Janice’s Adventures in Web 2.0

As a librarian I found Library Thing fun to explore. It was very addictive, so I had to set a time limit.  If I had more time, I could see getting really hooked on spending time on Library Thing, inputting my collection at home, and interacting with other library members. What I find is that each of these Web 2.0 activities we have been learning about, such as social bookmarking, reading one’s RSS Feed, blogging, etc. can be very time consuming! I already found several  library groups on the Library Thing that I would join-the one for librarians, the one for mystery readers, and the one for readers of YA. I could see spending time in the YA group, learning about new titles that we can buy for our middle school library, since we are trying to buy new, fun titles for our middle school students. I also found some chatting going on in the mystery group about YA mysteries, which is something that we are looking for right now at the Epstein School.  So, I can see how the Library Thing would be useful for collection develpment at school and also for my own reading enjoyment at home.

One has to remember, though, that the book reviews are written by people reading for their own enjoyment, and I would probably follow up the reviews I find here with reviews from some of my professional library journals. I am not sure I would have my students use it, since many of the titles that would be recommended might not be appropriate for a middle school reader. The one drawback I see to this for me is that most of the books that I read I do not own, but rather take out of the library. So, I guess I could use Library Thing more as a book log, to record and rate books I have read, be they ones that I own, or ones that I borrow from the library.

I did set myself up with a Library Thing account and put in my first 10 books today. It definitely is easy to add books. It will be interesting to see if I can find the time and will continue to add to my Library Thing collection. It might be interesting to track the books that I read, and start to catalog my at home book collection.

Wow-every day brings new adventures! I had heard of “Delicious” but had never used it before today. It is definitely very helpful to now have a way to sort my bookmarks by subjects/tags to have better access to them. It is also great that these bookmarks are online and I can access them from any computer. I also am enjoying the ability to see what websites other educators and librarians are using so that I can add more websites to my repertoire. This will definitely prove useful in the future. The other nice feature of delicious is that now I can share my websites easily with my coworkers, students, and others.  It will take some time to input my website favorites into delicious and I will need to learn how to import those favorites to speed up the process.  However, I am looking forward to utilizing this new social bookmarking tool when I get back to school next month! To see Janice’s delicious bookmarks you can just check out my link!

It is amazing how many tools are available online. I chose to explore Polldaddy, where you can create polls and surveys and embed them in your website. I created my first poll. Perhaps I will do one for middle school when school starts on “Summer Reading Favorites” as suggested by someone who commented at Stacy Brown’s blog. I think it would be fun to include surveys or polls sometimes on the Epstein School Media Center website for students and/or teachers to fill out, perhaps on what people are reading, perhaps on other topics as well.

Below is my first attempt at creating a poll and embedding it into a website. I actually created a poll widget, and am very proud of myself!

I am sure that our technology instructor already knows about royalty free music websites but this was new information for me. I learned a lot about creative commons as it applies to music from Judy O’Connell’s blog post, “Good sounds-royalty free to schools.”

The post addresses the realm of royalty free music online. Judy discusses the fact that when our students are creating productions via podcast, video, etc. they need to be introduced to ideas about creative commons, royalty free images and sound bites. She talks about Soundzabound Royalty Free Music which licenses the music at their website with unlimited rights for education, superseding fair use restrictions. They provide music with  ”education approved content in a searchable database” with a web-faced interface.

Judy emphasizes that if our students are adding music to their productions that is royalty free then they “can share their magic creations” on the web via YouTube and other venues. She also included a very useful school list of websites for productions, creative commons and music. As I begin to put some of the ideas I am learning about Web 2.0 into practice with my students, this will be very useful information for me.

It is nice to be able to attend a conference “in my pajamas” without having to leave home. The presentation I viewed from the K-12 Online Conference 2008 was in the “Leading the Change” section, Beyond the Stacks: Using Emerging Technologies to Strengthen Teacher-Librarian Leadership.  I definitely like the online, anytime delivery option for professional development. I think it is good, if possible to hit a happy medium on this, since actually physically attending conferences also has a lot of value. I just returned from the Association of Jewish Libraries Convention and besides the actual sessions, the networking and discussions that I had face to face at convention were also incredibly valuable and would not have happened to the same extent online. So, I definitely recommend that one does both, attends at least one actual conference each year, but that one also takes advantage of the podcasts, videos, etc. available online, since of course we do not have the time and money to attend all the conferences out there we would like. It is great that we now have the opportunity to learn and grow professionally online as well!

