Learning 2.0 Summary (Thing 20)

Well, I have to say that I've really enjoyed the Learning 2.0 assignments. Many of the technologies we've explored have been fairly (or entirely) new to me, and it's been fun becoming more tech savvy! I quite enjoy learning new technology skills, but it seems I never carve out time to learn them on my own. It's nice to have been "forced" to play because I think many of them will be extremely helpful tools in a library and to pass along to teachers to use in their classrooms. I've had quite a few experiences this year that have demonstrated the important role technology plays in our students' lives and the levels of engagement and enjoyment kids get from technology-driven lessons. This new-found understanding has required a bit of a shift in thinking for me. I've tried to incorporate more technology into my lessons over the last few years, but I'm quickly coming to the conclusion that I've barely scratched the surface in my attempts. Kids today are capable of so much if given the opportunity and the framework to be successful.

As far as introducing these technologies to teachers, I think it would be fun to have an optional teacher training on a different skill or program every month. Once or twice a year, I would also have a celebration for teachers to share how they have incorporated the skills into their class. I'm thinking I'd like to make this an informal gathering with teachers bringing in samples of student projects that are placed around the library's tables for people to peruse as they enjoy some treats and chat. It would also be neat to document students' learning throughout the school year by talking with the kids about their process and product and their feelings about using technology skills in class. I think a short video featuring the students and their thoughts would be a great way to open our technology celebration and a fantastic way to show teachers the positive impact their lessons have had on students and hopefully encourage them to do even more!

Google Docs Survey (Thing 19)

Learning 2.0 - Tag Clouds (Thing 18)

Here is my Wordle that I created about Web 2.0 topics.  Too fun!

I also found a couple of articles about ways teachers can incorporate the use of Wordle in the classroom.  I think these would be great ideas for librarians to share during collaborative efforts with teachers.

Word Clouds: 125 Ways...And Counting...To Use Wordle in the Classroom

45 Interesting Ways to Use Wordle in the Classroom

Learning 2.0 - Podcasts (Thing 17)

After browsing around iTunes, I chose to listen to a sampling from the following podcasts...

Tech Chick Tips - This podcast was created by a professional development consultant (Helen) and technology specialist (Anna) from Texas.  In their podcasts, they introduce different technologies and share ideas about how to implement them in classrooms.  They also have a website at Tech Chick Tips with links to the different programs and websites they mention on their podcasts.  Since we're working on creating a wiki, I listened to their podcast on blogs, wikis, and podcasts (0001 Tech Chick Tips).

I've used a blog (through Blogger) in my classroom in the past but was never really comfortable with the idea of giving students access to post directly to it.  Instead, I would have them fill out a Google Doc, which I would then look over before posting to the blog.  This always felt a bit cumbersome, and I was interested to hear some new suggestions.  The Tech Chicks mentioned two blogging sites that I'm going to look into using in the future.  Edublogs was the first hosting site they mentioned.  At first glance, it looks to be a pretty well-laid out site, but their premium features (including teacher moderation of comments) come with a $40/year price tag.  Class Blogmeister was the second site they mentioned, and while it is free (along with all of its features including teacher moderation of comments), it doesn't look quite as professional.  Hmmm...I'll have to do more research, but I may be sticking with Blogger.

I also took a look at two student-produced podcasts from a middle school in Wisconsin, Coulee Kids, and an elementary school in Nebraska, Radio WillowWeb.  These podcasts showcase student projects from different grade levels and content areas, and I think they'd be a great place to go to look for ideas for using podcasts in the classroom.  I particularly liked the Coulee Kids podcast on poems for two voices and think it would be a great way to practice and develop reading fluency.

Learning 2.0 - Online Video (Thing 16)

I really liked how this video hit on the many aspects of being a school librarian.  From creating a welcoming environment to teaching digital literacy skills to students (and teachers) to fostering a love of reading, I thought this video presented a powerful picture of the important role librarians can play in schools.

