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.