The Unquiet Librarian

I am not sure how I missed this ( I don’t remember an official announcement?), but you can now follow School Library Journal on Twitter!  Yeah!

http://twitter.com/sljournal

Twitter / sljournal via kwout

Georgia COMO 2008

Come join the Georgia COMO 2008 Ning!  What is the Georgia COMO 2008 Ning?  It is a social networking space where COMO attendees (as well as those who may not be able to attend in person but who want to get a taste of the conference happenings from afar!) can share ideas and network with other professionals and peers! 

In addition, we are inviting everyone who is presenting to jump into our “Session Discussions” forum!  This is a space where speakers and presenters can tell others about their presentations and embed content for their presentations.  As a member of our Georgia COMO 2008 Ning, you can embed content on “My Page” and share ideas with others.  Ning allows members to upload videos, photos, and other multimedia content—what a great Web 2.0 way to share the knowledge from our upcoming COMO 2008 conference!  In addition, members may create or join special interest groups where you can network with colleagues on a smaller scale.  You may also add a Georgia COMO 2008 Ning badge to your blog, wiki, or website!

To join our Ning, you must first register a free Ning account.  Click on this link to register for free! Once you have registered, you can then join our Ning going to http://georgiacomo2008.ning.com/ and click on the text link, “Sign Up”, on the left side of the page.

The Georgia COMO 2008 Ning is a terrific way for speakers and presenters to share information from their sessions.   Our network will allow attendees to get a taste of the sessions that they may not be able to get to; the Ning provides a means for those who cannot attend in person to experience the essence of the conference vicariously.  We have created in our Ning in the spirit of the NECC 2008 network, and we hope that our network will prove beneficial to you as a learning space. 

If you have any difficulties registering or navigating our Ning, please feel free to contact me at buffy.hamilton@cherokee.k12.ga.us .  The network is open for discussion and registration (free for everyone!), so surf on over to http://georgiacomo2008.ning.com/ and join today!

Buffy Hamilton, Media Specialist
Creekview High School
http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com
http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com

Check out our new Environmental Science Pagecast at Pageflakes! Our Pagecast provides you the latest RSS feeds from our favorite Environmental Science publications and resources! Please take time to check out our Environmental Science Pathfinder page as well!

Panik Science Current Events Research (theunquietlibrary) via kwout

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Back in January, I wrote a post about Pageflakes and the screencast we had created for our media center.  Now Joyce Valenza has inspired me with her latest blog post  about ways we can use Pageflakes with our patrons!  As Joyce points out, we can certainly use iGoogle with our patrons to help them design feeds through their GoogleReader accounts to keep up with the latest news on a particular topic from their favorite web resources:  news outlets, blogs, and RSS feed searches from a few databases.  We showed iGoogle to 9th graderst this past year, and they were very much impressed by the power of iGoogle, but now Joyce and Clarence Fisher  have me thinking about how we can use Pageflakes as personal learning network information portal.

I am not sure how I missed this, but there is a “Teacher Edition” of Pageflakes for educators—it is not really too different from the “regular” flavor, but the widgets and template are more tailored for items and feeds of interest to educators.   Pageflakes could be a powerful tool for teachers—imagine creating a screencast for your students around a particular unit of study in any subject area! 

However, I am really thinking hard tonight about students taking the reins and creating their own learning portal and personal learning networks; there is a student version of Pageflakes available, too!  As Will Richardson pointed out in this blog post,

“From a teaching standpoint, pages of this type can be pretty effective for bringing in potential content and then making decisions about what to do with that content. “

Take a look at these three examples: 

• Joyce’s test Pageflakes for Global Studies
• Lisa Spiro’s “Digital Humanities Research Portal”.   
• Will Richardson’s Darfur Screencast

All of these screencasts give us a tantalizing taste of how students could use Pageflakes as a personalized research portal.  Note how both examples pull in feeds from podcasts, authoritative news outlets, and vodcasts.   If students are blogging their research process, they can even pull in the RSS feed from their blog as part of their personal Pageflakes portal.  Note also that you can incorporate widgets for favorite search engines as well!  Students can also pull in their personal Google Library feed, You Tube videos, Teacher Tube videos, SlideShare presentations, del.icio.us RSS feeds….the possibilities are truly endless!  Organizational tools, such as sticky notes and “to do” lists, are also available. 

For the short term future, I want to experiment with Pageflakes as a personal learning network for students/information-research portal in three ways:

1.  Teacher-Librarian/School Library Media Specialist lens:  I will seek out a teacher to pilot the use of Pageflakes as a personal learning network/portal at my high school this fall.  We will work together to design mini-lessons to show students how to harness the power of Pageflakes for a particular research assignment.

2.  Classroom Teacher Lens:  As I do the  multigenre research project with my night school students this fall, I want to build a new requirement that they create their Pageflakes screencast to reflect their research.  We could easily incorporate screenshotsof the screencast and a live link to the Pageflakes screencast in their final Word document or better yet, move away from Word and create the final product in Google docs or as a blog/Wiki.  I could also create a blogroll to everyone’s Pageflakesresearch portal on my class blogs that I use with my students.

My third and more ambitious goal is to see if we could get one of our senior English teachers to collaborate with us and use a student created Pageflakes screencast (along with a research blog created by each student) as one of their artifacts for their Senior Project.  This is our school’s first year piloting the “Senior Project” since this year marks the rise of our first senior class—how exciting would it be if kids could easily view each other’s research projects and Pageflakes screencasts?

I will keep you all posted on how these three initiatives come to fruition this fall as the beginning of our school year is just three weeks away!  If anyone else out there is taking on similar collaborative planning projects, please email me at buffy.hamilton@cherokee.k12.ga.us —I am always happy to share ideas and experiences “from the trenches” with another media specialist.  Stay tuned!

