Thing #23... Reflection on Library2Play

Looking back at my blog, I am overall amazed at how much I have learned about technology over the course of these past 2 months. I actually love my "online portfolio" and know that I will reference it in the future to review the tools introduced during the course and ultimately also to record on the new discoveries that I plan to add on to my technology belt.

I think in general that blogging has been my favorite discovery and I really would like to use it as a tool for learning and reflection with my students, in the likes of teachers like Mark Ahlness. Of course, I loved "playing" with the creative applications like the online image generators, but I was really thrilled about the Google tools available, particularly the Reader. Organizing efficiently by creating my own folksonomy of tags through del.icio.us has been another highlight of this discovery experience too. Finding about Zamzar as a way to bypass the SBISD firewall to show educational vidcasts was another AHA moment. It's really hard to find which one I enjoyed most...

Library2play has helped me go beyond my fear of the unknown world of new technology and I have tremendously appreciated the scaffolding that the discovery assignments have provided. I really enjoyed the format and being able to work at my own pace. One of the thing I was scared of was not to have the discipline to get behind the computer regularly, but somehow I managed because of the engaging way the course was set up. Kudos to you all, Kickball Captains! I will without a doubt revisit the Common Craft website in the future to continue to keep abreast of technology with their short and simple videos.

The unexpected take-away is that I can now have a conversation with my computer engineering friend and actually know what all of the little icons like RSS and Technorati represent on his blog! I am no longer a technology nincompoop! How refreshing to see the light! So, YES, definitely, if there were another discovery program like this in the future, I would participate in it, as long as it is during the summer. Again, thank you for opening my eyes to all of the fascinating tools of this new digital world!

~CARPE DIEM with 23 "Things:" the future of technology is already here!~

Thing #22... Nings

Ning for Teachers was definitely my favorite social network of the three samples, because of course, it's targeting its content to teachers! Just as the website says "it's a place where teachers can share ideas, ask questions, learn from each other, or even vent about the school day!" Although I have finally joined Facebook over this summer, I am still having a hard time with the concept of social websites. Until I saw the concrete Ning examples, I had a hard time conceiving what you could do with them on a professional level. I get it now.

I am very glad that Ning for Teachers does not display the ubiquitous "activity" panel where you learn that "A & B are now friends" or that "C's profile has now changed" (like on Facebook.) Although I have not yet completely bought into the idea of social websites, I have to confess that I enjoyed having a virtual encounter with Clay Burrell via his blog over the course of this Learning 2.0 journey! And I surely enjoyed the Library2Play interaction; so, maybe,unbeknownst to me, I am slowing turning more and more to the Internet to connect with other people. I guess a ning is the new way of doing it at this point.

The first feature that I liked on http://teacherlingo.com/ are the top tabs that really make it easy to move through the different sections of the website. I also liked the ability to search for lesson plans created by expert teachers on specific content. It reminds me a little of the setup in the Teacher Section of Scholastic. The cloud tags on the right hand side of the home page was very informative as to what the latest trends in education might be.

Browsing through the most recent posts, I came over a great entry on "Wait Time" --one of my toughest challenge! I liked reading this quick review of "best practices" in the safety of my home and also found comfort in reading other teachers' constructive reflections: these are people who LOVE what they do, people for whom teaching is not a job and they are truly inspiring!

I've been using forums in the past and find that they really provide great expert information. That's where I got most of my questions as a newbie triathlete answered before participating in the Jeff and Brede's Intergalatic Triathlon. At Ning for Teachers, these type of forums fall under the "Message Board" tab and I could see them as a great venue for exchanging knowledge and expertise between first year teachers and mentors under a certain anonymity.

To me, nings are probably the virtual schools of tomorrow, where telecommuting students and teachers share an open discussion and collaborate online. If I were to set up a ning for school, I would probably build one to share book reviews, as this is essentially how I use my Facebook with friends who do not live in Houston. I did however read that our amazing SWMS librarian is actually planning on creating a ning for that purpose already and I am excited to see how we are going to implement it... :)

Thing #21: Podcasts and Audio Books

I was first very daunted by this Thing as the Wikipedia explanations seemed very "jargonish" to me and I wasn't sure I understood it all. Thank goodness for the CommonCraft's vidcast "Podcasting in Plain English" (am I using the term correctly?) because it really helped me comprehend through visuals where reading it couldn't!

