Library Media Dot Com

Wow, in Will Richarson’s Student Books on Lulu, I really liked the idea of Lulu. Perhaps that’s my 20+ years of publishing coming through. I immediately shared the site with some of my publishing friends who are writing on their own. They never expect to get published, but now they can do it themselves if they want to. Or they can publish their childrens’ stuff. I can see Lulu being used in school. It would be great for a writing club or even a cooking club so you can publish recipes. It would be a great place to publish exchange student writings, too.

In Developing Expert Voices - the concept, I was glad to see the assignment being used for a math class. I think too many math teachers don’t really consider the writing aspect of math. I also liked they way they mentioned collaboration and presenting to a global audience. I think working on a class blog makes the students think/work harder because other people will see it. No one wants to be embarrassed in cyberspace. I looked that the digital tools website and have no idea how to use most of them. Pretty amazing stuff to teach kids how to use.

I’m not a math person, but I could see the value of the APCalc blog and assignment. Again, an innovative learning tool.

Some of my links might not work. I tried inserting some of them multiple times, but they did not highlight when I posted them.

Today I happened to find this link to the Newbie’s Guide to Flickr  on an email from the American Library Association. Perhaps it will be helpful for us.

Just testing to see if I can add a photo. There must be an easier way to do this.

I hope this makes sense. I have a terrible headache. Stress from a fender bender and flood in one long weekend has taken its toll.
I looked at all of the class blogs for our assignment and thought they all had some value. While in the first one, the Science Leadership Academy, I found my way to another blog and ended up leaving a post there. Someone has had a similar teaching experience as mine, so I had to say something. I never would have looked for a blog like this, but there it was.

The classroom blogs are a great form of communication. I liked them because the students get to practice reading and writing skills in a safe forum and can disagree in a civil manner. All of their comments were on target. Personally, I would prefer having a class blog, esp. with younger students, that uses a password rather than being out there in public. Communicating with a book author on a blog is a great idea. Not everyone can afford to have author visits and this offers a nice alternative. Also, everyone has a chance to think of a really good question without the pressure of time constraints or speaking to someone they don’t know. The artwork or photos on the blogs offers a good option for students who don’t want to write.

I could see some of my middle school students, especially boys, liking Teentek. They are very much into the newest tech items out there and some are real whizzes at applying anything new. Dragonball Z anyone?

I’m not sure what my ideal class blogging scenario is. As a library media teacher, one idea I could see using a blog for would be for booktalks and have students incorporate a picture of the book cover and/or drawing of a favorite part of the story. Ultimately, every student in the school could participate in the blog or at least read it. The blog could be linked on the library home page. I know another middle school is trying to get a social studies blog partnership with another school. They will be studying the same units separately and can discuss them together.

I tried going to NetVibes and my computer kept shutting down all of the browser windows I had opened including this one. Thank goodness my post was automatically saved as a draft. I was about to have a meltdown!

See you Thursday.

We are back for Part II of our Web 2.0 class. What will we learn this time? So far, I have learned that I didn’t remember all of the login info from last time! Who am I? From Part I, I am planning on implementing a teacher blog at my school. The Principal gave me permission, but of course I have to go through the district tech dept. for final approval and instructions to put it on the school’s website.

First of all, I had to get rid of the coffee cup. It was taking up most of my screen at home. I like blogging to a small degree. For me its as easy as e-mailing. I created my first blog in my Instructional Media grad class last spring. We had to create the blog, post twice/week within our chosen topic, and comment on our classmates blogs on occasion. I liked finding info to put on my blog, “Library Trends R Us”, if you would like to see it. Blogspot was easy to use.

So moving along to Web 2.0. Besides blogging, Delicious worked well for me and I could definitely see using Flickr in the classroom. It would be great to see kids use Flickr to look up geographic locations and specific topics instead of googling everything. It can be a wonderful tool for art classes and a project option instead of a plain old report or poster. I got some photos on Flickr and like the idea of sharing. The Flickr video from the last assignment was helpful. I would like to know how to change the size of the photos though.

Furl and Diigio didn’t work well for me yet. I’ll have to keep practicing with those.

I’m glad Alan Levine’s video “I Did Not Know You Could do THAT with Free Web Tools” mentioned the ideas of storytelling and penpals. I could see using that in school. I had trouble with the link to his YouTube presentation, but searched for it and found this link to work instead. From Levine’s video, I linked to Parenting Advice: Web2.0 and Your Kids. The interviewer was cheesy, but the interviewee’s advice about learning being fun and connecting with technology was worth the short video.

See you in Web 2.0 Part 2!

I like all of the possibilities that Web 2.0 brings to us, but I feel like I don’t have time or need to access them on a regular basis. If I continue to blog, etc. it will be on a limited basis.

Even though I like electronic media and promote some forms of electronic media, I think a lot of blogging is people trying to make themselves look important. A lot of what I have found in blogs is too personal (sorry) and it takes away from the important information that one is trying to share. I guess I just like to get to the point when I’m seeking information. Kids spend too much time in front of their computers, with their ipods, etc. It takes away from social abilities and bombards them with unnecessary material. I saw two couples (together) at a restaurant recently and at least 3 of them were using their cell phones at the table. I thought “How rude. Why did you go out with this person if you want to talk to someone else?” You have to know when to put down your electronic toys.

Have you seen the “Web 2.0 In Under 5 Minutes” video? Pretty powerful, especially for those of us who remember writing with paper and pencil. One thing we have to remember is that the information that we get out of our computers is only as good as the information we put in.

Another great video is “Did You Know?” The amount of information that is floating around in cyberspace is mind-boggling. So much is added and changed continuously. It seems impossible to keep up with the latest information and the population statistics are amazing.

Webeducators.blog is the site for this Web 2.0 class.

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