We weren't the only ones enjoying the sun and open water!
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Feeders, Bookmarks, and Library Sites……OH MY!
Bloglines versus Google Reader wasn’t even a contest for me. I found Google Reader much more maneuverable and user friendly. I liked how I could “star” items that I wanted to come back to later on Google reader. I didn’t find a similar feature on Bloglines. The only pro that I could find for Bloglines was the mosaic representation of images associated with the feed, when there was one. Visually it did set the different postings apart and after looking at so much text, a change was nice. The cons that I found for Bloglines were that it was extremely hard to navigate! When I wanted to delete a feed there was no help button on my screen. After clicking on every imaginable button and praying, I finally realized that when I clicked on the “go to Bloglines.com” tag there was a small help tab. This tab directed me to the tiny gray area next to the title that had edit written in white. White text on a light gray background didn’t exactly jump out at me. At one point while adding a feed to Bloglines I was told that I had an “unhandled error.” I SOMEHOW managed to notice that the URL address did not start at the left of the box. Apparently there were two spaces which caused this error. Ugh! I guess I was spoiled since I had first set up a Google Reader account and found my way around without bursting any major blood vessels. I learned my lesson slowly that while bundles of similar feeds sounded nice I spent an incredible amount of time weeding through a large number of them that I ended up deleting. Starting small is definitely the way to go. I had a few solid days of digital overload and after a while of looking at the text I found comprehending it even more of a challenge. Good news, I have recovered!
I chose 5 blogs to follow in my Google Reader. The first blog is Will Richardson's Blog because since we are reading his book for the course I thought that this would keep me current with his views on technology in the school environment. I discovered an interesting tool while reading a Google reader feed from Will Richardson titled The Choices We Make. In an effort to try to cut down on information overload, he uses a tool called Proxlet to sift out only Tweets with links for his Twitter account. With all of the information streaming towards us, good filters are going to make our lives much saner. The second blog is Tech & Learning because I liked how they offer a grade appropriate "site of the day" that support topics such as The Boston Tea Party and Kids for Saving Earth. This can be used to help supplement the curriculum. I chose Read Roger at first because he is a Horn Book editor. I found that I also enjoyed his sense of humor and the books he reviewed as well. I liked The Children's Literature Book Club because she uses the blog to post children’s books that her club will discuss along with thought provoking questions for those that can’t attend so that they can still participate. (That and I liked her April 19, 2008 post on her visit with Jon Scieszka.) Finally, I chose Joyce Valenza’s blog Never Ending Search because in addition to reading posts by her, in this class and my last one, her entries discuss everything from books and vokis to the library as a multimedia center in a positive way. She is a great example of the librarian of the 2st century. I like how she manages to cover tough topics such as “5 Reasons Why Library Aides Should Not Be Cut” and she combines it with a pop culture figure such as David Letterman to make the plea more appealing and memorable.
First came Diigo and then came Delicious. I think if I had to choose my favorite it would be Diigo. I really liked the fact that any bookmarks listed were saved as a snapshot in HTML and as an image in the “Diigo cloud.” (It sounds like a pretty cool place.) The fact that there would never be an unsupported bookmark was a huge plus. The use of multi-colored highlighters and the ability to leave annotations or notes on sticky notes was an extremely interactive feature. The tutorial was great on Diigo as well. Once I realized that I needed a toolbar, it was very easy to install. I also loved their recommended tags because sometimes I just needed a little help coming up with different words. While Diigo focused on preserving content, Delicious was more focused on sharing links. With Delicious, I did have a little harder time navigating, especially when it came to finding the small button on the lower left part of the screen to manage subscriptions. Overall the look of the Diigo page was much more uncluttered and appealing. While I am using the Delicious account for my professional bookmarking, I chose to keep the Diigo account as a great family bookmarking site. I found that with both sites they are only as good as your tags.
The award for “Best Final Line in a Terms of Use Statement” goes to (insert long drum roll here)…..LibraryThing.com for posting the following:
BY USING LIBRARYTHING.COM DIRECTLY OR THROUGH A MEDIUM LIKE A COMPUTER WITH A KEYBOARD AND MAYBE A MOUSE ATTACHED YOU AGREE TO TAKE THESE IMPORTANT AND CONSEQUENTIAL TERMS OF USE SERIOUSLY EVEN THOUGH, OR EVEN BECAUSE, WE HAVE ONLY ONE SENTENCE AT THE END IN CAPITAL LETTERS.
That statement alone shows that these people that run this site are truly interested in the social aspect of cataloging and bookmarking and they are creative. I thought that the Local feature was really neat. Being able to find local events or even post local events takes the on-line social networking off-line as well, thereby creating the “face to face” interface. I like how they allowed for various sorts and offered recommendations along with offers to receive free books in exchange for a review. I was impressed with the large scope of this site.