I have just finished my first vidcast and have spent most of my afternoon working on it. It was definitely a time-consuming endeavor and after viewing the end-result, I am disappointed with it. But since I am in a time crunch, I won't have time to redo it. I am glad I got to dabble with Photostory to create my own visual podcast, but it surely does need a whole lot of cutting and editing! It's my own creation and I was bored stiff with it, although I tried to be witty, talk with a variety of tones and keep it short and sweet.
I failed miserably and I realized that this is how I must sound to students when I accidentally switch to the dreaded "lecture mode..." and to top it all, corny with that! Besides the vidcast content flop, this in itself is actually a great reminder for the new year of the 10:2 ratio of teacher-student talk. Sorry for the blah, blah, blah...

Thing #20... YouTube, TeacherTube and Zamzar

What a learning adventure I have had this early morning! Although I've known about YouTube and TeacherTube, I surely didn't know that Google and Yahoo also offered their own video hosting sites. But who cares, now that I am aware that Blinkx is the video search engine par excellence!

I thoroughly enjoyed viewing the 3 video samples. Jackie Halaw's Three Steps about Competing, Cooperating & Collaborating as literate skills for the 21st century learner was very upbeat and inspirational. It made me want to try epals again --I had tried pen pals with my french classes and it didn't work out so well. I absolutely loved the concept of global collaboration and would never have thought about it, even after learning about wikis yesterday. What a great video to inspire me for the upcoming school year; COMPETE, COOPERATE, COLLABORATE might be my motto for 2008-2009!
I also enjoyed the video snipped advertising The Portal to Texas History and was surprised to find Elvis' army picture! I found out that he was stationed at Fort Hood for a while!

My best discovery today is without a doubt the URL converter Zamzar -- surely wish I had known about it when I was trying to show that Cinderella tease by the Houston Ballet! It does indeed sound less complicated than the other way to play videos that might blocked & it doesn't require sign-up for the basic free service! I have however uploaded the Powerpoint YouTube Instructions to my Google Docs, so as to always have it available as a back-up plan! Gee, I am frightening myself with all this technology usage!

I used the "Advanced Search" box in YouTube to find this cute little video on French prepositions. It was really easy to narrow down my video search by language and also by playing length (less than 4 mn long!)

In TeacherTube, I looked up "English as a Second Language" and found a short video about the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) which could be a quick way to remind teachers across all content areas to take advantage of the wonderful professional development opportunities offered in SBISD as to how to make input comprehensible for our English Language Learners.

Thing #19... Web 2.0 Awards List

I felt like a kid in a candy store, exploring the Web 2.0 Awarded sites.  I wanted to try just about everything and thank goodness that I am pressed for time trying to finish this project, else I would probably "play" with everything!

I dabbled with the self-publishing website by the name of Lulu and thought it would be great to upload students' writing to create an anthology with a customized book-cover and all.  Nothing like that to make students know they are authors.  To tell you the truth, I was thrilled to death when I read that you could even purchase an ISBN for the book you create!

I don't think that YouTube needs any introduction as far as Web 2.0 application is concerned.  I use it mainly on my personal time but you can also find educational content.  For instance, I was able to dig up a preview of the Houston ballet's upbeat version of Cinderella to show to my ESL students before their field trip, but unfortunately the district's firewalls prevented me from showing it.

Saving the best review for last, I discovered the html form builder Wufoo, which makes creating surveys and gathering information painless, even for someone who barely got acquainted with its features.  I "designed" the information questionnaire that can be seen below and I would like to give it to my students to fill online at the beginning of the school year. I am also thinking about reproducing the "Reading Survey" used by the district as an online survey, as it will be easier to aggregate the information and genres that students enjoy reading.

Powered by Wufoo

Thing #18... Online Productivity Tools

Since I didn't feel like downloading Open Office, I went ahead and decided to review Google Docs instead.  Needless to say, I was truly surprised when I clicked on the link and found a document page that listed the Notebooks entries that I have kept since starting Learning 2.0!

Advantages of using Google Docs versus MS Office:

• great for students --all they need is a computer with Internet access & no costly software is involved
• can be used with Windows, Safari & other platforms
• ability to share documents and collaborate on them with others at the same time --it reminds me of a wiki! 
  
• ability to access documents from anywhere without having to carry your flash drive around your neck!
  
• ability to publish document as a web or blog with no need to master html! 
• documents can be saved in pdf, which is not possible in Word except if you have the Adobe program, I think
• Word-processing has same features as MS Word except the limited number of fonts and the lack of more advanced graphic features (adding speech bubbles), but it is extremely user-friendly
• templates are available --it made creating a presentation very easy and after dabbling with it a bit, I found it even easier than PowerPoint!
• Since I am not too much of a spreadsheet kinda gal, I bypassed this application for review...