A footnote:  Tonight’s blog post and the ideas that have come out of it are the result of my personal learning network I have established using Web 2.0 tools….I will be blogging more about this topic in September! 

Buffy Hamilton, Media Specialist
Creekview High School
http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com
http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com
http://webtech.cherokee.k12.ga.us/creekview-hs/mediacenter/

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Calling all Grizzly patrons!  Are you looking for a cool multimedia tool to show your teachers what you have learned this fall?  Check out Mixwit, a fun “media playground” that allows you to artwork, photos, and music in a format that can be easily shared!  Read about how this teacher, Konrad Glogowski , used this tool as part of a novel study (hit the play button above to play his mix); you can also visit and see student examples by going to the link beneath this screenshot.

blog of proximal development

You can register your own account for free!  Click on the link below to visit Mixwit and start mixing up your own creative projects today!

Mixwit – Create and Share Digital Mixtapes

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Konrad Glogowski:   I just discovered this blogger, educator, and teacher in recent days, but he has some really interesting posts and experiences to share with us.  You can visit his blog and read more at http://www.teachandlearn.ca/blog/. 

blog of proximal development

classroom2dot0 » live conversations

From educator extraordinaire Steve Hargadon:

http://www.classroom20wiki.com/live+conversations

The NECC wrap-up and review show. EduBloggerCon, NECC Unplugged, the Bloggers’ Cafe, and all the rest. The best links, leads, streams, podcasts, vlogs, and blogs. What you loved, what you didn’t. We’ll try and document all in a special 90-minute show.

Go to http://www.elluminate.com/support/ to make sure you have everything installed needed to participate in the live session and to configure your Elluminate software that you can download at this site; it takes no more than 5-8 minutes to do this.

Whether you attended NECC 2008 in person or not, this live discussion will be a great way to see the highlights of the conference and get ideas for your library or classroom!

Is it me, or did the NECC convention generate more buzz?  I have been part of an amazing NECC Convention Ning, and read all kinds of wonderful Tweets about the convention on Twitter.  I barely heard a gurgling sound from the ALA Convention….again, it could just be my vantage point, but other than one blog post and a SLJ article, I have heard nary a word about the ALA Convention whereas I am saturated with the NECC buzz!

How about you other librarians/media specialists out there?  Did you hear/read/virtually participate more in NECC or ALA this past week?   Should ALA or ALA members have offered more participation virtually like NECC/NECC participants did?

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Are you like me, unable to attend NECC in person?  If you can’t be in San Antonio, then being a part of the NECC Ning  is the next best thing.  I joined up about a month ago, and it has been a blast to hear and learn about what has been happening out there through the Ning.  It’s not too late to join and to get in on all the buzz!

As most of you know, not only am I a high school librarian by day, but I also still teach 10th and 11th English courses by night for our district evening school during the regular academic school year.  I should probably take more time to write about my observations on students’ information literacy skills and perceptions about research (and perhaps I will during 2008-09), but as many of you can relate, it is hard to find time to stop, reflect, and then actually blog about what is happening “out there” because time seemingly just gets way so quickly.

Today marks the beginning of Week 2 of our three week summer school session.  While many express shock and skepticism about the feasibility of trying to do a 90 day course in 15 days, we do meet four and a half hours per course—the economy of time forces both teachers and students to focus on what really matters! 

On Friday, we began our multigenre research project in my afternoon 10B Literature/Composition course.  This type of research paper can incorporate traditional elements of the “written” research paper (and mine does), but it also calls upon students to interpret and represent key learnings and findings of their research in creative and alternate genres.  For more information, see my links at http://del.icio.us/creekview_hs_library/multigenre .

At first, most students seemed a bit dazed and confused.  What is multigenre?  What are learning artifacts?  You want me to do what?  Present information I’ve learned in an alternative way?  Think?  Huh?  Many vocalized these questions, and for those who didn’t….I only had to look at their faces to read their thoughts!  After we had reviewed the assignment, though, and the students had an opportunity to look at real projects/papers and examples, several began getting excited and were already brainstorming ideas.  My 10A students probably have a slight advantage because we are incorporating a few multigenre elements into our short story project and our Georgia Peach Book project.  I am hopeful the little gurgles and spurts of enthusiasm I saw in some of my students Friday afternoon will become a full blown “gush” this week as we essentially spend about two and half hours in the library each day this week.

One young man looked dismayed and sad during our class break after we had reviewed the assignment and discussed the project.  When I asked him what was wrong, he cried, “I can write a paper no problem and give you the facts, but interpret the information….that is going to be hard!”  I asked him what seemed difficult or challenging about the multigenre artifacts because in my mind, those are the creative and exciting parts of the project. 

With dismay he sputtered, “Because I will have to think and really show what I have learned“!

With a wry smile on my face, I replied, “That is exactly the purpose of this research!”

I thought his response was very telling about what our “NCLB” generation kids are used to doing in the classroom and what they have been trained to do:  regurgitate information and move on.  No synthesis, no analysis, no evaluation of information—just “learn” it and “cover it” for a test.  Of course, we as librarians have seen how the emphasis on standardized testing has killed inquiry and research in our media centers, so his comments were not really surprising.  However, they are troublesome just the same.

I will be interested to see how he and the rest of his classmates evaluate this project in about eight days from now.  In the past, I have done this project as a literature based project, and while students at first looked like deer in the headlights, nearly all became excited and engaged in what they were doing; projects pulling in multigenre elements have gotten high marks from my students in the last two years, but this is the first time I have made the entire research project a multigenre paper.  They are doing topics all over the map, and I honestly can’t wait to see what they do with this….stay tuned!