. It does feel good to let "things" go just like everyone says it does. It is a big job after 17 years in the same house but I plan to get my son involved when he returns. We have a pretty good start already and I think I will go add to that right now. Have a great day.

good books

There is nothing like a good book to pass a hot, humid summer day. I just finished Chandra's Secrets and Thirteen Reasons Why. I enjoyed both of them. Chandra's Secrets was the most moving and highlighted the problem of aids in Africa. It was written from Chandra's perspective on how it affected her family and friends. Chandra is a very strong character who was enjoyable to get to know.

Thirteen Reasons Why was about suicide so it was also serious. It is about a high school girl who commits suicide and then sends audio tapes to the thirteen people who affected her death. I had heard that the teen girls were very interested in it so I thought I would read it. I was glad I did and I think it would make an interesting high school talking book; an introduction to the subject of suicide and relationships in high school.

New books for my ongoing list

I just received some new/used books today to add to my "to be read" pile. They are:

How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci : seven steps to genius every day - This was recommended at a workshop by a participant

China Safari : on the trail of Beijing's expansion in Africa - recommended by my son and looked interesting on Amazon

Thirteen R3asons Why - A serious YA book mentioned by other teachers to read because students are so interested

Any good recommendations for me? I have my Shelfari books shown below.

firstmonday.org

Another good site I found through my course work. I picked out one article to reflect upon but there were a lot of others. I want to remember to go back there and what better way to do it than to put it in my blog so that I remember the link. The article I liked talks about digital natives versus digital immigrants and how it might be a good thing for everyone if we blend those two groups and learn from each other. The immigrants can help the natives weed out the bad from the good. The natives can help the immigrants get up to speed in understanding the new ways of thinking.

The Power of Blogs

For a graduate course I am taking I have been looking for blogs that will help me professionally. As with everything else on the web this takes a lot of time not because there is nothing out there but there is so much to read. One blog leads to another site that might have good lesson ideas that I can use at the beginning of the year and then I segway into other topics of interest and before I know it many hours have passed. I find so many things intriguing on the web that I could easily spend half of my life there. The gmail reader has helped my life by allowing me to aggregate the blogs I like to follow the most. Once I get it honed to my favorites I can spend more time there and less time searching. Today I tried Bloglines. At first I had trouble because apparently some time in the past I set up a bloglines account with the email address I used and I couldn't find a way to get around not knowing the password so I used another email. Then it was simple. Every day I find another cool site that allows you to do one more thing. On this blog I have used glogster, flickr toys, voki's, etc. It is a fun place to keep everything I try. I should also add a link to my wiki but I have not kept current with my personal one. Well, I will end here and go read, read, read...

Building positive relationships with student workshop

I attended a workshop this week about creating positive relationships in the classroom. There was a lot of good material on warmup activities to get to know one another, tips like greeting students at the door, finding ways to connect and find out what your students passions are outside of the classroom, etc. I found it very useful for the coming year. The instructors looked at the topic from three points of view: what we can do in the classroom, what our school does to enhance relationships and what the district does to support relationships. By highlighting the three areas it allowed us to recognize supports that are in place that we might not have thought of in this context. The instructors really made it relevant by infusing their own experiences throughout the class which deepened the impact of the material. A very worthwhile class.

Fun ways to get boys to read

I was answering my email when I found an interesting site; http://bookclub4boysinfo.blogspot.com
This is a topic I have been interested in for a long time. If you are interested in starting a book club for boys this site has a lot of good outlines for books with ideas and questions. A great way to start.

Welcome to PA Web 2.0 Spring Session

I am very excited. For the spring session of the PA Web 2.0 I have agreed to be a mentor to three of the new members. I enjoyed it so much and learned from the people that I went through the program with so I would like to see the same thing happen for the new group. I learned something new since my session ended and that is Glogster.com. Here you can build a poster that you can use on your wiki and it will really spice up the look and feel. One of our elementary schools did this for the Reading Olympics questions. The only downside I can see to it is that it might be memory dependent which might exclude older machines that students have at home. I have still been using Wordle.net and Picnik.com. Those are some of my favorite sites. It is a beautiful day so I will end here and write more later.

End of 23 Things - Journey's End

Well I finished the 23 things and learned a lot. I filled out the survey at the end and I hope it took because I received a screen saying that the blog I was looking for was not found. Hopefully it worked. I am happy that I signed up for this journey. Because I signed up I remained committed to finishing it and thus learned more than I might have if I just tried to do it on my own. There are so many thousands of things you can do in Web 2.0 that it is impossible to be an expert at all of them. If I just continue to chip away at it I will be much farther before I know it. Thank you!