Disadvantages of using Google Docs versus MS Office:

• safety --there are just certain documents that I would not feel comfortable saving on a server that is not the school's.
  
• possible slow Internet connection at times
• very likely limited space provided for free on the server --my typical presentation files are always humongous!

Thing #17... Rollyo

Helping students narrow down their research findings by having a set of credible websites pre-selected through Rollyo sounds like great scaffolding in the often overwhelming information super-highway research world. After watching Bruce Goodner's illuminating TeacherTube video, it was really easy to repeat the steps that he modeled so well in Using Rollyo for Online Research.

I had no problem creating several searchrolls that pertained to Americana, Mexico, and France that I plan on using when I have students do a research project on a facet of one of these cultures. Hoping to find new websites I was not familiar with, I went ahead and explored other people's searchrolls but they didn't help me much in discovering new sites I liked. I was a little disappointed with the still large amount of results my Rollyo search came up with when I plugged in "Alamo" under my "Texas" Rollyo. I did however get quicker and easier results (only 2220) from sites that I trust versus 25,000,000 results in Google! Surely glad that Bruce mentioned to disregard the results with the blue background as they are sponsored by merchants...

One question --how does one remove "entire web" from the site searched windows --at the bottom of the left panel? I want the results to come only from the sites that I have pre-selected, else I feel it defeats the purpose...

Thing #16... Wikis

~in Hawaiian, wiki wiki, means fast; a wiki is a social text~

I can't believe that wikis have been around for such a long time and I am finally learning about them. What a precious time saver that can be on a personal level! When I watched the video, I realized that from now on I would never use emails again for who brings what at parties! That is social software at its best, as far as I am concerned. No more nightmare coordinating a school faculty party and the confusing list of cross-referencing emails! Wikis rock!

Classroom use? Since wikis are basically collaborative texts where people can add, remove & edit content to share knowledge and thus construct meaning together, I can see using it as a great brainstorming tool --a virtual KWL chart of sorts. The fact that you can keep up on what has been changed and by whom is also great for a class project based on collaboration and sharing knowledge on a certain topic, and it keeps everyone accountable!

I really like the way Mr. Miller's Wiki 10 English is set up for his students and I would probably use his framework as a start-up in my own class. He has students compile descriptions of story elements and provide supporting text via a wiki which then allows the students to share and add on using one single document. I also liked another way Mr. Miller used technology: he used his blog Miller's English 10 Classroom Blog to post writing assignments and his students wrote their reflections as comments. However, after reading Meredith Gorran Farkas' Wikis: A Beginner's Look, my only concern is that she suggested that wikis might not be the best tool if one tends to be a "control freak," which I think I am at times...

Participating in a wiki is indeed as simply as edit -write- save! The first one I went to was the Library Blogger Wiki and I added Library2Play under Professional Expert blog! :) Then I went ahead and added my thoughts to the SBISD Library Future Wiki sandbox which was a piece of cake too! I was wondering... Is PB wiki the best farm out there to use?

Thing #15... Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and the Future of Libraries

Indeed, libraries have changed a lot in a matter of 10 years. Gone are the stuffy card catalogs, the mausoleum-like floors where you were shushed to hear a pin drop! I strongly agree with Michael Stephens (Into a new world of librarianship), that "the library of the future is a social and emotionally engaging center for learning and experience."

The library has already involved into a much more user-friendly, interactive environment where the patrons' needs seem to drive the virtual and physical materials purchased. With nowadays technology and the emergence of Library 2.0, the library of the future is bound to become even more rich in "interactivity, user participation, collective intelligence, self-service, novel and remixed content" (Web 2.0: Where will the next generation of the web it take libraries?, Tom Storey). I do worry however about the fact that the collaboration and conversation tends to be mostly online that it might negatively affect students' development of face-to-face interpersonal skills...

But it is true that library patrons (myself included) have started to expect access to everything online (digital collections of journals, books, blogs, podcasts, being able to place holds on books online...), but I still think books will remain a big component of a library. Personally, downloading a novel on a Kindle (Amazon's Wireless Reading Device) does not have the same appeal at all as holding the actual book in my hands while I am comfortably ensconced on my couch or laying on the beach! I actually want my students to experience the joy of flipping through the pages of a new book, the intoxicating smell of the black ink on its freshly printed pages, the excitement of finding an author's autograph on the cover page.