Learning 2.0 - Twittter (Thing 15)

Hee, hee!  I have a Twitter account!  I found the process of setting up an account to be relatively painless, but it was a bit daunting to come up with people to follow as part of the set-up process.  Luckily, most of the blogs I looked at for my RSS Feed post are by people who have Twitter accounts, and I also found some people and organizations to follow from the UELMA article.  I also added a few authors to my personal feed.  Figuring out how to add a Twitter feed widget to my blog wasn't necessarily intuitive, but a quick Google search led me to some good tutorials.

I found the article "How Librarians Can Leverage Twitter" to be very helpful in suggesting easy ways to implement and use this new (to me!) form of social media into the library.  Here are a few ideas:

Report Library Happenings - This is probably the main way I was thinking of using Twitter.  I thought about sending tweets about new books, special program reminders, contest winners, and upcoming book club meeting dates.  I also liked Burkhardt's suggestion about letting patrons know about unusual occurrences such as early closures or machines being down.

Sharing Recommendations - I also liked the idea of having kids tweet book recommendations to the library and then embedding a widget on the library's website for the tweets.

Build Community - I hadn't thought using Twitter for building community ties, but I liked the ideas about retweeting information from students and other patrons about upcoming community events or interesting content.

Engaging Users - Burkhardt also talked about helping users with library questions.  In this article, he talks about setting up tweet alerts using the advanced search feature in Twitter in order to alert you to library related questions from users in your area.  You could also share articles about authors, the importance of school libraries, or the positive effects of reading with your followers.

Learning 2.0 - RSS Feeds and Newsreaders (Things 13 & 14)

Mighty Little Librarian - This looked like a pretty great site for ideas.   Tiff Whitehead is the school librarian at Central Middle School in Louisiana. In my browsing of this blog, I found quite a few ideas for engaging readers and promoting literacy that would be fun.  Whitehead shared ideas for a "Book Crush" display that would be fun in February, a March Madness bracket based on the books that have been checked out the most so far during the school year, and reading challenges that sound like they'd pull in a lot of readers.  She also has a lot of Web 2.0 tool tutorials and seems to be very involved in a lot of professional development activities and presentations.  I also liked that she seems pretty open about sharing her ideas and even files she has created for lessons and projects. 

Librarians on the Fly - This blog was recommended by one of the librarians I visited with during fall semester.  Like The Mighty Little Librarian, it has a lot of ideas for implementing Web 2.0 technologies into the library setting.  One of the ideas I particularly liked was about mounting iPads around the library for students to use for catalog browsing.  These librarians suggested this as a way to keep the other library computers open for student research, and I thought it would also be a nice to have the ability to search for books from different locations.  Sometimes I think it's hard for kids to go back and forth and back and forth from the shelves to the computer banks.

Learning 2.0 - Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 (Thing 12)

I'm excused from this post, but I wanted to throw in a few websites that looked like they'd be good resources for learning new Web 2.0 skills.

Discovery Education: Web 2.0 - Internet safety, Web 2.0 tools (presentation, video, mobile devices), media literacy, tech tips

Glogster EDU

Learn It In 5 - Video tutorials for Web 2.0 teaching ideas

Oh! The Web 2.0 Places You'll Go!

Read...Share...Learn

WebTools4u2use

Learning 2.0 - Social Bookmarking with Technorati (Thing 11)

When looking over Technorati's blog directory, one of the categories that I felt was noticeably absent was "Education."  I know education is a bit of a specialized field, but it seems as though there are quite a few blogs out there dedicated to sharing teaching ideas.  I'm sure it's tucked away under the umbrella of another category, but I thought it would be a bit more visible.

I tried to do searches for two different topics (school librarian and board games) and came up with very different results when searching by blog and blog postings. The only blog on the first results page for my school librarian search with an authority rating above "1" didn't seem to actually have anything to do with school librarians.  When I searched by post, I found articles about a December school shooting involving a school librarian, but there was nothing else of interest on the first two pages of results.  My search for board games was also relatively fruitless.  I know of a few good blogs on this topic, and none of them showed up in the first few pages of results.  There were also a lot of irrelevant results for video games.  When searching by post, I also didn't come up with a lot of useful results.

