So Many Tools, So Little Time!

Wow! Look at all these fun tools I used this week!

Flickr

BigHugeLabs

Dumpr

Zoho

Google Docs

Zamzar

SurveyMonkey

Doodle

Stumbleupon

Rollyo.com

BubblUs

Voki

Jing

Animoto

BigHugeLabs and Dumpr were hugely appealing photos enhancement sites. I loved how they were easy, free, and fun. StumbleUpon was a very interesting time waster that I plan to visit again. I’m not sure how useful it would be for educational uses, but it was fun to play with and interesting to look at all the random sites. Rollyo, on the other hand, would be a great way for teachers to set up a “controlled” search engine, so students get the chance to really search but without ending up in inappropriate territory. It seems like Rollyo could be really effective in helping students avoid wasting time as they research. I don’t foresee using Zoho—seems too complicated and doesn’t offer anything that GoogleDocs or a wiki don’t already have. I had trouble loading Jing on my computer, but I like the possibilities it offers for real time communication between two computers. All in all, I had a great time exploring these online tools and look forward to sharing them with others.

I had looked at Flickr before but had never loaded any pictures. I was happy to see how simple it was to post photos. I enjoyed exploring the Creative Commons section. The Library of Congress section was so much easier to use than the actual Library of Congress site. Obviously there’s more on the regular site, but I hope they’ll be migrating more and more material to Flickr. I’ll be working with Flickr more next week to learn what other exciting features are there.

dumpr.net

Dumpr - Photo Fun

Animoto

This was fun; I'll have to make a plan for my next movie!

I've always loved these pics of my sons and their cousins. I found them on my camera long after they posed for them
badboys first try

dumpr.net

Dumpr - Photo Fun

Survey Monkey

I've taken surveys on Survey Monkey, but I've never made one.  Here's my two-question practice survey:
Click here to take survey

Zamzar

I'll admit I don't really understand all the uses for Zamzar.  But the blog says you can convert to ereader format, which would be nifty if someone needed to change a personal document into that format.  Sorry, rambling, trying to get my head around this tool.  I practiced converting the AASL Standards for the 21st Century Learner booklet from pdf to doc.  This conversion allows me to edit the brochure--not that I have any suggestions to make!  But I can imagine a scenario when I might want to work with a pdf and Zamzar makes it possible.  Also, from the Zamzar blog, there seem to be conversions that would be useful for ipad users.  I'll try to remember this resource when I'm stuck in the wrong format....

bubbl.us

I'm trying to embed my brainstorming map from bubbl.us here.  Let's see how it goes!


Well, it worked, but you'll have to zoom in to see it!

del.icio.us

I used del.icio.us for another class when I was getting overwhelmed with bookmarks.  I liked the concept of it but then didn't really use it much for my next class or for personal uses.  Why not?  I don't know!  It's really handy.  I think I was a little confused when I set up my "Bookmark on Delicious" system in the first place; for some reason it seemed harder to do than it really was, and I ended up only using it on one computer, and etc.   Now I am really ready to use this very amazing resource.  I still need to work on understanding how I would begin looking at other people's bookmarks and how I could link up with other people at my school. 

I'm going to ask around at my school and see if many teachers use delicious.  Because teachers have to use many different computers during a school day, portable bookmarks could make life so much easier for them.  I wonder if there would be a way to set up a "school" delicious account where any teacher could log in to the same account and post great bookmarks for everyone else to see.  Probably just as easy for everyone to get his/her own account and then link up.  I've got more to learn with this technology.

goodreads

I had signed up for goodreads a while ago and then never looked at it again.  But a few months ago I started writing down the books I’d read in a giant ledger book that I found at a book sale.  (Actually, my husband and I are sharing it; I started from the front, and he began at the back.  Since there are something like 500 pages, I don’t think we’ll run out!)  Anyway, since I was already recording my books on paper, I was more interested in putting them on the computer, too.  I entered a few recent reads and plan to keep up with both the paper and the goodreads listings from here on out.  I’m sure I can keep up with both of them; when I looked back at my ledger, I was surprised to realize that I read fewer books than I think I do.  Well, I’m a busy lady!

Now that I’m back on goodreads I wish that more of my reading friends were on the site.  I’m most interested to see what people I know are reading right now.

As far as educational uses are concerned, I think students in 4th and 5th grade—especially the avid readers—would enjoy recording their books and seeing what their friends and classmates are reading.  If they wrote reviews, that would obviously be a wonderful writing opportunity.  Goodreads doesn’t seem like an activity that teachers would spend time on during school.  The most reasonable use in elementary schools would probably be to introduce students to the site during a library lesson, and those readers who were interested could (and likely would) continue to visit the site on their own time.

Website Challenges

I’ve been hard at work on my school website.  It’s not part of our week’s assignment, of course, but it has been interesting to compare the school site to blogger.  Blogger seems much easier to use and is much more intuitive.  Working on the school site made me want to tear out my hair because nothing was self-explanatory, and I had to keep referring to some hard-to-understand instructions from IT.  Eventually I realized that I was working on two websites simultaneously, one with my name and one called Library.  I couldn’t understand why the changes I had just made weren’t showing up—well, they were, just on a different webpage!  With that mystery solved, I’m able to move on to create my website. I’m thinking of ways to link wikis to the webpage.  I’ve felt remiss not having a school webpage up, so I'm glad to get this project done despite the frustrations. 