Week #9 Copyright and Fair Use

I enjoyed the file and saw that there was a disclaimer at the beginning that it was not sanctioned by Disney and saw the extensive credits at the end. I also noticed that the clips were very short which were taken from each movie.

Copyright and Fair Use are important topics but I struggle to find a creative way to discuss them so that 5th and 6th grade students can really get a good understanding of their meaning. I think adults find them confusing. Most students I know think it is just about putting things into their own words. This topic is on my radar to improve instruction in next year. This year will be an exploration of what is out there that other elementary teachers are using.

Week #9 Podcasts, Video & Downloadable Audio

YouTube is an area that I would like to explore further. I watched the video "the machine is using us" and it reminded me of Common Craft videos in its simplicity. I would like to create videos that are informational like that for my patrons. I could not do it on YouTube since that is blocked but perhaps on TeacherTube. Right now I am exploring podcasts and next year plan to work more with videos. One of the best YouTube videos I have seen is the Did you know. They use that in our district as an intro to the district technology class for new hires and it is very powerful. I watched the adventures of Super Librarian a few years ago and the March of the Librarians and enjoyed both. But I like best the videos that teach a concept simply like Professor Weisch's "The Machine is Using Us" or any of the Common Craft videos. Those are the ones I want my students to make that will be useful to future patrons. Joyce Valenza's students have made some humorous but useful videos and they are available on her site (or at least they were; I haven't looked lately). The students used a paper mache head to conceal their identities and narrated accordingly. That is what gave me the inspiration initially to have my students make informational videos for the younger students.

There are some good podcasts under Conference Connections by Apple Educators. From that entry point you can link to all sorts of other interesting podcasts. I used to subscribe to Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips and they were short and useful. How the many forms of its are used and when to use the apostrophe and when to leave it off. These were useful in the middle school setting that I worked at the time. They were bite-sized chunks of information that would not overwhelm students.

Week #8 exploration of zoho.com

Hey it worked. I created a document in zoho.com and was able to publish it as a post to my blog.

Explorations of Zoho.com

The Journey to Web 2.0 Literacy

There is a such an abundance of information out on the web that you need a purpose to go and get it. I was fortunate to see a post on my library listserv on the Web 2.0 training that was offered. This gave me an incentive and a road map to got through many of the technologies that I had experimented with over the last couple of years. This gave me a deeper look and a time table for accountability. I learned many things, discovered many useful sites and tools and will continue to try to grow my library offerings, my class lesson plans and my life in the Web 2.0 directions.

This week we are exploring online productivity tools. This is a favorite of mine in that it offers the student who does not have Microsoft Office at home to complete assignments at home. We have not had an opportunity to use it to collaborate on a document. We use the wiki for that purpose. I am a big fan of the leelefever CommonCraft Explanations in Plain Engish videos on YouTube. They are easy to understand and simply the explanations tremendously. If you haven't watched one try "wikis in plain english". I think that is the one that got me started.

I am going to try to publish this to my blog so here goes.  

Week #7 Wikis

Now this is an area in which I have had interest in for a while. Last year we set up a professional wiki for our elementary librarians. I learned a much better way to organize this by looking at the examples provided. We use it to centralize forms, share lessons and talk about ongoing issues. It took some pushing to get some to use it and this year I think I would have to push again. I noticed that the Princeton wiki that was used by a summer book club has moved to have the reviews right where partrons are accessing the books. I think that is the way we are moving. The wiki will still have some uses since it is available from home. We also have an intranet we could use but it is only available to us in school.

I have also used wikis for my resume which also contains my favorite sites. I am able to access it from most places to get to those sites. I subscribe to the TeacherLibrarian ning that Joyce Valenza set up. I go to it occasionally but have bookmarked her website which has a lot of good information. I have a wiki set up for my school on which to put student audio booktalks but will probably not use it since I now have access to a webpage that will be linked in to the district. I will be learning about sharepoint this week and how I will update the page and keep the content current. I have been working with students on podcasts and ensuring that they know only to use their first names for safety purposes. In 4th they podcast poetry and add sound effects and music. In 5th they write up a script for a booktalk and then podcast it. They also add bumper music and intros and closes which makes it fun. I had planned to put them on the wiki to make them accessible to all students but will now probably put them on the library website.