The session I attended online was about what is for me one of the most burning issues as a media specialist, or as they are called in Saskatchewan, Canada, “teacher-librarians”, how can we make our libraries relevant for our digital natives? What is our new role in the 21st century? I loved the name the two session leaders, Donna DesRoches and Carlene Walter have given themselves-”disruptive innovators.”

Some of the main points discussed were as follows: now that students can learn anywhere, anytime, what do they need our libraries for? Donna and Carlene referred to their library as a place of “organized chaos”, where students can come to collaborate with each other on computer projects, as well as seek the assistance of the librarians. They mentioned again the recurrent theme that our students are perfectly capable of using the internet, online resources, etc., but are they using these information resources effectively?

Donna and Carlene shared the bare bones of a professional development course they presented to teacher-librarians in Saskatchewan, Canada entitled, Meet the Stars: Books and Web 2.0.I plan to go back and look at the details of this at a future date. The course involved learning and using a variety of social network tools such as wikis and blogs to promote the Canadian Willow Award books to their students.  The students were involved in reading the award books and writing book reviews, creating movie trailers about their novels, etc. via blogs and other tools. The course also discussed information literacy skills, and how we teach those skills to our students. I would love to see our school media center get more involved, especially in the middle school with a similar project where the students read books, and use a blog or wiki format, and other technology to share their thoughts on these books with other students in the school. If I get some of my hours reinstated that I just had cut, this is one of the activities that I might like to be involved with in the middle school.

Well, I did it! I did a slideshow of cities of Israel on Slide.com.

The slide show shows cities in Israel, from north to south. I tried to find some Israeli music to go along with the slide show,

but I could not find anything I liked. So, I know the very basics now of how to do a slideshow. I am looking forward to learning more

techniques when time permits.

Photo Credits:

Israel-Haifa by Stellas mom http://www.flickr.com/photos/lithuania2008/461634953/\

See of Galilee by 4T9R (travelling 4 a while) http://www.flickr.com/photos/lithuania2008/461634953/

Israel-Safed-Tsfat by Stellas mom http://www.flickr.com/photos/lithuania2008/461640746/

Fisherman in Tel Aviv by Hyper Viper http://www.flickr.com/photos/divinorum_/149558841/

Jerusalem from Mt. Scopus by Stellas mom http://www.flickr.com/photos/lithuania2008/461651759/

Eilat Coastline, In Vivid Colors by lior shapira http://www.flickr.com/photos/liorshapira/3609247227/

Wow-every week I am learning so many new things. I had heard of Flickr and seen students using it at school, so it is great to now have a good understanding of what Flickr is all about! There are some absolutely beautiful photos on Flickr and I really enjoyed searching for different images. It was very helpful to learn how to interpret a Flickr page-how to identify the photographer, etc. It was also important to learn about copyright, attibution and creative commons photos so we can teach our students these things.

The topic that I chose for my search was cities in Israel and I learned that the tags are not always as precise as you would want them to be. Teachers at school often ask me for images of Israeli cities so I wanted to explore what was out there in the Creative Commons Flickr domain. I was thrilled to see how many beautiful photos were available. One of my favorite photos was this one of Haifa seen from the Bahai Gardens.

Photo by Stellas Mom

I was very interested in reading about uses of Flickr in relation to storytelling/story writing and poetry. I loved the term “flicktion“, where one writes a story about a Flickr image. I know that I just touched the tip of the iceberg for educational uses of Flickr. I enjoyed reading Alan Levine’s examples, such as Visual Storytelling, where you tell an entire story with 5 images, the Six Word Stories were neat as well where one had to tell a complete story about a photo in only six words. The other idea that I loved was linking photos to poetry. David Jakes has a lot of good ideas of how to use Flickr in a classroom-I enjoyed seeing how he took his favorite poem from Hawthorne and linked words in the poem to photos. I think that that is a really neat idea-having children read or create poetry, and then tie an image or images to that poem. It really helps to have visuals to portray the feeling and meaning of a poem. I can see us using Flickr to illustrate stories or poems that our children read or create in Hebrew as well.