I know, I do sound a little reactionary here, but the truth of the matter too is that NOT all of the information is totally available online yet. Actually, I just found myself checking out a book on scuba-diving in Roatan, Honduras at the Houston Public Library because I couldn't find a website that actually provided me with the information I was looking for. Sure, plenty of sites popped up when I performed a search, but a lot was advertising and actually TOO much extraneous information to weed through! So, I do agree with Rick Anderson (Away from the “icebergs”) that it is crucial that we need to teach library patrons --and teachers :)-- to use note-worthy Web 2.0 interfaces as effectively as possible, so they can actually spend most time reading and learning.

Kudos to our amazing school librarian who definitely is a great role model for students and teachers alike as she not only embraces and implements today's new technology but encourages all of our campus to become technology-learners for life. SWMS is definitely dodging the "icebergs" thanks to Captain Laucher!

Thing #14...Technorati and How Tags Work

I had a hard time doing the first discovery activity as it seems that Technorati has revamped its web site since the video by Liz Dunn was made in 2006. I entered "School Library Learning 2.0" next to the search navigation but was not able to target a search option (i.e., either in blog posts, in tags, or in blog directory); after 5 minutes (duh!), I finally realized that maybe I'd better check the "advanced" feature! Ban-zai! There it was... and the results are very different, indeed. My search resulted in 1,481 results for blog posts, 19 blogs, and 36 posts tagged School AND Library AND Learning AND 2.0. So, YES, the results were very different! Just to give my two-cents, the drop-down menu featured on the 2006 Technorati version seemed way more user-friendly to me! I feel like I had to jump through hoops today!

I wasn't too impressed with the top 100 popular blogs that were listed under the tab "overview" under the Blogger Central feature. It was fun looking at the blog reactions of the 100 most popular videos though, particularly the ones about Bert & Ernie 'Tries' Gangsta-Rap! I did a post search for "Mongolia" and was overwhelmed with results that had nothing to do with what I had in mind --I was seeking more of a "travelogue!" That's how the tags helped me narrow down my search and bingo, I found what I was looking for: Getting on Mongol Time! I also liked using the Technorati blog directory feature as my way to browse through possible reading topics that might strike my fancy... such as about pets, of course!

So far, I have to say that from all of the tagging tools that I have dabbled with so far, de.li.cio.us is my favorite one and seems to work best for me. I share the same vision as Joshua Schachter, the programmer who invented Del.icio.us: "Tagging is something you do for yourself, to help find information" which differs with Technorati's view of tagging. Del.icio.us and its efficient "folksonomy" has indeed made finding information a piece of cake of cake for me! Now, I have even started leaving tags on my Google Notebook so that I will be able to locate my notes about a topic much more easily. Beware of the contagious nature of tagging, folks --you might be "recipe tagging" before long... or does that already exist? :)

Over-achiever that I am, I went through the steps to claim my blog and that was really easy. However, now that I am performing a search under "ESLfroggie" or "Wannabe Polyglot," nothing is coming up. I have the feeling that I am not doing something right AGAIN--gee, Technorati is THE blog search engine by excellence, after all. I thoroughly enjoyed playing with the widgets, though. However, let's face it, coining a new term is in order when it comes to my Technorati savvy: techno~illiterati!

Cute Pooch HAS FOUND a Good Home ~UPDATED!

I was found tied up around a tree with no water nor food and eaten up with fleas.  After several flea dips & a dose of Frontline, my rescuer, torn with sadness and drenched in tears, had to relinquish me to the Houston SPCA on July 15, 2008.  She wants me to have the life filled with love and care that I so much deserve, and she can't keep me because she already has two other spoiled pooches.  I am a shy, skinny little boy, very mellow and am probably part Shepherd and part Chow (I have a couple of black spots on my tongue); I only weigh 27 lbs right now and am probably around 1 year old at the most.  Please come and check me out at the SPCA and see how we can get along --I would be so grateful to meet someone I can call my owner and dote on forever.  They named me BAXTER and my Pet ID number is 5490975. 

Thing #13...Tagging and Discovering Del.icio.us

~an online file cabinet of saved web pages~ (furl.net)

Eureka! Social bookmarking has been the best invention ever! It is about time that I found a tool that allows me to work smart and not hard. My URL folders always seem filled to the brim with great educational websites but they end up in such an unorganized mess that I can't retrieve anything without a whole lot of frustration and wasting a whole lot of time!

Second common scenario with me: big epiphany --it dawns on me that there is this cool website that I viewed at home that would really work well with the lesson that I am currently teaching at school... I end up spending my whole planning time desperately looking for the website in question because it is bookmarked on my home computer and I am not --argh!

