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

august-2008-monthly-report

Take a look at our new and improved monthly report format!  You can view all the exciting highlights from our library program in August and see how we are supporting Georgia Performance Standards, ISTE Nets for Standards, and AASL Standards for 21st century learners through our media center program at Creekview High School.

Pew Internet: Search Engine Use

The Pew Internet and American Life project has just published a new study that reports 49% of Internet users employ the use of a search engine use on a typical day.  The report also found that younger users are more likely to use search engines regularly than older Internet users.  What accounts for this jump in search engine use from the 2005 study?  The authors surmise that increased access to broadband Internet connections, improved search engine performance on individual websites, and the improved quality of general search engines are the three major factors for the increase in search engine use.

What implications does this study have for us as librarians and educators?  More than ever, we need to take the time to show students tips and strategies for effective searching of major search engines; in addition, we need to expose students to alternate search engines that may better fit their searching needs.  As we continue to teach our students about website evaluation strategies, we should also make our students aware that search engines yield paid and unpaid results—many users may not realize how this factor can “color” the results they get from a particular search engine. 

You may also be interested a more detailed study of Internet use conducted by the Pew foundation in 2005—although it is three years old, the findings are more detailed than the 2008 study and reveal some interesting data about Internet usage.

[slideshow id=2017612633080107273&w=500&h=375]

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/

Experimenting with Google Picasa: Buffy Unpacking First Box of Books

Originally uploaded by theunquietlibrarian

Whenever I start feeling overwhelmed by the upcoming school year, I like to look at this photo and remember the pure joy of something as simple as unpacking a box of books. I can honestly say this was one of the happiest moment in my career—this is me opening the first box of 8000 books when I opened my media center in July 2006! Happiness is a box full of books that you are about to unbox and put on the shelves!

MS Library 2.0 Summit Birds of a Feather Lunch Tables

Originally uploaded by msulibrary1

Are you teaching Web 2.0 or Library 2.0 courses to your faculty or fellow educators? Here is a sample of photo of a great idea from the MSU Library 2.0 Summit (that I wanted to attend but could not because I could not leave my summer school peeps!) a few weeks ago. I love how they organized the tables by Web 2.0 tool….I am going to borrow this idea for a presentation I am doing July 12 at UGA and for my blogging class I am teaching July 14-15.

Thank you, MSU, for inspiring me!

necclibrarians08 » home

If you have not heard the buzz about this NECC session, then head over to http://necclibrarians08.wikispaces.com/ to get the scoop!  Here you will find the recorded Ustream video of the session, plus terrific resources from all the presenters on the panel.  What was this session all about?  Here is the official description in a nutshell:

School librarians are leading learning and instructional change. Discover how we are re-visioning reading, research, and “library” for 21st-century students on the Read/Write Web.

As if this link isn’t enough, feel free to check out my favorite buzz and discussion on this important NECC 2008 panel discussion by visiting http://del.icio.us/theunquietlibrary/LibraryRemix2.5 .

ISTE has released the newly revamped NETS for Teachers 2008  at the NECC2008 Conference.   Take a look at this newly released document and the five new major standards for teachers.  I know I will certainly reflect on this in the upcoming weeks and figure out where I am on the continuum and how I can strive to improve in all five areas as a teacher-librarian and as an English teacher.

ISTE | NETS for Teachers 2008

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!