Week 15: Wikis

When I read this week's assignment for 23 Things Kansas, I immediately remembered a wiki that a fellow librarian had created and shared with us. She has so many wonderful ideas and has done such creative projects with her students that I knew I had to go back to her wiki and check out what new things she had posted, as well as see other postings from fellow librarians. I added a new activity to her wiki dealing with a new children's picture book that I had developed last week. The wiki site has been changed since I last looked at it so it took a little bit of time trying to figure out how to edit and add to the wiki, but I did it! Check out the following when you have some time: http://libraryshare.pbworks.com

I created a Wetpaint account to do the 2nd activity in this week's project, and found it was easier than I thought it might be to add a page to the 23 Things Kansas Participants page. I hope others will read the comments made by me and others as I found a lot of interesting facts, comments and suggestions on this wiki.

I just want to send out a thank you to all of our instructors for each week's lessons during this project. You all did an excellent job, and I've gained a lot of new skills and investigated a lot of tools and sites I might not otherwise have found the time to examine.

Week 14: Library Thing, Etc

I was very interested in this week's 23 Things Kansas project because I had started a Shelfari account a few months ago but really hadn't had much time to do anything with it and I knew that through this lesson I could really get into the program. I learned how to rate my books and how to edit them from showing them on my Planning to Read shelf to my Have Read shelf. I added a number of my personal books and also a number of books that I had recently checked out of the public library. I hope to be able to use time this summer and put a lot more of my personal books into Shelfari.

I mentioned in the 23 Things Kansas comments that I have a teacher who is using the Delicious Library program to catalog and track the books in his classroom library. He can scan the barcode on a book through the webcame on his Mac and it goes to Amazon and finds the book and puts all of the info into his account. He checks the books out to students through the use of the webcame, also. Is anyone out there using this program or have you even heard of it? I want to investigate it more when school is out and I have time to really see if it is useable for my personal books that I loan to others.

Week 13: Slide Sharing

I was excited when I saw this weeks assignment. I've used Animoto a few times and love to create short videos and I'm seriously considering purchased a pro account so I can make longer videos. I created a new Animoto video just for this project using pictures from our annual Pie in the Face ceremony in December after students bring in food for the food drive. Faculty members and student council members volunteer to be the recepients of the pies and the students (96 this year) all got to throw a pie in the face of their choice. I've chosen to embed the code here and I hope that works. I plan on checking out the other slide sharing options this summer when I have more time to investigate them.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Week 12: Screencasting

This week's 23 Things Kansas activity was a little harder to do than I thought it would be but only because the first three screencast ideas I came up with didn't work for me because my library system operates in Windows format while my laptop, which has the built-in webcam and microphone, is a Mac. I spent 3 days trying to figure out what I could do a brief screencast that someone else might want to know about, then a teacher came to me and asked for help with iPhoto and labeling events so I thought what an opportunity. I created the video linked below using ScreenToaster. It was easy to learn and fun to do and now I'm creating lists of other small projectors like this one that I want to do screencasts for in order to help both teachers and students. I think everyone should try this out. Thanks for making me aware of this wonderful resource.

http://www.screentoaster.com/watch/stUEtXRU1IRFtYQVVVXV1fVlRR/iphoto_event_and_photo_title_changes

Week 10: Video

What a fun assignment this has been. I've spent a lot of time in the last 2 weeks looking at all kinds of video on YouTube and TeacherTube. I found some really great stuff to share with teachers in my building. However, the one video that I found that I love because it promotes reading is one I'm sure many of you have seen, but I'm posting it anyway. It was created by a group of students at Ocee Middle School in Florida. My students all loved it and they sang the song all day long after I showed it to them and they still come into the library and will sing part of it to me.

Week 11: Catch Up Week

Well, as you can tell by the date, I really didn't get caught up by Week 11. Too many things on my plate as my mother would say. Trying to make costumes for Chicago production is eating up too much of my time.

Week 9: Instant Messaging

I have been a semi-fan of instant messaging for a few years. However, I don't use it a great deal due to problems receiving some messages in our buildings. On our Mac computers we have iChat and it is managed by our district so that we can chat with other teachers/administators in our district during the day and it has been very useful in that I can send quick messages to teachers about concerns or with questions; however, it seems that many of them prefer using email to stay in touch during the day and we are told that using iChat uses up a lot of our bandwidth so we really haven't been encouraged to use it. I have tried out Yahoo Instant Messaging but was not happy with it. My family and I are using Google Chat because it is one of the few instant messaging programs that I can access at school. I tried the 23 Things Kansas extra credit link but only one other person was on and apparently they were away from the screen. I'll keep trying this because I think it could be very helpful.