Week #6 Thing 15 the future of libraries

After reading over several of the articles on the subject of the future of libraries I thought about a few different things.
1. It has been true for several years that we need to push out more to the place where the students are using the technology if we want input in how it is done. Being in an elementary school I have the opportunity through my classes to impact every student and how they use the resources we make available but as much as possible I want input into how the students use the resources everywhere they use them and with whomever they use them. This is an ongoing challenge.
2. We still need to filter at the elementary level to ensure that the content our students are exposed to is age appropriate. That is why targeted searches and limited web use has been used extensively in elementary. But we need to have many of the technologies available so that students are ready to move to the next level and understand how to determine if a website is good for research or is better for personal uses so we don't want the searches to be too restricted. I also think that the library even at the elementary level needs to be available to the families 24x7 and that a library webpage would be a good vehicle of communication and accessibility.
The discussion of the future of libraries seems to be a multi-threaded discussion because of the different requirements of public libraries, elementary school libraries and middle or high school libraries. I am sure Universities and special libraries also have unique requirements that would change the discussion somewhat. But it is an important topic. One that we need to talk continuously about and actively search for ways to add Web 2.0 capabilities to our libraries.

One area in education that Web 2.0 has a big impact with is authentic audiences. It is so much easier to share student work with other students. When students know that they will have a real audience they put more effort into the delivery because it seems so much more relevant to them.

Week #6 Technorati and Del.icio.us

I spent a long time last night and today exploring Technorati. I found a good site with Daniel Pink's comments on what students are learning and how Web 2.0 helps them toward that goal. The pluses of Technorati seem to me to be the ability to sift through large amounts of data using tags and keyword searches. One comment that resonated with me in the Daniel Pink post is that the model has always been to publish then filter. I agree with the author that the time has come to filter and then publish. There is an abundance of sites and information out there but in order to get to the good stuff you often have to go through a lot of irrelevant information. This can eat up a lot of time that most working professionals with families don't have. In order to maximize my efficiency I use the social aspect of Del.icio.us by accessing my friends and colleagues sites to see what they have found recently that might enhance my classroom. I think at the moment that is a more efficient use of my limited time. I do go to the Web for new information and Technorati would probably speed that acquisition of new data. I will continue to explore with it and see if another application springs to mind.

Week #5 Things 10,11,12

Okay, so I might have gotten carried away when playing with the FD Toys and creating the Warholizer image. But it was fun. It took me a while to find a picture that would work. The other times I tried it I could not recognize myself. As far as the Web 2.0 winners, I am already a member and fan of Del.icio.us. I used it more when I worked in a high school but may eventually find that I use it on a much more regular basis in my new position. We will see. I also am a fan of Library Thing which got an honorable mention. I belong to it but use it more to get suggestions and read what other people think than for posting my own books. I use Shelfari at the moment for that. I also like that Shelfari sends me emails when one of my friends adds something to their shelves. It reminds me to go and look at when they are looking at. I set up a Rollyo for explorers and plan to compare it to the targeted searches that my colleagues use on Google. I can see that it would be useful for me to search on Rollyo and then put the specific websites that I want my students to have access to in an e-notes so that I know they won't see all of the sites I do not want them to use in research.

Week#4 RSS feeds, Bloglines

I ended up setting up an account on google reader and began looking for RSS feeds that I would like to subscribe to. So far I have found some useful things but nothing I would like to hear again and again. I have found useful podcasts on iTunes and have kept several. My favorite is Joyce Valenza and Ken Rodoff : Information Fluency Meets Web 2.0. I have listened to this one several times because it has so many useful things in it. I guess looking back at the time stamp it is relatively old since I first listened to it in July of 07. But I still think it applies. There are a couple of other podcasts I found at Conference Connections brought to you by Apple learning. There are a few on digital storytelling. www.digitales.us Bernajean Porter's website. I am going to subscribe to the Cool Tools for Library 2.0 since that seems to have short explanations of various tools for photo editing among other things. I have previously subscribed to other podcasts but if I don't get back to my iTunes to monitor these they seemed to add up geometrically so I ended up unsubscribing and just looking for them as I needed them. On iTunes there were a lot of interesting podcasts such as Iste's Podcast, Teach with Video, Technology Enhanced Classroom, etc. I actually liked the Screencasts better than the podcasts which can get boring if the person creating puts in a lot of beginning info before getting to the crux of the information. I also found Tech Chicks. So it was a productive Web 2.0 day.