Overall, I was kind of disappointed with Technorati.  It didn't seem like it necessarily pulled up a lot of relevant results, and it was a bit frustrating to go back and try to sift through everything.  It also felt like the site was down a lot.   I tried to get onto Technorati five times as I was completing this assignment was only able to access the site two of those times.

Learning 2.0 - Social Bookmarking with Diigo (Thing 10)

Diigo seems like a pretty cool social bookmarking site.  I think I'm most excited about trying it with students as a research tool.  With an educator upgrade, you can create accounts for your students and add them to groups.  I think this would be a great tool for students to use when researching because they can collect and share articles with others in their group as well as any mark-ups (highlighting, sticky notes) they make.  As I understand it, you can also comment on the notes that others have made.  I think this could be a great time saver for students who are working on group projects, but it would also be great for students who are working independently on projects.

This would also be a neat site to recommend to classroom teachers to use with their students for follow-up readings in content areas.  I think the mark-up capabilities of Diigo can offer a fresh take on reading an article and then writing a summary or response.  Instead, teachers could assign the reading and ask students to come prepared with their highlighted text and comments or questions written down on sticky notes.  I've often questioned the relevance of writing short summaries or responses to prove I've completed a reading.  If someone really wanted proof that I've read something, all they'd need to do is look at my marked up text! :)

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Here is a link to some videos about using Diigo in the classroom as well as a nice article with ideas and handy tips for using the site.

Learning 2.0 - Search Engines (Thing 9)

 Search engine created!  This video was very helpful!

Learning 2.0 - Goodreads and LibraryThing (Thing 8)

Here are some of the ideas I had for using Goodreads in a school library.

Adding Friends on Goodreads
This would be a fun feature to use with students because it would allow you to track the types of books students are reading (although this might be more useful to a classroom teacher than a librarian) and make recommendations to them or let them make recommendations to you!  There's also a feature on Goodreads that allows you to compare your library of titles with your friends and see how similar your tastes are, and I think some kids would enjoy using this tool.  One of the blogs I looked at also mentioned that students who "friend" each other on Goodreads tend to read (or at least record their reading) more than those who don't have many friends.  I think this makes sense because Goodreads is yet another social media site and posting updates gives kids one more way to connect with their peers.

Book Reviews
Again, this might be of more use to classroom teachers, but Goodreads could be used as a way for students to write reviews of the books they read.  One blog post also suggested having students look at different reviews that have been posted on the site in order to create a set of criteria for a well-written book review. 

Book Discussions
I think it would be fun to start a library book club, and it would be fun to set up a discussion thread on Goodreads for kids to use before the meeting to spark discussion or even after the meeting to follow up with ideas that were shared.  According to one blog I read, there's also a student groups feature that can be used for this, but I haven't done enough research to find out more about that yet.  I think you can also create private groups that require an invitation to join, and I think using this feature would be a good way to protect students' privacy.

Reading Challenges
Interested students can join a reading challenge and use the site to chart their progress toward reaching their goal.

Fan/Follow Features
Students can become fans of their favorite Goodreads authors and follow their posts.  I think it would also be cool for kids to take a look at the shelves of their favorite authors to see that they read just like we do and also to recognize the important link that exists between reading and writing.

Quizzes
Teachers and even students can create quizzes for the books they read.  I think some kids would enjoy making a quiz and then challenging their friends to complete it.  As a teacher librarian, you could also create a quiz as part of a school-wide reading challenge and give out prizes for the students with the most correct answers.

One caution that I saw repeated in several places dealt with using Goodreads with a younger crowd because of the ads that can pop up as well as fact that there's no way to monitor the content of reviews or comments.  Several people recommended using BiblioNasium for readers in elementary school in order to track the books you've read or Edmodo if you wanted to set up class discussions for
different books.