Google Reader

I spent a while this morning learning Google Reader.  I had subscribed to this a while ago but never used it.  I realized that it’s best (for me, at least!) for tracking blogs and sites that are only updated occasionally.  For instance, in my earlier foray into Google Reader, I had subscribed to BBC Portado Mundo, which is a site with news in Spanish.  I thought this would be a great way for me to remember to practice Spanish—and it would be, except that they send about 50 articles a day.  For a news site, I think it makes more sense to go directly to the site when I have some time and select the 2 or 3 articles that interest me.  (I had the same realization about Twitter; I subscribed to the NY Times and ended up with a million postings.) 

I like to read blogs about saving money, so I put a few of those in.  I subscribed to some of the Kid Lit blogs in the Elizabeth Bird article, SLJ, Joyce Valenza.  These will be fun to look at, but the subscription that makes me happiest is to a food blog called Orangette.  Since this blogs posts infrequently, it can be disappointing to check for new posts.  Now I'll know when she's written something new.

No doubt there are many ways of fine-tuning my use of Google Reader to make it more effective, but I haven’t explored that deeply yet.  I did at least organize some of the subscriptions into folders, and I starred some articles I’d like to go back to. 

Wiki World

My wiki is in business! http://hmlslibrary.wikispaces.com/  (Barbara, you should receive an email inviting you to join.)  For another class last year I made a wiki on pbwiki, so I thought I’d try wikispaces to see if I liked it better.  My final verdict….they both seemed fine.  I made a library wiki because I’ve wanted to figure out a way that students at my school could have online discussions about the Massachusetts Children’s Book Award books.  I’m still not sure a wiki is the best way to approach this project.  The need for accounts seems cumbersome, and I’d bet many students would forget their passwords when the time came that they actually were going to use the wiki.  For students in a classroom, I think a wiki could work wonderfully to allow collaboration on writing assignments and projects, and students would have the teacher right there to remind them of passwords and of how to work the wiki.

Nonetheless, I learned a number of useful skills as I created my hmlslibrary wiki.  For my homepage, I made a Voki cat, and embedded it.  This took a few tries of pasting the code in, but eventually it worked fine.  I think children visiting the wiki would have fun with my library cat!  I also made a Volunteer Page, because I dream a lot about library volunteers this year.  (Last year I had a work study student who put books away for 25 hours a week (I miss you, Stephanie!), but this year there are no work studies.)  Mostly I made the Volunteer Page to see how tricky it would be to embed a Google Calendar.  It was easy!

The other accomplishment I’m proud of is my neat and tidy MCBA page.  At first I was trying to make one page listing all the MCBA books, each including the book jacket art and a discussion section.  By the time I had three books listed, the page was a confusing mess, and the Navigation section was becoming overwhelmed with book titles.  I decided to make a separate page for each of the MCBA books (well, I did about 10 of the 25 titles), and then I linked them all to the MCBA page.  This format allows a student to click on a link and quickly go to the page he or she wants without being distracted by other pictures, comments, and clutter.  I also learned how to edit the Navigation section to hide the book titles.

For formatting and the designing the wiki, I was grateful for people’s comments on the discussion board.  Their tips on using the “T” on the formatting bar saved me some time.  Also, I did much better once I watched the site’s tutorials. 

I love how the wiki can absorb so many different kinds of media—audio, video, calendars, Vokis, etc.  And wikis are obviously very powerful in enabling collaboration between people.  But I still need to find a way to allow easy access to students while also keeping them safe from possible inappropriate comments if the wiki is open to anyone.

Snow Day #2, p.m.

Here’s what I learned on my snow day:  Sesame Street is now promoting 21^st Century skills with an old friend/new superhero, Super Grover 2.0.  In these segments, Super Grover 2.0 introduces kids to concepts like observation, investigation, and questioning.  Sure, numbers and the alphabet are important, but it’s wonderful to see that Sesame Street is trying to grow and change along with the rest of the educational world.

My other shoutout for the day is to Superheroine Joyce Valenza, who tirelessly (or so it seems) instructs and guides her fellow librarians through the avalanche (it is a snow day!) of online educational and technological resources.

Snow Day #2, a.m.

In my wiki exploration, I started with http://edublogawards.com/2010awards/best-educational-wiki-2010/ and choose the Educational Origami blog because I liked the name.  There I found a very helpful section called Starter Sheets.  Starter Sheets are handouts that introduce tools and technologies that could be used in the classroom.  I like handouts that hold my hand, taking me through a new technology (Diigo, Animoto, Twitter, etc.) step by step, and I plan to refer to these as I work my way through various tools and technologies.  I also linked to wikimania here and waded around in the wikimedia world—a place I didn’t realize existed.  I could see putting links to ebooks like Alice in Wonderland on my library website using resources from wikisource.  Many of the books have audio included, so a child could listen and read along.  I know these public domain books are available in other places on the web but not necessarily with an audio component.  

I could definitely lose a few hours looking around at wikimedia commons, a huge database of freely usable media files.  For instance, if you ever need harmonica music for a presentation, the commons has many to choose from!

Next I took a look at kidpedia, a wiki encyclopedia written by fifth graders.  Kidpedia had terms you wouldn’t find in many other encyclopedias, such as: smoothies, “So You Think You Can Dance,” Eminem, and Frosted Flakes.  It wasn’t fancy but was nonetheless a nice example of how young students could collaborate and create a product that was meaningful to them.