Registering with del.icio.us was a piece of cake and so was importing all of my 774 urls from my home iMac too. It was nice to see my bookmark chaos get organized at the click of a button!del.icio.us will definitely help me manage my "reading list" in a much more effective way. At last, I will be able to access my bookmarks from anywhere and no matter which computer I use. Another feature I liked and that was also available with Furl is that it is possible to highlight text on the website that will be saved along the tags you create --no need to scan the whole website for the part you thought would be good to quote in your research paper! How brilliant! One thing I haven't figured out yet with del.ici.ous is out to have my tags displayed as cloud tags --being visual, I really like how the size of the tags in the list reflects their popularity. Another feature that I liked that Ma.gnolia offered and del.icio.us doesn't have is that the tags are separated with commas. With del.icio.us, I am having a hard time staying consistent with my folksonomy --sometimes I tag a website Character.Education, another time CharacterEducation, and yet at other times Character_Education... I need to find a way to remain consistent. At any rate, I love the ability to search websites by giving keywords like ESL or French and see the plethora that pops up, knowing that I will be able to locate the gems I found again in the future without a lot of sweat and exasperation!

An application that I thought that I could theoretically use del.icio.us with my students is for a research project. I could create a unique tag & then have students post their findings of the topic under the shared tag. This way I could monitor their research and my students could piggy-back on each others' discoveries. Yet at this time, I still have to figure out how I would set all this up to work for a whole classroom...

Thing #12...Creating Community Through Commenting

Although I don't consider myself an expert in any field, I guess leaving comments on people's blog comes fairly naturally to me. True, they might not be as constructive as suggested in the various articles and podcast about blog etiquette, but my comments are definitely meant to share my enthusiasm about the new knowledge that I have gained from reading that person's blog. And, hopefully, since we are all teachers, Darth-Vader-type comments don't come too naturally to us! After I finish my Thing assignment, I typically read other Spring Branch bloggers' chronicles of their experience with the same item and I seem to always get a new insight, learn about a different approach or become familiar with more interesting class application. Reading others' blogs is truly enriching (and addictively time-consuming, even with Google Reader!) and although my comments might not be as meaningful as they should be, I do want to let my fellow bloggers know that I am reading their fresh ideas and that I enjoy their divergent ideas. It seems also less daunting for me to comment on other novices' blogs and I notice that I tend to be more of a lurker on more "established" sites. For Thing #9, I did however leave a comment on Clay Burrell's informative website Beyond School where he showcased Biography of America. Later I was very thrilled when I found a comment that Clay left afterwards on my very own blog (and that was before I even knew that it was good idea to hyperlink your html blog address in the comment section to get more traffic!) suggesting an even easier online quiz creator to try out. At that very time, I really got a glimpse about what this blogging business is truly about: establishing a friendly and collegial dialogue. Of course, Grendel & Horatio's encouraging words made my day too!

After reading Doug Johnson's blog, I realized that I might be what he considers a rude and ungrateful troll. In Doug's opinion, one should always drop a line to thank the people who leave a comment on your blog, and although I am very grateful to "[the] person [that] has given up a chunk of life to read and craft a response," the truth of the matter is that sadly, I am not sure how to do it! After I receive the e-mail that tells me that I have a new comment and asks if I want to post it or not, I have tried to respond to the writer by clicking on his/her hyperlinked name in the email and I am just brought to their blog profiles where there typically is no e-mail address to write to (addressed by Shannon and Melanie towards the end of their podcast). I don’t know what to do from at that point and wonder if I am overlooking a step...

So, please, if any of you savvy techno bloggers out there know the answer to this conundrum, drop me a comment, okay? Incidentally, here is my open-ended question, which should initiate a successful comment! :) At any rate, please rest assured that if you have left me a comment and I haven't written back to you, I surely don’t mean to "exude a message of elitism" to quote Drape’s Takes, but I do rather have a serious lack of blog savoir-faire!

Here are some links to a few comments that I made on other Learn 2 Play bloggers --I surely wish I would have used the Cocomment feature that Vicki Davis refers to, though it still perplexes me a tad...

Comment One: Thing #9 on the Chris' blog The Ailurophile (thank you for teaching me another cool way to say "cat lover!")

Comment Two: Thing #11 on the blog Alex Rover Wannabe about possible book review collaboration when school starts again.

Comment Three: Thing #10 on the blog Fooling with Words --enjoy LauraAnn's smooth and witty writing style, her hilarious version of Books for Dummies, and a read of Prelutsky's delightful poem Bleezer's Ice Cream as the cherry on top of the ice cream!

Comment Four: Thing #3 admiring the very chic avatar created by Acadienne76 on her blog Vive le Francais!

Comment Five: Thing #10 on my favorite librarian's blog La Bibliotecaria Loca (she is not, I promise!) about the awesome images that she generated with the online creators!

