Week 7: Thing #17--Add an entry to the Sandbox

It's true. Dead links make me frustrated. I found this assignment tedious and frustrating, probably because it just seemed all over the place and there were links that no longer worked. Still, I found some fun things to do, very apropos. We are currently using Inspiration to produce a flowchart for a WikiHow skill/direction. The list of online, free Web2.0 applications just became my next step in the assignment. I played with several of them to see which might fit our school's needs. In fact, I have been advocating Inspiration--and got a grant to install it several years ago. For planning writing assignments, a project, a presentation, it is a wonderful tool. But having it at school and not at home is one of the difficulties of the digital age--providing access when and where it is needed.

As I looked through the list of flowchart creators, I got really excited. The one I chose required a registration process that ultimately failed. Then I found Webspiration--and since I am, at this moment, teaching some students to use Inspiration (an old version)--it was a great find.

Two great wiki ideas that I found included a wiki on the school library page to allow students and teachers to make selection suggestions for print and materials. The other idea was to use wikis to create pathfinders--a really solid idea as they could be shared with teachers who could edit and add to them as necessary.

Week 7: Thing #16--Wikis

Several of the wikis listed on the Week 7 list stood out for me. St. Joseph County Public Library's Subject Guides:  Wow! What a great resource. This is an outstanding reason to create a wiki--using a collective brain to recommend books. Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki is a practical resource for new and experienced librarians. Some, like Welcome to the Blogging Libraries Wiki probably offer great information, but the format is so uninviting that I just couldn't love it.

I have participated in creating wikis for group assignments in the past. but I have never set one up for the library. I can see that the calendar function, survey, and discussion board, would all be outstanding resources for the classroom and for the library. The ability to put links on a navigation column--and the ease of the navigation bar--all create a very friendly environment on the Westwood wiki found in the Sample School wiki. Wiki: A Beginner's Look is a really useful, user friendly resource/idea bank that is ready to go for students and faculty. I also really like the wiki for WebJunction: the ability to organize so many resources in one spot, without the stress of a website....

I am going to have my Library TAs create a wiki after reading the PLCMC Information Core Competencies  on wikis. Then I think we will create one together on TA Core Competencies at NHS Library. At this moment, I have Library TAs working on an Inspiration outline and concept web based on a WikiHow project. They are to complete one of the projects, then put it into Inspiration, showing what they had to do to accomplish the project, with more details than in the WikiHow. Students are uploading pictures of their projects and some are bringing samples. A few are including pictures from Picasa or Flickr for their presentations. It seems like a perfect segue.

Week 6: Thing #15--Perspectives on Web 2.0, Library 2.0, and the future of libraries

Social media brings people together. Just look at Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya at this very moment. There are too many news articles and blogs discussing the part social media is playing in revolutions to mention or even read. I looked at several, including these two:

Libya, Egypt, Bahrain--they just want to be like us. Iain Macwhirter Now and Then

Can social networking overthrow a government? Peter Beaumont February 25, 2011 - 12:27PM

In an article from Next: The OCLC Newsletter titled "The Thoughts of Nine Experts About Our Increasingly Online Lives," Paul Jones (one of the experts) says:

If libraries and museums act on their heritage as places for intellectual improvement and social interaction and cultural cohesion, there is a great future for them. If they act as warehouses for cultural treasures as interpreted by the dominant culture, their days are numbered.

They may be numbered anyway. The gathering place, where information is gathered and exchanged, is treasured by the human race, but is frequently excoriated by taxpayers and tax collectors. As we see gross assumptions that students no longer need reference material because everything is available on the Internet and pundits declare that, somehow, 21st Century Skills will save us all if students just have access to technology, it is really questionable whether libraries can survive. Explaining to a dubious public that we are busier than ever is an ominous task, unless we are explaining it to the public that uses the library. There are great examples of librarians leading the technology charge--I'd like to be one myself. Advocacy will be everything.

In the face of revolutions without leadership, I think I see the face of the same anarchy that followed the French Revolution. In "Books in Time," a Carla Hesse article about the eBook, technology, and literacy, written approximately fifteen years ago, she states, among numerous amazing forecasts:

What appears to be emerging from the digital revolution is the possibility of a new mode of temporality for public communication, one in which public exchange through the written word can occur without deferral, in a continuously immediate present. A world in which we are all, through electronic writing, continuously present to one another.

I attended the CSLA Conference in Sacramento last fall. It is usually my first stop to look for ideas on integrating technology into my curricula. CUE came to Napa early in the year and met at American Canyon High School--our new tech rich site. Digital responsibility, social networking, collaboration--all considered 21st Century Skills--were the order of the day. Looking into the near future, or even the now, according to the Horizon Report, electronic books and mobiles are what to look for. Slightly down the path, we need to be ready for augmented reality and game based learning and gesture-based  computing. My cell phone seems to be using the last, my grandson is heavily into games for math, and augmented reality--well, aren't on the fringes of that? The "augment" feels more like an equitable access than a future based technology.