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A few of the ideas I shared for using Goodreads can be found here.  I also found some ideas for how teacher librarians and public libraries might look at using Goodreads including a nice comparison between Goodreads, LibraryThing, and Shelfari. 

Learning 2.0 - Online Image Generator (Thing 7)

I played with the image generator on redkid.net (which also offers ways to resize images), but I'm also going to play with the keepcalm-omatic and shrinkpictures.com sites.  Given my love of fortune cookies, I couldn't resist using the following message generator...

I made this fortune to go along with the book Divergent, and I think it would be a lot of fun to have kids create a similar project using one of the message generators on redkid.net.  It was quite tough to shorten the message to fit on the fortune cookie slip, and I really had to think about what information was important to convey without including any spoilers.  I think the fortune cookie generator in particular would make a fun book display around Chinese New Year.  I'd probably try a set of directions similar to those below:

Imagine the main character of your favorite book is sitting down to a delicious Chinese dinner in the opening pages of the story.  What sage advice might appear on their fortune cookie to help guide them through the twists and turns of the story's plot?  Visit redkid.net/generator/fortune/ to generate your own message, print off a copy of your creation, and bring it to the library to be included in our school display!

Learning 2.0 - Skype (Thing 6)

I just signed up for a Skype in the Classroom account and am excited to find out more about how Skype can be used in the library or classroom.  There are three main categories of activities that are listed on the main site:  Collaborating with other Skype in the Classroom teachers, finding guest speakers for classes, and taking virtual field trips.

After doing just a tiny bit of digging, I came across an activity that I think would be a lot of fun for my students.  It's called MysterySkype and involves two different classrooms from two different parts of the world connecting and giving their partner class clues about their location.  There are a couple of suggested formats for the activity, but one that I think would be fun is the "20 Questions" version.  Basically, each class would come up with 20 clues to share with their partner class that would help to narrow down where they are located in the world.  I think this would make a great and very interactive geography lesson...especially since geography is a subject that is often brushed aside in the curriculum.

If using MysterySkype in a classroom setting, I'd probably have groups of students work together to create a list of clues to share with the partner classroom.  As far as resources go, I'd try to focus on using more general sources such as encyclopedias for the initial clues as well as more specialized sources such as books on unique landmarks or even local history for the final clues that pinpoint our exact location.  Before Skyping with a partner class, we'd also talk about presentation skills (eye contact, speaking in a clear voice, intonation, etc.) and practice these skills.  After Skyping, I'd let the kids have a few days to figure out their mystery location and then set up another Skype call to share our thoughts.  During this second call, it would be neat to have a few kids share information about how they conducted their research (either for writing the clues they shared or for finding their mystery location) or give a more detailed description of a few of the locations we mentioned in our presentations. 

It would also be fun to try something similar on a school-wide scale.  Interested classes could participate as described above, and then partner sites could be mapped on a world map that is kept in the library.  If teachers wanted to extend things even further, their students could get into groups to conduct a very brief research activity on a specific aspect of the country.  I'm thinking CultureGrams or World Book Online would be good resources for this and that groups could be in charge of categories such as family life, schooling, holidays and celebrations, cultural food, etc.  The information they discover could be submitted to the library (perhaps through a Google Doc) and then transferred onto a newsletter style template and compiled into a "Travel Log," which could also be kept in the library for browsing.

Learning 2.0 - Wikis (Thing 5)

In the past, I've always opted to use a website instead of a wikipage for my class because I never really felt I needed the option of letting others modify my content.  However, when stepping out of the classroom and into a library, I think there are some benefits to using a wiki because of the opportunities it offers for collaboration.  Here are a few of my ideas for how I might use a wiki in a school library setting:

Pages for Teachers
Collaboration - When collaborating with teachers to create assignments or projects, it would be helpful to both have access to a wikipage that could be modified with resource links, descriptions of assignments, and any necessary files for students.  This would also be a nice place to house information so it could be used from year to year. Editing access restricted to teacher librarian, principal, and classroom teachers.