I discovered Samantha Brown's new TV show Passport to Great Weekends over this summer (always looking for affordable getaways with the gas price hike!) and since I am always looking for off-the-beaten path experiences, I have enjoyed reading her blog about her experiences in the cities that she has traveled to. I left a comment inquiring about the great musician that was featured on the Austin travelogue (under my real name "Estelle")... but unfortunately, my question has yet to be answered. :(

Another blog that has intrigued me is the one that Mark Ahlness has created with his elementary students, Room Twelve. One of his student, Jackson, seem to be so taken with blogging, that he is even chronicling about his summer... and school is out! Finding about that unusual way that Mark has instilled the love of writing in his students has truly been such an inspiration to me that I might want to try doing the same next year. I posted a comment (to be posted yet) for Mark asking more about setting up class blogs using http://classblogmeister.com/ and particularly about how he preserved the children's privacy.

Thing #11... LibraryThing

Setting an account with LibraryThing was indeed a piece of cake: the easiest registration I have ever seen in ages! The site is fairly user-friendly, even should one skip the tour, the short intro and the podcast --which I didn't, being conscientious and all :). I can't believe LibraryThing has been around for 2 years and I hadn't heard of it until now. I recently discovered Shelfari while leaving comments on other Spring Branchers' blogs and another similar book cataloguing system when creating my Facebook profile --this Learning 2.0 seems to be spilling in all aspects of my life now! LOL

LibraryThing will definitely save me time in the future. As one of my compulsion, I have always kept a ledger of all of the personal Young Adult books that I own and share with my students, but it was always a bittersweet chore. I would email the title and the author to my home computer and then add the info to my long list saved in an MS Word document. In another word, I am just like the guy on the YouTube skit, making it hard when you can really work smart instead... From now on, I can just immediately input the book info on the web, and best of all I have cover pictures too! The only caveat is that the max it holds for free is 200 books, which I know I will reach very quickly.

I checked out the different tabs on the LibraryThing website and particularly enjoyed The Zeitgeist feature and by browsing through the 25 most reviewed books, I remembered that I had wanted to read Life of Pi and had forgotten all about it. Another interesting feature I liked is that it was easy to see what is popular with Young Adults by going to the Group tab. The most common shared books on this Read YA Lit gave me some insight about what some of my ESL students might like to read, although the titles seem a little too advanced. I clicked on the Zeitgeist group hyperlink, but it took a long time for the page to load. I am wondering if anyone might have found a group for YA books in Spanish? It would be a great hit with my students and they would be able to write reviews in their own language and become more familiar with touchstone YA books that are popular with American kids too. Okay, on that note, let me go back to my "macrame owl" --no, just kidding, I am eagerly going to delve into my novel du moment: Unaccustomed Earth! See ya!

Thing #10...Online Image Generators

Comic Strip Generator --the toughest part was finding an image that I liked among the so many options! This could be a great tool to use with my French students; they could look up a celebrity that they like and then write a first-person description in the bubble from the perspective of the chosen person.

Custom Sign Generator --I didn't really care for the Graffiti maker but had a lot of fun with the Dummies Book Cover Maker. Although I enjoyed playing with it, I don't think I would use it with students because of the stigma the word "dummy" might have with them; personally, I am very fond of this informative book series and have learned a lot reading them!

One generator that I would use with my students is the license plate generator. We could use it to make a very quick and easy book report. The license plate chosen would have to reflect the setting of the story and the students would have to write a very brief phrase that would describe the essence of the main character. Of course, you could switch to another story element to have students focus on. The only thing I found slightly frustrating was adjusting the text so it would fit on the space allotted on the license plate. As you can see on my example for my easy summer read How Perfect is That, my description of Blythe Young ended up "bleeding" over the Lone Star!

Image Chef --I had a hard time figuring something out that my students could do with this. I somehow have the inkling that the first thing they would do is customize a soccer jersey with their names and no longer pay attention to what I would want them to do! :) I did like the typical motivational poster format that you see in offices generally and thought I could have the students look for pictures that could illustrate the different literature themes they encounter in their reading and write a tag line for its meaning.

Happy Face Generator -- I used the first smiley face generator on top of the list, thinking that I could use this generator to have my ESL students locate faces that illustrate the character traits from a given list. Afterwards, they would fill in the comic bubble and write the trait in context. I was a little antsy because it took a while for the "smiley-faced" traits site to switch pages, which might even be worse in a big network situation...

