Friday, July 6, 2007

Why we are doing this 2.0 learning

I enjoy the perspective of the "big picture" I get when I view "Did You Know?" videos courtesy of xplanevisualthinking on YouTube.

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Week #4, Things #8 & 9 - RSS

I started using Bloglines about a year ago as my RSS aggregator and then after reading many comparisons I switched to Google Reader about three months ago. As with everything there are positives and negatives to both. I like the ease with which I can scroll through all the entries in Google Reader, but if I have over 100 entries it's a little overwhelming. Something about the magic number of 100 often leads me to mark all as read so as to start fresh the next day.

I check approximately 15 library-related blogs every day, plus a few personal blogs interspersed (including "Unshelved" as a great way to start the day). Some of my favorites are Will Richardson's Weblogg-ed, Librarian in Black, LISNews.org, The Shifted Librarian, The Liminal Librarian, and The Free Range Librarian.

I love getting different perspectives and ideas from across librarianship, which is why I read public, academic, and school librarians' work. It is easy to add RSS feeds until they are scrolling off your list, and then the daily reading becomes a task instead of an informative session. Google Reader has a nice feature where you can see when your feeds were last updated and I occasionally check that and delete blogs that have not been updated in a month or more.

I also learned how to set up an RSS feed for our school's website and a parent emailed me last week to tell me he had actually added us to his aggregator! It was an exciting moment because I thought I was the only one reading my own feed. It also changes what and how often I post news items, with an audience paying attention it's an important communication tool between school and home.

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Week #3, Things #5, 6, 7 - Flickr

This is my Flickr exploration week. I've used Flickr for about two years now to upload photos of my family for other family members to see what we're up to. I admit I've also used it to show many, many photos of transportation (fire trucks, vans, police cars, bulldozers, etc.) to my two-and-a-half-year-old son. It's easy to find a group that has hundreds or thousands of photos in one category like that.

So I have been thinking about using Flickr in this way at school, to quickly show kindergarteners photos of sushi if they are studying Japan, or even photos of Japan. I would find the groups and browse them quickly beforehand and then have them ready to show. I found this collection that would be fun for my students to see - 1,879 photos from over 500 users just about sushi!

http://www.flickr.com/groups/sushi_sushi/

I also would use these photos and the Creative Commons licenses to teach my older students about copyright. We would learn about the different types of licenses and they would be tasked to find photos on Flickr that are available for them to use in school projects.

I used the mapping feature in Flickr to mark the location of the sightseeing photos I took in Washington DC. (click here) It was remarkably easy to use and I thought of the similar maps you can create in Google Maps. I started making one for Washington State history, pinpointing important locations in Washington's history. This is a project I could see my fourth graders doing at school, if we could get around the 'everyone has to have a Google account' problem. We can't do that with fourth graders. Maybe a school account that everyone uses?

I also had fun using the trading card maker and would love to use it in projects, maybe Washington State location trading cards, finding appropriate photos on Flickr?

Trading Card