week 9 Thing#23

LOL Fair(y) Use Tale. When we talk to students about using copyright images and that Google images are not copyrighted we get a lot of eye rolls. More students would obey picture copyright laws if they were required to cite their picture source. I feel many teachers overlook copyright laws because it is just too tough to keep track of what is allowed and what isn't. I like this copyright chart. Easy to read and learn what is A okay and what is a no no.

Copyright - Upload a Document to Scribd

To sum up this 23 Things in one word - FOREFRONT. Looking back at my 23 things I feel creating my own blog, posting feeds, creating funky pictures (love that imagechef) were probably some of the best Things that I learned about. I can't really find anything Thing that wasn't a valuable activity. This was an amazing learning adventure that wasn't too taxing. Learning had a creative fun element to it. One of the best suggestions, now that I am finished, was to keep my blog as an educational blog and to post the link to my email signature. I will miss leaning more Things and have suggested that a biweekly Thing be emailed to us so we can continue keeping up with technology.

Thing 24 If you want to load a document to your blog try Scribd. I wanted to upload that copyright chart and it was a pdf file. What's a girl to do? Google for a way to upload a pdf file to your blog. Google is my Easy Button.

week 9 Thing #22

Audiobooks for free? At our high school we are just beginning to start a collection of playaways that students will be able to borrow. The nice thing about playaways is that they are small and actually look like a small book on the outside. The only thing we are not including with the playaways our the earbuds. Kind of gross to be sticking someone else's bud in your own ear. Next week we will be offering books on ipods for students to listen to their required fiction English book. We will be adding titles to the ipods as we are just beginning this new venture. Students will borrow the ipods just like they would a book. The website the best place to get free books is terrific. Listening to audiobooks on the road is a great way to pass the time and I have always bought my books through itunes. Love their selection hate the prices. Just this week I was contemplating buying Twilight to get caught up in this popular reading series (I so do want to be a twilighter), but when I saw the price $25 something I didn't bite. I will definitely keep looking for free audiobooks for my own personal use as well as for our patrons in our library.

week9 Thing#21

Learning by listening is one of the best things to do while driving in the car. I have been listening to podcasts for a few years and the best update on technology for me is TWIT. I find out numerous happenings in the tech world this way. I also like the podcast videos of AppleQuickTips. You could actually show some of these quick videos to a high school class before teaching a lesson. Great way to warm up a lesson with technology.

week 8 Thing #19

Lots of discussion about the books I posted to Library Thing. I thought is was interesting that the first 200 books u post are free and then there are fees if you want to post more. The best bet is $25 smackers for a lifetime membership. How long is that? Really? This would be an awesome way for churches, library classrooms to keep track and share what books they have in their collection. As for my personal use I could see using this Library Thing if I were extremely organized and looking for something to do, which I am not. This is a fun tool. Wouldn't it be great to use with high school students to map their reading life of favorite books from toddler to today? I saw an English teacher do this using a podcast to create a history of personal reading journeys. I think this would be a fun way to create one too.

week 8 Thing #18

I didn't know how easy it was to create your own website until viewing the Google Sites tutorial. I was familiar with Google Docs but I think Zoho writer has more writing tools available for documents than Google Doc does. The really awesome feature of either writer is they allow for collaboration. This is a great way for students to create documents together.

Week 9 Thing #20

week 7 Thing #16 & #17

WIKI WIKI WIKI We are using wiki spaces for our high school research pathfinders. Students seem to like the easy access to resources for their specific research projects. After teachers conference with us about their students' assignments we put together the best resources we have to offer - books, searching suggestions/directions, databases, citation machine link ect-all on one page. Students can click on the database they want to use and get there quickly. By using research pathfinders, students are Googling less and are getting quality information from the databases. We added the cover images to our title suggestions. There is nothing like a visual to aid a student in finding a book. Students can get to the wiki research pathfinders from a link that was added to our library's home page. I am in the process of developing a WIKI to promote PYRCA at our high school. I am planning on placing the list of nominees and rules of how to vote plus enable online voting ( I am still checking into the online voting). Hopefully this will be a hook to get high school students to participate in this awesome reading program. Wish me luck.
I tried adding to the Pa Curriculum Connection wiki but the password is just not working.

Week 6 Thing#15

From “Away from the “icebergs” Rick Anderson Director of Resource Acquisition

First Berg: who has funds for the “just in case collection?” You gotta be kiddin right?

Second Berg:
u know I just calculated the librarian to student ratio in our high school and I get 1: 960 which is an improvement over last year which was 1:1200. The biggest connection I made was to make sure that the services we have such as our databases, research pathfinders, citation maker and OPAC are easy to access and use. Students are no different than teachers. They want to easily access quality information. I know our library is striving to accomplish this. We are constantly making improvements and changes to ensure that students and teachers can get to what they need.

Third Berg:
We tell teachers that we can come to their classrooms. With many teachers in our building taking part in CFF (Classrooms for the Future - content area teachers who are participating have laptop carts in their classrooms) we want them to know that we can come to them.





“Into a new world of librarianship” Michael Stephens Librarian, Blogger




New world of librarianship should be my title. I taught kindergarten for 13 years and am just on year 2.5 of being a high school librarian. I have no huge past of how things used to be. I get the wave of constant changes. By reading journals, blogs and talking to other coworkers we get new ideas to try in our teaching. We are teaching cooperatively and learning from others and yes, having fun at the same time. Our newest twist is switching from a 9 day period to block scheduling. Goodbye study halls every period. Hello flex (study hall) for just 2 blocks. Hello added part-time librarian to help handle teaching in the block.

For me 2.0 is our information life. Ever changing so keep learning.