Trading Card Maker --I created a trading card featuring my dog Raven (as a canine Vanna White!) in front of the amazing landscape in Enchanted Rock. I am still brainstorming as how I could use trading cards in class because I am not really familiar with the concept in itself. I will add "learning about trading cards" onto my "bucket list!" :)

Thing #9...9 useful library-related blogs & news feeds

I tried most of the blog search tools and liked Edublogs' award winners the best. For a blog-reading novice like me, it was nice to find some high quality blogs that had already received a stamp of approval by peers and not have to jump through hoops to sift through the millions of entries out there in cyberspace.

I am planning on creating a blog roll to showcase some of these fabulous "substance" blogs that I discovered, amongst them the one by Clay Burrell (Beyond School) which provided great reviews on the cool educational tools available online. Check out the "self-centered" interactive pop quiz that I created after reading Strut Your Etymo-Lexico Stuff with a Mystudiyo Vocab Quiz. Burrell's blog was easy to add because after clicking on his RSS feed icon,it asked me to which platform (Google Reader, Rojo, Newsgater, Pageflake, Netvibes, etc.) I wished to add it, and voila, it was a done deal. Everything did not go as smoothly with other RSS feeds that I encountered; for example, after I clicked the RSS icon to subscribe to a feed, a new page of seemingly nothing but html mumbo-jumbo would pop up, and that would be it. I wasn't sure what to do with it (there was nowhere to click on it), so instead, I went back to my Google Reader and added the feed manually by entering the blog's URL... That worked without a glitch.

Incidentally, I also found the new term (for me)of "permalinks" and I was wondering if they are the same thing as RSS feeds. Some of the blogs I read had that permalink hyperlink but I don't know what its use is. When I clicked on it at the end of a blog, the same gobly-gook came up as for non-working RSS feeds, i.e. more of these html hieroglyphics I had mentioned before!

Here is my review of the other blog/news search I tried out, on a scale of 1 to 5 stars (5 being the best):

School Library Blogs on Suprglu - *** Good information and links to other blogs, but I am glad that I had the pointers given by our Captains, else I don't think I would have known what to do with the site.

Google Blog Search - **** Very user-friendly and straight to the point. I did a search for "Library2Play" and there were around 150 results for it, including the comments people left on the blogs! Way to go, Spring Branch!

Topix.net - **** Great presentation --clean and organized. I liked the advanced search feature which allows to do "blog-less" searches and only focus on news results instead. Good tool to locate RSS feeds for information.

Syndic8.com - * Too drab for me; I need more colors and I had a hard time operating the site.

Technorati - **** Great blog finding tool! I really enjoyed Blogger Central: what’s percolating in blogs now and all the features it includes, such as "Rising links of the day." It sort of reminds me of the "trends" available in the Google Reader, of which, I must confess I have become really fond!

Interactive Online Quiz Created with MyStudiyo

Thing #8... RSS Feeds & Readers

21st century, here I come at last! I felt so relieved that I belong to the norm and didn't know what RSS meant. As usual when you don't know the meaning of a word, you assume that everyone else knows it; well, I am so thrilled about THIS thing! I have been using the Google Reader and am amazed at the technology available today to simplify our life and make every minute count. I thought the TeacherTube video was very helpful with its layman terms --first reading the Wikipedia definition got me a little worried. I particularly am eager to find out my trends and use the data to unsubscribe to feeds that do not update often or that I don't read. Even with the Internet, I seem to be a pack-rat! Among the news site that I subscribed to was of course NPR and I read about the fact that Mars is trying to map out the genome for the cocoa bean --hmmm, endless supply of chocolate, here I come! (see right). It is pretty cool how it gives you a summary of the NPR report...
Also, while I was adding the Vanity Fair RSS to my reader, I accidentally came across their BLOGOPTICON: an indispensable guide to the blogosphere
and it gave me some additional blogs to feed to (sorry, I have to have a little bit of celebrity gossip!)

Thing #7... Google Tools

I don't know if I am just tired and if that is why I am struggling with this latest "thing." Everyone seems to be very excited about the Google tools and I seem to be simply frustrated and overwhelmed. Did all the hype create too high expectations for me? Like almost everyone, I had used Google as a search engine before and was aware of Google Earth (solely because I knew we were not allowed to download the program when we still had the stand-alone computers at school and because it was not available for my Mac at home!). Since imitation is the best form of flattery, I am going to share my review in the same format as the amazing Horatio who masterminds the insightful and well-written blog La Bibliotecaria Loca.

Google Alerts
This tool is pretty nifty and does all the research for you and keeps you posted. I used "hurricane" as my test topic and got a long e-mail this morning about each piece of news around the world that mentioned the word. Since I like to get straight to the info that pertains to me, I wonder if there is a way to further narrow down the alert search...