Goodreads also had its appeal and therefore I opened an account there as well. At first I was a little annoyed that I couldn’t immediately get started but instead had to take a “book compatibility test.” I did like that they saved my responses and ratings and added them to my library. Unlike the other two sites, I liked how within my library it was very easy to see, based on the shelf feature, which books I had read versus the to read or reading books. I also liked that I could shelve a book under more than one shelf on Goodreads. Under the Goodreads goups tab, I also liked that there were suggested book clubs that were also reading my book at the same time. Like LibraryThing, Goodreads had giveaways and local events.
Shelfari, in comparison, seemed lacking in its toolbar and choices. While choices similar to those found on Goodreads and LibraryThing were available from dropdown menus, they weren’t as easily found. I am sure Shelfari is as good as Goodreads and LibraryThing, but I found myself gravitating to the latter two just by visual ease. The final reason that I found myself gravitating more towards Goodreads was that LibraryThing had a maximum of 200 books per year on their free account while there seemed to be no limit on Goodreads. Overall, I was impressed at these 3 social bookmarking sites and can see why many people found them addictive.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Awesome Vimeo
This video is sung to Michael Jackson's Beat It. I loved the lyrics and thought the message was great. Some favorite lyrics were, "maybe your craving digital text." and, "research, share it, and tweet it." Very current of them and it looked like they had fun too. I know this isn't technically until week 6, but I just couldn't help myself. Great way to make a library experience enjoyable and they mentioned a large amount of the technology needed in the lyrics. Enjoy!
Read It! from Joyce Valenza on Vimeo.
Read It! from Joyce Valenza on Vimeo.
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Creating A Wiki!
This week playing with my NEW WIKI has been just as exciting as it sounds! I first looked at PBWiki but it looked so “business like” that it didn’t seem very inviting or easy to navigate. I liked the larger storage capacity and password protection on the free teacher wikis that were offered on Wikispaces in contrast to the basic page on PBWiki. Wikispaces made me feel much more confident that this was a task that I could easily accomplish. I enjoyed playing with my wiki this week and learned a great deal about what worked and what didn’t. I also realized that sometimes you need to step back from it and approach it fresh at another time to solve a problem. This was definitely the case with changing the fonts and centering.
My Wiki (http://readingatgloverisfun.wikispaces.com) is an attempt to bring a wiki to my school library. I see this wiki as a place where students in addition to teachers can comment on books (K-3) that they liked in order to stimulate student interest in various books. It is also a place where kids, parents, and teachers can request books that they would like to see in the library. The parent resources page is meant to be an ongoing site for parents to reference various links and post new links that they wish to share with other parents in their community. There is also a “meet the author” page by grade, a gift book program page, and a link to the Glover School library book catalog.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
A "HUGE" Exploration in Blogging
The following rather lengthy post gives my observations while "playing" with various blog sites I visited.
Twitter
Day 1 on Twitter had me realize many things. First, getting an account was easy, finding the real Stephenie Meyer’s Twitter was a bit harder. (I am still not sure if the one I looked at was real.) Second, by the end of my first day on Twitter, I had one follower, but after being initially happy that she found me, I think she realized that she didn’t know me and chose to ” unfollow” me. Second, I chose to follow stores I knew, authors, librarians, libraries, a few friends, some food sites, my college, and a humor site. (Who doesn’t like a good laugh?) Third I observed that while most people don’t use complete sentences (which I am ok with), I really can’t stand the lack of use of punctuation, capital letters, and uncommon slang. Lastly, I was not sure what the “#priorities” meant, but I am thinking it is some sort of ongoing list. It only took me until day 3 to figure out that # is a hashtag and a way to categorize your post and make it easier to find for people looking for related material.
I am still playing around with the security settings, background colors and design, finding people to follow, linking it to my blog, and reading tweets. (I still think it should be “twits,” but understand that that would just be bad PR.) It is easy to lose a few hours trying to follow several people, let alone my mere 30, and all of the links that these tweets lead me to discover.
My initial thoughts were that this is great for written “sound bites.” Like many others, I envision a teen using their Iphone or Blackberry to post their latest epiphany to the world. I never realized that this could have business and school uses. I currently do not have access to a computer during the school day on a regular basis and my cell phone doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles, so I don’t know how practical this would be for me as a school tool right now.
Blogger
While I had a blog from my previous course I tried to do something different with it. I couldn’t bring myself to change the book backdrop because it is so “schoolish” so I spent a few hours navigating a possible connection between Twitter and my Blog. After a while of this, I finally went to Google for some answers.
A positive for me is that I can write as little or as much as I want on my blog. I am not limited to a short one sentence blurb, as in the case with Twitter. I like how I could link my Blog to my Twitter account along with listing those that I could find of other classmates and Barb, of course. I like how this helped me organize all of the Twitter accounts a little better.
