Thing Twenty-Three: Done, Done, Done!

Hello fellow bloggers!!! I'm done! Can you believe we actually made it through all twenty-three things? There were many things that I liked, like the mashups, podcasts and vidcasts, and discovering Doug Valentine's cool book talks. Overall, I learned that I'm not a big fan of RSS feeds, Tags, or the Google Reader, but perhaps as I journey down the road I will become more interested in those tools. I hope you have all enjoyed this journey as much as I have, and that you have learned as much as I have. I have a much better sense of what all there is out there to use in my classroom and library, when that day comes, that is free and exciting! Adios, for now!

Thing Twenty-Two: Ning, it's not Bing

Hello fellow bloggers! Well, sadly I discovered that Ning will be focusing their efforts on their paying customers, and will no longer be offering it as a free service. Boo hoo...the Ning that most interested me was the Texas School Librarian Ning I especially liked watching the animated book talks that the students did with Doug Valentine. I investigated the "Crazy Talk" software that I believe he must have used to make the pictures animated and look like they are talking. I'm fascinated by this and desperately want the software for myself. In my Tuesday night class one of my classmates was talking about this and how she was side-tracked trying to figure out how he made these hand-drawn pictures animated like they are talking, and where do I find myself...doing the same thing, ha. As a teacher or librarian, you could use it to connect with other people in your profession, but unless you want to pay for it, you won't be able to make your own Ning network.

Thing Twenty-One: Podcasts and Vidcasts

This is a digital story I made for writing with art in the classroom. So many times students say, "I don't know what to write about!" With something like this you will hopefully inspire them with pictures. They can create a story that goes with what they see in the picture, or perhaps the mood of the picture will inspire them. Whatever it is, hoepfully by having a visual their little brains will start thinking of things to write about. I find photostory to be an easy tool to use for the classroom, and in the classroom. It is fairly easy for students to pick up this skill and as long as you do your research in advance, for pictures and information, and write your script before you begin to record, the actual making of a vidcast is pretty simple. As a mac user I was sad to see that there is not a downloadable photostory for us. We do have imovie, but the process is a little different. You will most likely have this question as some of your students will want to work on this at home, but might only have a mac, sadly you will have to tell them that it is not available...boo hoo. You might want to work a little bit in advance to come up with some direction sheets for both photostory and imovie, especially if your campus, in SBISD, has the new mac notebooks. I'm looking forward to watching the vidcasts you produced! Happy blogging! P.S. Here is something I created in a summer school course on Art in Education, this one has the voice over as well as pictures.

Thing Twenty: Embeded videos

Hello fellow bloggers! So, I searched for Librarians in Youtube and this is what I found to be the most interesting. I thought you could show this at the start of the school year when you are giving a refresher of where to find things in the library.

When searching through teachertube I found a video on how to write a persuasive essay, something my students are working on at the moment. This video uses a silly topic, "cats are better than dogs," but it makes it very simple for the students to understand. I might just post this on my website so that my students can watch it for homework when we get to writing their actual essays.
Enjoy my movies!

As teacher right now, the value of having access to all of these free video resources is that you can pull something up on a whim and show it to your students in order to enhance learning. Also, I had my students work in groups to create lesson plans and many of them found videos they could use to help teacher their lesson from these sites. As a future librarian, I could use a resource like my Dewey Decimal rap to teach my patrons how the library is set up by this system. Using something like this will help them remember as opposed to me just telling them, or giving them a labeled map, a video is more appealing to this generation of students.

P.S. Well, I was not able to embed the teachertube video because it keeps saying, "Your HTML cannot be accepted: Tag is not closed: EMBED." I'm going try to figure it out and post it later.

Thing Nineteen: Docstoc isn't just for doctors.

Hello fellow bloggers! Well, I chose to check out docstoc, part of the reason, because I wandered if it was for doctors, or documents, ha! As I investigated I realized it is for many different areas, basically any area that would have a need for documents. Within the Education portion there are some great documents that you can download for free. Unfortunately you do have to weed through a whole lot to ultimately find the ones that are useful, but it can be worth the time. Also, you can upload your documents and make them available to other educators out there in the world beyond your classroom and school. I'm interested to find out what sites caught your attention from the Awards list. Many of the items on the list I am aware of and use due to my fabulous iphone and the many aps that are available! I had to pick something I hadn't used before.

Thing Eighteen: Open Office/Google Docs vs. Microsoft Office

Eighteen down and five more to go...for this "thing" we were supposed to explore either OpenOffice or Google Docs, or both! I chose Google Docs, simply because I was unable to download the free open office at school, it was blocked, and I do all my school work on my personal computer during my conference period, so Google Docs it is! I enjoy this free online resources because it does allow you to collaborate with a group of people without having to send things via email, and that is a huge advantage in the world of education where time is of the essence. As well, you can create things from already formatted templates rather than creating the entire thing from scratch, that is another advantage. One of the disadvantages is that there are less option as with the Microsoft Office you purchase, obviously by purchasing something it allows you more than the free versions of things, but for the most part you can do without a lot of those features. One that I might not be able to live without is "track changes" on Microsoft Office, well really on iworks, because I use that so much with my students when they turn in their papers. It give me the chance to make suggestions and comments without it being in red, or marking all over their paper. Then, they can accept it or not. Now, I'm not sure if OpenOffice has this option has I have not had the chance to play with it yet, but I will definitely look into it as an option other than purchasing the Microsoft Office package for the mac. Over and out!

I thought I woudl add two "forms" I created using Google Docs for my classes.

Thing Seventeen: Roll ups are good!

Hello fellow bloggers!

I have no experienced Rollyo and found that it could be useful as a librarian. You could create a Searchroll for the sites you most frequent and be able to easily search those sites on a daily basis without having to go to each site. I believe if I am comparingi Rollyo to Delicious, I prefer a Searchrolls to tags. I created a Books, Books, Books, search roll that allows you to simply search booklists and other review sites for books you might be interested in finding out more about before you read it, or put it in your library. Let me know what you thought about Rollyo.

Thing Sixteen: Wiki, wiki, what?!?

Hello fellow bloggers!

Here I am on Thing #16; how did I make it so far...it almost didn't hurt at all. While I love learning, sometimes it stretches you into places that are a little uncomfortable, but you make it through and come out on the other side more knowledge! I think that is where I am with tags and RSS feeds, I think. Ha! Well, wikis I can definitely handle, while I am a person who likes the bling, and wikis don't really allow for that, I can see how this would be beneficial in the world of a librarian. I can see into my future where I use wikis to collaborate with teachers from departments, for example, the sixth grade social studies team comes to me and wants to do research on Africa, that's what they were just doing, and so I create a social studies wiki where they can post the information they have and what they need from me. We can plan the entire lesson via and wiki with minimal time meeting after school. As is often the case, an entire grade-level department does not always have the same planning period, and the wiki will allow everyone to stay up-to-date regardless of ability to meet all together! How cool is that?!?! I must say that I like the notion of the "Sandbox portion" idea of designating places to play. The two wikis that were most interesting to me were the "Teacher Librarian Wiki" and the "Book Lovers Wiki" because those are two things that I have a passion for. I hope you had as much fun as I did checking out the wikis, and let me know if you start using them in your own classroom. I'm going to have to figure out how to fit this in before the end of the year. Singing off, FarmerDaughter!