Google Calendar
I think it can be a very useful tool, though I tend to remain more of a paper agenda kind of girl. There is nothing like scratching out what you have accomplished! Also, I think that I spend more time entering the info online than I actually would by hand. Of course, the advantage is that there are no ugly scratches when a change needs to be made and that you can share with your colleagues, which is obviously not a function a Franklin Planner offers! LOL



iGoogle
To use one of the new terms that I learned this summer, this feature kinda reminded me of a hybrid mashup, since this personalized Google home page draws on info from other websites. I got so caught up with the cool gadgets available, that my iGoogle homepage looked rather messy initially. Being a voracious quotation collector, I ended up having 3 or 4 quotations of the day besides the tops news from Time & CNN, National Geographics Picture of the Day, World clocks --that I couldn't figure to set to France & the USA, and of course... the always much needed daily weight-loss advice! Well, a hodge-podge of my interests that I am still shuffling around and weeding out so that I eventually can use the website as efficiently as intended. A work in progress...

Google Notebook
I dabbled with this feature last night and didn't get it. I revisited tonight and played a little more with it, but I was quickly annoyed as each time I used the web search option within the Notebook page, it would leave my notebook page and go to the new URL. So, it felt very time consuming to click back on the browser each time to paste the information that I had gathered and copied from the website. All I can figure out is that I must not have been doing something correctly and that I must be choosing my usual difficult way of doing things instead of the easier and more sensible route. Did any one else experience that problem? I found my old way of copying and pasting Web info into my Microsoft Word much more user-friendly... and probably easier to explain to my students too.

Google Earth
Woohoo! I have downloaded the GE at last and am thrilled that my townhome is finally visible online. For the longest time, the satellite pix still showed a vacant lot, although the place had been built for 3 years now. Of course, I also looked up my home in France, but when I zoomed into my little village, it remained rather blurry. What a cool tool that my ESL students could use to include in their personal memoir to show the place they are from... Although the 3-D feature didn't work well for me, I was thrilled to discover the "Explore the Sky" feature, where you can learn about the different aspects of the universe around us.

Thing #6... Mashups & 3rd Party Sites

I guess, why reinvent the wheel when you can use mashups? :) What a clever idea! I can see how I could use bighugelabs.com with my ESL students to create a mosaic of self-selected pictures from Flickr to illustrate a theme from literature. I enjoyed playing and designing my own mosaic, although I had some technical problems a few times and the page remained blank when I just pasted the URLs in the boxes. When I used the other option of linking bighugelabs.com to Flickr Toys, everything went smoothly. Here is the mosaic created with pix of pooches that I cherish and who continue to be a big part of my life; students could use non-copyrighted pictures on more abstract concepts instead. Another application I can see for using bighugelabs.com is to have students create their own magazine cover after they have been introduced to informational text features. They would use the tool from Big Huge Labs. Of course, Warholizing a pix is fun too... and makes me wish I were an art teacher too! :)

Thing #5... Flickr

I was a little worried about choosing an image that might be "copyrighted," even after reading the Creative Commons information. The 4-page comic strip was a fun reinforcer to help internalize most of the differences. I think it would be a useful & concrete tool to explain the different laws that govern intellectual properties to my ESL students... I was still very relieved that just before you get to download the actual image, there are Creative Commons icons again just in case you need extra reassurance that you are not breaking the law! The coolest part is that when you actually click on either them, it tells you exactly what you are allowed to do with the pix in plain old jargon-free English! I just wonder what I need to do to now to give credit to the author and so that it shows right below the picture... FYI, this picture of the Paris subway sign was taken by pedrosimoes7 .

Thing #3... The Process

Wow, I really enjoyed creating my avatar a whole lot! I played with my design for hours, trying to get it as accurately as I could. Too bad, there was no blonde pixie hairstyle... Of course, I could have completely redefined my style, couldn't I? I was wondering if there were any other known websites that allow you to create "funkier" and more "artsy" avatars. Also, thinking of my kids, I was wondering if it would be possible to export from Animal Planet's "Mutt Maker" (http://animal.discovery.com/pet-planet/mutt-maker/mutt-maker.html)...

Thing #2... 7 1/2 Habits

Because of my innate curiosity, I think that accepting responsibility for my own learning is a habit that I have nurtured my entire life without really trying. It definitely has to be the easiest of the 7 1/2 Habits of Highly Success People for me, especially since the Internet era. Not making a mountain of a mole hill continues to be a challenge for me on a daily basis, but this natural-born drama queen has been showing some progress and is learning to be proactive and to "control the controllable!"