Week 6: Thing #14 Technorati, Tags, and SEO

My favorite thing about technorati, ASAP is that it recognizes multiple word tags. The no-space tag allowed by Delicious always irritates me, so any application that uses comma delineated tagging appeals to me. The tag list is really helpful and, of course, I love tag clouds. I checked up on Barack Obama, found some great blogs, but found myself, unwittingly of course, on a travel blog, which was advocating a new webpage that helps find least expensive airfair.

I am now a registered blogger at Technorati. I cannot wait to see if I show up in a search--the tags I use may or may not be the ones that get search by people who need to find my information. I searched Ask.com, Google, Yahoo, and Bing, as well as Technorati for "School Library Learning 2.0." All search engines returned better results than Technorati (0). The search engines were pretty much a dead heat--all returned several hits, including the main site and either Week 6 or 7 or both.

I have added a bit of knowledge about using title tags in search engine optimization (SEO). What I have always taught kids in English classes works on the web as well--be specific, be thorough. Now, it is a bit depressing to think that I might spend days and weeks writing an article for a blog or website that will just be scanned by readers, but that is just what I do all the time. Better make it good, better make it quick. Teaching students to very carefully consider content on the web, to evaluate it and synthesize it, becomes all the more a serious concern--teaching them the difference between what takes close reading and what can be quickly digested is a problem for every classroom today.

Week 6: Thing # 13--Delicious and Tagging

I have had a Delicious account for several years now--long enough to be greatful that all the dots have been removed. Long enough to be sorry that it was taken over by Yahoo, because students need to get a Yahoo account in order to create a Delicious account now. I have taught studnets to use Delicious as their bookmarking system because it travels with them. I also recommend that they add tags directly associated with assignments, such as the teacher name and course description. Someday, when they are trying to remember resources used in a previous assignment, it may be easier to remember that that was in schallon's class, or economics--thus schallon or economics become a tag. Meanwhile, they learn to use other useful tags--and how to use search terms to search the web. My Delicious account, schallon, has 380 useful bookmarks. Thanks to tagging, I can find what I want. Thanks to Delicious, I can take them wherever I go, though I miss the toolbar buttons to take me directly there.

I love Delicious. I have passed the wealth on to many teachers and students at my site and will continue to do so. However, I intend to migrate my bookmarks over to Diigo someday soon, but I can barely stand the thought of keeping up to sets of bookmarks.... I especially like Diigo's enhanced offer to K-12 and higher ed educators so that they can create student accounts, free from non-educational advertising, made useful for their specific teaching curricula. The accounts have to be applied for and approved, but might very well  make it worthwhile to migrate over. Diigo also allows for highlighting and sticky notes (other things as well--I've just been checking it out in a workshop).

Week 5, Thing #12: Fun 'n' Games

I love Wordle and have found it to be very useful for all sorts of things, from bookmarks to birthday cards to certificates (I used significant events and people to create a great certificate of lifetime accomplishment for my father's 85th birthday). Library TAs use Wordle to make cards, graphics for display, and bookmarks. Use it, play with it, love it.... I created the Wordle below when one of our teachers retired a couple of years ago.

My TAs and other students play with FreeRice.com in starts and spurts. It is a great vocabulary builder and it is a self-motivator. There is something mesmerizing and compulsive about it (don't tell anyone that I do Farmville). Students like it, it feels as if they are accomplishing something, so I like it.

Rollyo I had never heard of...the idea of a personalized search engine was just too good. I decided to try developing a travel site for future use (not too future...).

1. Made an account.
2. Added URLs--slowly. I got way too interested in looking at the places and venues. I probably should have chosen a topic like "dyspepsia".
3. Finally, I copied and pasted travel sites recommended by Rollyo because visiting travel sites was taking over my world.

Usefulness for class projects, research papers, etc.--amazing!

I also designed a Mini-Read Poster. Easy, fun, I am going to have each of my TAs and Library Teen Advisors Club (LTAC) create their own. We can post them on the library bulletin board--and on our library blog.

Travel IQ is a a great way to teach capitols, flags, etc. I sent it along to the staff and confessed that I completely bombed on my efforts--but I can see hope for finding my way around Canada in the future.

Week 5, Thing #11 Web 2.0 Awards List

I decided to try Mozy because I had used it briefly in the past between my home and work computer, but when my computer at work was updated, the Mozy download was wiped off. I have left it alone (for almost a year), thinking I would try it again. Besides, I also suspected that administration would have a discussion with me if they noticed it on my hardware.

I logged on to Mozy only to find this great "free" resource had become successful enough, or large enough, to charge customers for the storage. Several reasons I really liked it when I was doing the trial included backup against hard drive problems, access to my work documents from home, and the potential to share my work with a family member or co-worker.

Mozy is not as attractive when an minimum annual home use subscription fee is$109.89. While that allows the user to download to three computers and offers a maximum of 125 GB, a portable hard drive becomes very appealing. For business purposes, it is a great deal more attractive because it could save on the purchase of huge storage computers, space to house them, and employees to service them. Since I am not on that end of our school network, I have nothing to compare--but I strongly suspect that cloud environments like Mozy will be in our future.

I went to LinkedIn and linked in. Of course I have an account with quite a number of friends and colleagues, but I went out and found another librarian to add along the way. I found that I had already joined Library 2.0 at some time in my past, so I updated my profile and added a post.