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!" :)