Skybrary Blog

I just checked into iTunes U … Wow! A huge wealth of information. On a personal note, I subscribed to a Learn Irish podcast for my vacation this summer. However, there are all sorts of language, science, math, professional, how-to, PBS, and more.

I may just have to push harder to get iTunes unblocked. I am truly amazed.

Video streaming and podcasting have tremendous potential to change our teaching for the better through the availability of a wide variety of resources readily available in short, easily integrated clips. Content can be better matched to the objective and used to reinforce individual points.

Money issues: Bandwidth, availability of projectors
Policy issues: Filtering

Creation of content by students and teachers is also a powerful tool for both engaging students in learning and communication with parents and community. As video editing tools become cheaper and easier to use, this becomes a much more viable option. The main barrier I see is time — time for students to research, plan, film, and edit a podcast or video clip becomes cumbersome at times because of unfamiliarity with the equipment and software for the majority of students. However, that should become easier with experience.

Supervision, supervision, supervision… one part of my job that I really hate is when I have to deal with the disciplinary part of when kids do stuff they are not supposed to. In most cases, the kids’ misbehavior is a result of poor teaching practices — too much free time, no sense that we do school stuff on school time and we use school resources for school stuff, no screen checking. It is frustrating because it does hurt our ability to delve into the Web 2.0 applications.

So much available — here’s what I can think of off the top of my head. What an improvement over when we were limited to what we taped from the instructional video feed.

DVD/VHS static
Discovery Streaming
Brainpop
Teacher Tube
You Tube
Podcasts
Individual sites
Create your own

I remember reading a post by Joyce Valenza about using a wiki for pathfinders — “Ten Reasons Why Your Next Pathfinder should be a Wiki” and decided to try it this year.

Our iTrt and I had tried various methods to standardize pathfinders — we both write them and bounce them back and forth for suggestions. We had the most success using Macromedia’s Contribute, which handled rights for saving and editing and made sure neither one of us overwrote what the other had done, but it still felt clunky. A wiki has worked well this year. For some assignments we have even had students add resources. It can be updated easily and quickly and now that we have a standard format, easy to create.

Our pathfinders are linked from the library home page out you can check out THMS pathfinders directly. I do have to credit Lori Lineweaver for using her knowledge of html to help with the formatting.

Diigo the social bookmarking site seems like it could be fun to use. I am anxious to play with the annotation feature, and wonder how it is different from Google’s Notebook feature, whcih I find very useful. I can see where the social part of it may be an issue in schools….

David Warlick has an interesting commentary on Diigo here .

mentioned on Joyce Valenza’s blog — Mnemograph allows users to create a timeline, that not only creates dates but can include images an notes about events. Worth checking into

Ideas for using RSS in schools that I hadn’t thought about…from the article RSS Ideas for Educators111.

I like the idea of using rss for continuous provision of links. I can envision this being a quick way to customize links for patrons that will allow them to focus specifically on one subject area.

eportfolios are also an interesting way to collect writings — the rss does make it easy to know when they have posted and a comments feature does encourage peer review.

I like the way blogmeister and edublogs allow you to vreate accounts for your kids so that we don’t run into the email circle — kids having to have an email address to get an account at a web 2.0 site.

Blogs can convey information easily for so many different purposes — both personal and professional. I’ve seen friends watch their granddaughter grow daily through a blog even though she’s 8 hours away, I’ve been following Leroy Siever’s battle with cancer, I follow local news through a couple of blogs (get alternative viewpoints that way), and I follow several blogs dealing with technology and school libraries. The neat thing about blogs is once you get a system down, it really doesn’t take that long to keep up with reading them.

I maintain a book review blog for my middle school students, I have a blog to track my reading, and I even keep a bike blog where I track my mileage and routes (but I don’t post this one — who else cares?), and I have sporadically kept a blog to share resources with my faculty. I gave up on that because at the time, blog readers were not as easy to use as they are now and it really was too much work for teachers to check the blog. It became easier for me to just email information to those I knew could use it. I’ll try this one to share resources with teachers — could be a good way to get to know my new faculty.

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