The Evaluating Website Tutorial is succint, to the point. It moves faster than a lot of tutorials and doesn't give the audience a chance to get bored. Quick intro! Love the CARS reminder; good place to start discussion.
Three steps good visualization of global peers, upbeat music, they have to read and watch to get the message! Great, short intro to rev up morale at beginning of school year for teachers. It shows several of the tools, but I think we would have to explain some of them to the teachers.
Love the Texas history video; got to show it to the coaches who teach history. Web site http://texashistory.unt.edu/
I like it that you have instructions on how to convert files and/or access them if the videos are blocked by your school's filter or firewall.
There are some good videos on activities in the library and library tutorials for specific libraries on YouTube. These would be fairly easy to make for our own library with a video camera; great way to get the students involved by having them help create them.
On TeacherTube there's a good video from a math teacher on "why I teach math." Now I want to know how he makes math "fun, relevant and exciting." There are also several videos for teaching specific math concepts for high school, as well as a personal documentary of a teacher's first year as a math teacher.
You can find almost anything. If this isn't blocked in our district, I will post a link to it on my library resources page and promote it just like UnitedStreaming's videos.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Thing #19: Web 2.0 Awards
Since I was bitten by the travel bug after a visit to NYC, I decided to try out Farecast, which checks flights, hotels and vacation deals across several travel sites at once. Wanting to check out hotels, I typed in a city and my pop-up blocker went crazy. You see, you need to temporarily allow pop-ups from this site because each search prompts opening a different window for each travel site. I got results from travelocity, expedia, hotels.com, hotwire and priceline. I was surprised Orbitz wasn't included. This is pretty cool because you can check each site for the same hotel and compare prices, but you have to beware of some comparisons and read the fine print because some of the prices listed include fees and others do not so check that out so you can compare apples to apples. Also, if you are a member of some of these individual sites you may be able to get better deals by signing in to those sites first.
I came across a site similar to this earlier this summer and it may have been kayak, the second runner up in this category. In that other one, you viewed the first result and then clicked to view the next and so on. This one is better because it opens all the windows in tabs on my browser so I can click and switch from one to the other fairly quickly to go back and forth. However, I wish there was a way to get the results listed side by side all in the same window. I have yet to find a site that does. If you know of one, please comment!
Two ways this would be useful for schools and students: for coaches trying to book rooms for teams playing in tournaments other places, students who are doing travel brochures for a country (history project) in which they have to do a budget trip and a deluxe trip (my son had to do this for Africa). All right, all right, not much to do with libraries, but I would recommend it for students doing this type of project when they are in my library's computer lab.
I came across a site similar to this earlier this summer and it may have been kayak, the second runner up in this category. In that other one, you viewed the first result and then clicked to view the next and so on. This one is better because it opens all the windows in tabs on my browser so I can click and switch from one to the other fairly quickly to go back and forth. However, I wish there was a way to get the results listed side by side all in the same window. I have yet to find a site that does. If you know of one, please comment!
Two ways this would be useful for schools and students: for coaches trying to book rooms for teams playing in tournaments other places, students who are doing travel brochures for a country (history project) in which they have to do a budget trip and a deluxe trip (my son had to do this for Africa). All right, all right, not much to do with libraries, but I would recommend it for students doing this type of project when they are in my library's computer lab.
Thing #18 Online productivity tools
Just this week I read on one of those blogs I signed up for earlier about Microsoft offer this new Office-type software called Equipt, only cheaper. The article had this quote: "as much as we love free alternatives like OpenOffice.org, we have yet to find one that's 100% compatible with Microsoft Office" -- Brad Linder, ITLnet Blog. While Open Office is great and everyone can get it free, not everyone you send attachments too will be able to open them unless they go download it, too, and they just might not want to take up hard drive space with another program just to read your stuff. Since we have a license for Microsoft Office at school, I know we won't spend time downloading OpenOffice to every computer at school.
However, Microsoft Office's versions aren't always compatible with each other, either. Students will create something at home, save it on a flash drive and try to open it in our school's computer lab only to have it show up as jibberish because their version at home doesn't match the one we have at school. I always tell them to save documents in WordPad or Notepad, then they can copy and paste it into any wordprocessing document to edit/print when they get to school.
However, Microsoft Office's versions aren't always compatible with each other, either. Students will create something at home, save it on a flash drive and try to open it in our school's computer lab only to have it show up as jibberish because their version at home doesn't match the one we have at school. I always tell them to save documents in WordPad or Notepad, then they can copy and paste it into any wordprocessing document to edit/print when they get to school.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Thing #17: Rollyo
After I registered, I created a search roll for information on multiple sclerosis and current research on that disease using a list of reputable web sites from the government, multiple sclerosis organizations, and health care institutions specializing in MS. However, our assignment said to provide a link to it. That took some searching to figure out how to get to the site and copy the url. At first, I thought I needed to add a rollbar bookmarklet to get to it, but when I tried to Drag this link to your Bookmark Bar --> RollBar, it did not work. Either that or I don't know what my bookmark bar is. So then I clicked on Explore Searchrolls and found that mine was listed under "Recently added." I clicked on it and it gave me a "try it out" page. The link is listed below.
http://rollyo.com/search.html?q=Try+it+out...&sid=413626&x=16&y=9
But, when I typed in a keyword and clicked on search, I got nothing. So, I clicked on "Link to this search roll" and got the url below:
http://rollyo.com/mwcalco/ms_info_research/
After I save this post, I'll try the link and see if it takes me to my searchroll called "MS Info & Research.