Professional Development - Teachers and the school librarian could also have a wikipage of interesting professional development sites, articles, or tutorials and training videos for new technology ideas that teachers might be interested in implementing.  Editing access restricted to teacher librarian, principal, and classroom teachers. 

Pages for Students
Library Sponsored Clubs - If there are any clubs that meet regularly in the library or operate under the direction of the school librarian, they might also be interested in a wikipage.  Club officers could be given access to the specific page in order to update information about upcoming meetings or special activities.  It would also be a great place for kids to create sign up lists for activities.  I'm definitely planning on having a game club be a part of our library, but most games have a limit on the number of players it can handle.  A wiki would be a great way to let students talk about the games they wanted to play and sign up for slots. Editing access restricted to teacher librarian, principal, and club members.

Research Resources - A wiki would also be a great way to promote research resources to students.  You could include links to Big6 resources as well as links to different sites that offer different options for presentations such as Prezi or Powtoons.   Editing access restricted to teacher librarian, principal, and classroom teachers.

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Listed below are a few sites I plan on looking to for ideas on layout, organization, or content.

Read...Share...Learn: Wikispaces - Lots of great ideas for how to design a useful wiki and examples of ways others have used wikis in their classrooms
Sigml Mobile Learning - 21st Century Tools for 21st Century Schools - information about designing/redesigning a wiki
Think Media - Kearns High School - Content and organization ideas
ICTMagic - Content ideas, especially for Web 2.0 tools
Cool Tools for Schools -  Content ideas, especially for presentation tools for students
School Library Websites - Elementary - List of elementary level sites to visit
School Library Websites - Middle - List of middle school level sites to visit
School Library Websites - High - List of high school level sites to visit

Learning 2.0 - Flickr (Thing 4)

clever book displays [H42/365], a photo by eclecticlibrarian on Flickr.

Would you be interested in reading a book from this display? Keep your eyes peeled...You may see some of these ideas showing up in our library!

Learning 2.0 - Lifelong Learning and Blogging (Things 1, 2, & 3)

7 ½ Habits of Successful Lifelong Learners

1.     Begin with the end in mind.

2.     Accept responsibility for your own learning.

3.     View problems as challenges.

4.     Have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner.

5.     Create your own learning toolbox.

6.     Use technology to your advantage.

7.     Teach and mentor others.

7½ Play!

When I think about the habits of lifelong learners, it’s a bit difficult to pin down which of the habits I feel I do a good job of following and which I struggle with doing.  A lot depends on the familiarity I have on the subject I’m studying as well as my interest in developing my skills in that particular area. 

However, in general, I’d say that one of the habits I struggle with the most is Habit #4:  Have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner.  When trying something new, I will quite often feel fairly incompetent and not up to the challenge of completing the task, especially if it is a subject with which I have little familiarity.  However, this is usually just an initial stumbling block for me.  The more I study a topic, the more interested I become in finding out more about it.  Delving deeper usually pushes me past feelings of inadequacy and quite often makes me want to push myself harder to learn more. 

For this reason, I’d say that I am pretty successful in regard to Habit #2: Accept responsibility for your own learning.  I know that my success or failure largely rests upon my own shoulders, and I also accept the idea that what I get out of a project is directly related to the amount of effort I’m willing to put into it.  However, although I understand this idea pretty readily, putting it into practice is more easily said than done!  I love to play (Habit #7 ½), find resources to help build my learning toolbox (Habit #5), and share my learning with others through teaching and mentoring (Habit #7), and I think all of these are great indicators of how much success you’ll have with your learning.  Sadly, time constraints often hold me back from accomplishing all that I’d like to do.  Life has a way of pulling us in a lot of different directions at once, and there always seems to be a plethora of things competing for our attention.  It can quite often be difficult to find time to dedicate to learning new things, but as I think about it, this is a pretty good example of Habit #3: viewing obstacles as challenges! Instead of viewing lack of time as an obstacle, I should see it more as a challenge to overcome.  I suppose Habit #3 is one I need to work on!