Edublogs
I loved the home page of this site. It was uncluttered and colorful. Somehow, it put me immediately at ease. I liked how the 1st thing that I saw at the top of the page was “Why Edublogs?” and next to it “Help & Support.” I liked how the edublogs are broken down further into students, teachers, and campuses. They seemed to address some of the most common concerns in blogging and schools on that page. From the layout I knew exactly where I wanted to go to have my questions answered. The word FREE jumped out at me as well. I liked that it was allowed by most school filters because it was an all education site. The privacy settings took a little digging to figure out. While the free option blog has privacy to search engines, only the paid options offer full privacy with security. I found the Top 10 Ways to use Edublog to Teach very interesting. I realized that my alma mater also is offers a campus blog through Edublog.
LiveJournal
In contrast to Edublog, LiveJournal immediately seemed cluttered and too commercial. The prominent add for Ideeli designer boots along with the virtual gift shop, with its animated gifts below it, drew my initial attention. The site was very drab and cluttered. The help options were a little less obvious as was maneuvering the site. LiveJournal claims to be a global community where you can customize your own personal journal along with imbedding multimedia options or social networking with friends or those with similar interests. They make it easy to stay connected while on the go with options for email notification, text messaging, and IM. Again, I found that my alma mater was part of this as well.
WordPress
On first glance, WordPress seemed to offer diversity with samples of different types of blogs on their home page. I loved that they have a 10 step walk-through guide for the nervous and technically challenged. (They definitely market to real people like me.) I like how they step-by-step walk you through the set up steps with actual screen visuals. Their words of wisdom, “Blogs need a focus.” make so much sense while their approach to it was very humorous.
Some blogs were related to national news, humor, cooking, and technology. One blog that caught my eye was titled The Future of Texbooks in a Digitized World. I was amazed to find out that there is a California Law requiring the use of electronic textbooks by 2020 in all primary and secondary schools. (After further clicking, I found that the law requires access to all textbooks on line that are used in print form.) The post talks about how newspapers were slow to react and nearly went under financially as a result. The post states that the financially feasible thing to do is for textbook companies to jump on this ereader bandwagon early and make their etextbooks be non-transferrable and charge the user a per-use-fee.
My favorite quote was by Mark Twain “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.” When it comes to exploring technology, this quote is even more appropriate. This site couldn’t be MORE user friendly, even for a novice like me.
Twiducate
While the home page states it is a social networking for schools site, the background color makes it hard to see the purpose. It looked promising but then clicked on the YouTube video and my computer monitor went black and made a not very nice grinding sound. After having my husband, bring it back up and check for errors I was a little leery to hit play button again. With that said there really wasn’t much more information offered on their home page. You could log in, play the video, read the 6 bullet points about their site, or sign up. It left me wanting a little more info before I even would think about signing up.
TodaysMeet
This on-line “room” allows users to meet and participate in a two-way presentation. There is a time length that you chose for the room. While you don’t have to be on Twitter, the use of hashtags on TodaysMeet pulls in anything from Twitter that comes after the hashtag. This is beneficial when trying to talk to multiple people without your meeting being totally public. When I read the feedback of the “TodaysMeet meets Twitter” News, out of 13 posts there were 10 that expressed some problems. Hopefully since the last post was from June 2010, TodaysMeet has worked out the bugs. I also learned that backchanneling allows for sidebar communication.
Edmodo
The name sounds like some sort of modern Japanese anime, but it is, in actuality, a social learning site for classrooms. On this site you can customize you connections, manage support and monitor activity. In Edmodo communities, you find what other teachers recommend in content areas such as math, social studies, language arts, and science. The introductory video gave a nice overview of the applications of Edmodo. It likened Edmodo to a membrane functioning in osmosis which allows the flow of information into the classroom. Other digital content publishers, such as Quizlet, are part of the Edmodo learning community. It makes learning and sharing seem like a breeze.
Supportblogging.com/Links+to+School+Bloggers
This page is quite a resource of information. I was like a kid in a candy store, not knowing what to try first. I found myself on a link to a page about Web 2.0 and The 21st Century Learner. This person spoke of the divergent learner and the need for the right half of the brain to become more involved with how we learn. I also saw an interesting blog site on Smartboards.
Edublogawards.com
I found this link off of this year’s winner “Free Tehnologies for Teachers” http://grade1ad.litcircuits.com/2010/03/27/backchanneling-in-grade-1/
It showed how 1st graders could interact in a chat room. I liked how the teacher felt that the quieter students didn’t feel awkward about joining in for this virtual conversation. She also posted the comments in real time on the Smartboard along with teacher comments. I know kids love to use a computer and can image the excitement that this exercise would have brought.
I also loved the links to edays instead of snow days post. It talked about the merits of having a virtual learning environment allowing more time for students that didn’t have access to a computer. All of this technology is really making me think of learning in ways I never thought possible.
Edtechpost.ca/gems/matrix2.gif
The breakdown and groupings of the writing versus reading blogs for students and for instructors was visually easy to understand. It was similar to a road map for blogging.I know that I have much more to learn, but I am taking some advice from Mark Twain. Breaking the technology down into more manageable pieces is a good first step. This was an incredible journey and in some cases I felt that I barely scratched the surface. I am much more aware of the many sites available and the applications they can have in a school environment.
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