This would be useful for teachers to use for guided searches on specific topics for their students as well as me keeping up with new info on whatever topic I want to create a searchroll on.
http://rollyo.com/search.html?q=Try+it+out...&sid=413626&x=16&y=9
But, when I typed in a keyword and clicked on search, I got nothing. So, I clicked on "Link to this search roll" and got the url below:
http://rollyo.com/mwcalco/ms_info_research/
After I save this post, I'll try the link and see if it takes me to my searchroll called "MS Info & Research.
This would be useful for teachers to use for guided searches on specific topics for their students as well as me keeping up with new info on whatever topic I want to create a searchroll on.
Thing #16 Wikis
Wikis are fun ways to share information. Of course, students are very familiar with Wikipedia; an article there will usually be the top result on any topic search they do. I have edited articles there before, very slightly.
We could adapt idea #2 where students compile a wiki for history of famous artists, architects, writers, etc. We could have used this for my high school's warrior peoples research project. The students could have created posts on their particular warriors and it would appear all on one page, rather than several individual pages. Plus they could post links to sites they used for their research for others to see.
I'd also like to see a wiki used as a way for students to review books they've read, create top 10 lists for books they've read or top 10 favorite authors, etc.
We could adapt idea #2 where students compile a wiki for history of famous artists, architects, writers, etc. We could have used this for my high school's warrior peoples research project. The students could have created posts on their particular warriors and it would appear all on one page, rather than several individual pages. Plus they could post links to sites they used for their research for others to see.
I'd also like to see a wiki used as a way for students to review books they've read, create top 10 lists for books they've read or top 10 favorite authors, etc.
Thing #15: Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and the Future of Libraries
To me, it means getting library users to participate more in what's offered in their library and that participation driving what the library offers. Instead of building up required sections of the non-fiction section with books that never get opened, give users an easily accessed forum to offer suggestions, comment on what the library already has, tag what they find, make recommendations to other users and the librarians. With everyone participating, there is more interaction and therefore more use of the library's services and more direction on what the library should be offering.
Thing #14 Technorati
There are three blog posts with School Library Learning 2.0, 16 blogs about it and only two posts tagged under it.
2. Explore popular blog, searches and tags. Is anything interesting or surprising in your results?
The most popular blogs have to do with technology or gadgets and other computer or technology-related items so it just shows you that people who blog are interested in this technology and gadgets that can be used to do more things technology-wise.
A popular search is about something called "meedia." Now at first I thought it was media spelled wrong and found out there were 8 posts and a few videos. Well, not all those people would be spelling it wrong, right? "Meedia" is media that has to do with "ME" and how you can customize what you read, interact with and communicate to on the interest to pertain just to you, individually. I may have that wrong, but that's what I came away with. Some of the top tags are about gadgets (apple and iphone and iphone3 because a new one came out) and politics (barack obama, mccain, etc.) So tags are sort of categories like news sites use, i.e. sports, news, life, health, etc. So I could search using tags of interest to me, then choose blogs to add to my del.icio.us account or reader account. It's also cool for use in Flickr when you are looking for photos on a specific subject to demonstrate something or decorate a report or web page (but be sure to ask for permission and show copyright!). Tagging is a great way to organize information you need. Students could use it to tag their favorite books to help other students find similar books, i.e. baseball, romance, etc.
I didn't opt to register my blog yet because it's about stuff in this class and I want it to be eventually just about books in our library so once it is, I may do that and just see how popular it becomes! The widgets would be of more use then.
2. Explore popular blog, searches and tags. Is anything interesting or surprising in your results?
The most popular blogs have to do with technology or gadgets and other computer or technology-related items so it just shows you that people who blog are interested in this technology and gadgets that can be used to do more things technology-wise.
A popular search is about something called "meedia." Now at first I thought it was media spelled wrong and found out there were 8 posts and a few videos. Well, not all those people would be spelling it wrong, right? "Meedia" is media that has to do with "ME" and how you can customize what you read, interact with and communicate to on the interest to pertain just to you, individually. I may have that wrong, but that's what I came away with. Some of the top tags are about gadgets (apple and iphone and iphone3 because a new one came out) and politics (barack obama, mccain, etc.) So tags are sort of categories like news sites use, i.e. sports, news, life, health, etc. So I could search using tags of interest to me, then choose blogs to add to my del.icio.us account or reader account. It's also cool for use in Flickr when you are looking for photos on a specific subject to demonstrate something or decorate a report or web page (but be sure to ask for permission and show copyright!). Tagging is a great way to organize information you need. Students could use it to tag their favorite books to help other students find similar books, i.e. baseball, romance, etc.
I didn't opt to register my blog yet because it's about stuff in this class and I want it to be eventually just about books in our library so once it is, I may do that and just see how popular it becomes! The widgets would be of more use then.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
