Oh, I just found an excellent website from one of my RSS feeds, techLearning. It described a site named Copyright Bay. I can’t wait to send a link to the site to our teachers. It is a fun way to demonstrate this copyright issue to teachers. I hope you will take a look at it – what a great find!
Wow! These tools are fabulous. There are some incredibly talented people out there to think up and develop these wonderful tools – and then to make them available to everyone. There are so many ideas out there. I love our Tool Reviews – what great ideas. The JigZone brings up all kinds of ideas including a way to introduce authors to students as I read books to them, especially for the younger students. I’m always looking for fun “library” activities for students who are not checking out books during library time. There are also all kinds of tools for the students to create books of their own with ToonDoo or MixBook. I would love for some of the students to create a Welcome to HIES book for new students, describing the different places they’ll go and all the teachers they will meet. I look forward to spending more time with these tools.
Attending a conference at home was fabulous! I loved looking through the available sessions to select one. I had a hard time choosing! I finally decided to listen to one about using Web 2.0 with 1st graders. If you can do it with first graders, you can use it with anyone. Those students actually wrote in blogs and wikis. It was a great session and gave me some ideas about research projects with 1st and 2nd graders. Second graders already do a small one about dinosaurs with their classroom teachers, but I could probably do something with animals. The opportunities out there are incredible, the hard part is narrowing it down and going for it. I think that becomes easier the more I have my hands in this Web 2.0, and this class has done a great job of really getting me into it, even though some tasks were faced reluctantly. I’m becoming more and more comfortable with blogs and wikis, as well as some of the other tools out there. I’m looking forward to going back and listening to more conference sessions when I have time.
I have to admit that this task wasn’t quite as easy as I’d hoped. It may have something to do with the fact that I changed my subject matter and spent HOURS searching for pictures in Flickr. I decided to try to do a slideshow that might go along with one of the GA Book Award nominee picture books for the upcoming year. I worked on several different books with very limited results. The Girls Baseball League had too many copyright pictures and then the next 2 books I chose didn’t have many pictures to complement them. So, I decided to work something up on Margie Palatini’s Sweet Tooth. That was fun, as I spent many hours looking at different desserts. I downloaded the pictures, created a word file for the credits, and then chose PikiStrips for my slideshow. I loaded 7 of the 9 pictures with captions and then the site went down. Saving it as I went seemed difficult, and sure enough, it was lost. So, I started over again. This time I went through the cumbersome task of saving after every couple of pictures. I don’t know about these Web 2.0 slideshows… The jury is still out. I guess I find Powerpoint so easy to work with, that I may be a little skeptical. You can see my slideshow in my wikispace, Sand in My Shoes.
Flickr can be a valuable tool to take students further in a lesson. Since I participate in the Georgia Book Award program from UGA, I’m always looking for ways to bring the books to life. For instance, one of the nominees for next year is Mama Played Baseball by David Adler. It is a story about women playing baseball during WWII. I thought it would be interesting to find pictures of some of the real players from that time.
From the Florida Memory Collection.
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…
