Web 2.0 Summer Blog

As a Media Specialist, I really try to focus on copyright and teach students how to correctly cite their sources. The creative commons concept really makes you think. What do we need to cite? Being able to use information “For Educational Purposes” allowed us to use a lot of information (except anything from Disney), and now it seems we can use things freely. I’m still getting my arms around this and trying to figure out how to correctly teach this to students. It’s exciting, while being a little overwhelming at the same time. And then we turn around and find that the AP is going to start charging us to use their information! Will Richardson talks about this on his blog. It can certainly be confusing – things are changing constantly. How do we keep up? I will be getting a Promethean Board next year and I hope to be using a lot more digital information with my classes. It is an exciting and challenging time we live in.

Wikis are amazing. I have to admit that I was introduced to Wikis about a year ago from Shelley when she showed us at an AATE meeting the Turn Homeward, Hannalee wikipage. I was so impressed that I immediately sent the link to my Principal and Assistant Principal. I was hooked at that point. I have made a few feeble attempts at it, but I have primarily used them to create pages for research projects in the Library. They haven’t been interactive, only informational. I have used them to link research websites and instructions for research projects. They have worked great for those purposes, but I haven’t used the spaces to their full potential. I did get a classroom teacher excited about it and he created a great classroom page for an Atlanta Research project. It turned out well. I loved the Salute to Seuss wikipage! What a great Lower School project! It is a fun way to highlight an author. Wouldn’t it be fun to select one author a quarter and have students contribute information about their books and background. Poetry month (April) would be a great time to explore different poets and have students create their own poetry. The Go West wikipage was another great research project. There are so many great opportunities out there to have students collaborate and learn from each other. I also loved Vicki Davis’ ideas for “study” wikis. I wish these were out there when I was in school!

I am adding RSS feeds all the time now. I think I will need to go back and edit some of my choices. For instance, I have been monitoring The Shifted Librarian for about 6 months now. While it has interesting information from time to time, it seems to be more suitable to public librarians, rather than school librarians. There may be some interesting information for high school librarians, but I don’t think there is much there for Lower School librarians. It takes so much time to keep updated on all these blogs, that this may be one that I let go. I’m still deciding…

I love keeping up with David Pogue from NYTimes. I saw him speak at a technical conference and it was so entertaining, that I subscribed to his RSS feed. He has great information as well as entertaining videos. He evaluates a lot of new technology.

Another great feed I’ve been readying for a while now is from David Warlick. One of his recent articles focuses on the Creative Arts in school. He has great information and ideas in the area of education.

I have mainly focused on education and technology for my feeds. I’m looking forward to adding some fun ones now!

RSS is a great tool. I started using it this year and I am amazed at the amount of information that I can learn. I found the new feeds very interesting, but I really liked the Infinite Thinking and TechLearning blogs. It sounds like we might be able to get information from the NECC conference, even though I am unable to attend this year. I am hoping there will be some feeds that can give us some new information. I do enjoy keeping up with information from Will Richardson and I loved the idea of using KidPix to illustrate fairy tales from TechLearning. I used KidPix for poetry and illustrations with some 3rd graders a few years ago and they really loved working with it. There are so many fun tools they can use to illustrate their writing.

Oh, the things you can learn! There is so much information out there that it can be overwhelming, but how interesting. When you follow the links within the blogs, you can really delve into some interesting information. For instance, learning about Anne Davis’ Rational for Blogging gets me thinking about ways I can use blogs with my students. Then further justification and ideas can be found in The Ripe Environment where I learn about all the tools that can be used in my blog. But I didn’t stop there! Will Richardson is a wealth of information. I have actually been following his blog for about a year now. His latest entry is really interesting. He is talking about how the AP is now going to charge us to use their information – even for educational purposes! We get a discount for education (from $12.50 to $7.50) for using 5 – 25 words! Wow. This takes plagiarism to a new level. If you check out this blog, be sure to visit all the links. I could spend hours going through all these links. The problem will be narrowing down the list to follow the ones that could help me the most or that I find the most interesting…

Well, it was much easier than I ever suspected to set up a blog! It is so enlightening to visit the various blogs of my fellow Web 2.0 classmates. It is fun to read their ideas and comments – it really gets me thinking of the possibilities. I am looking forward to learning about more of the possible ways to use blogs with my students. I can really see having my students blog to recommend books to each other. The library software that I currently have allows my students to write comments on the books they read, but they have to find a book to read the recommendation. With the blog, students have the opportunity to recommend books to each other in “real-time”.

Web 2.0 is an exciting way to connect our students to so many opportunities and ways to learn. As a media specialist, I feel that it is important for me to help students understand how to use all this new and exciting information. There is so much out there that it can be a challenge to navigate through all this to find what is relevant to what the student really wants to know. It is easy to get off-track when doing research projects, but it is also important for them to understand that they can also take note of the information and ideas that excite them and go back to these ideas when the time is appropriate to learn more about them. Web 2.0 opens up so many possibilities!

Being a lifelong learner is essential for everyone. It keeps us alive and involved. Of course, I changed careers when I was 40 from the corporate business world and went back to school for a Masters degree a few years later to get into the field of education. I love learning – especially when it involves technology. What an exciting world we live in! It is always changing and challenging us. Playing with this technology will be fun, but actually using it with students in a meaningful way will be a challenge. I don’t want to just throw new things at them, but I want to make their learning fun and challenging at the same time. My challenge will be creating my own learning toolbox that I can organize and refer back to. Playing with the new technologies will be no problem, but I want to be sure to use the technology meaningfully with my students.