Blogging for You

I attended a NASTech meeting yesterday in the library at Westbury High School. They have a room adjacent to the library with several computers, but the library itself only had a few locked down laptops for their OPAC stations. The school has implemented a very successful COW program that extends to the use of laptops in the libraries.

I was most interested in the presentation given by an elementary bilingual teacher about blogging in her second grade classroom. She chose this venue because it simulated journal writing and she believed she was helping to create an online community of readers and writers. Sure enough, connections were made with a school in New Zealand, and the students are now enthusiastic writers! She recomends using David Warlick's blogmeister because it's made for the classroom, but also check out 21 classes.

Avatars, anyone? Check out Voki and take your pick.

Computers in Libraries 2

I was too ambitious to think that I would be able to share everything in one posting.

Highlights from other workshops:

Screencasting
The presenter for this workshop simply pressed "play" and walked away from the podium while the flash movie ran on the screen, introducing us to the concept of creating flash movies for tutorial purposes. He mentioned programs like Jing, with which we're familiar, as well as Camtasia (for a fee) and meebo. The advice he gave is to keep the screencasts short, and to find a good hosting service. He suggested blip.tv, YouTube (well, Teacher Tube would be better for us), freescreencast.com, screencastomatic. The entire presentation is available at http://screencasting.pbwiki.com.

Bookmapping
This presentation explored the use of interactive map technology to bring a geographical perspective to books. Sites that help make this possible include Google Earth, http://gutenkarte.org/, and Google Lit Trips.

Second Life
I'm still not convinced of the worth of creating a second life for libraries--don't we have enough to do with our first one!!!--but there are avid followers who create virtual worlds for all kinds of functions, including answering questions via an avatar at a reference desk. Visit http://secondlife.com and see what you think.

Teaching Books
I had a fresh look at this program and I have to confess I was much more impressed with it than I've been in the past. We still have access through Nassau BOCES. I recommend you take a look the next time you introduce a new author. There's a lot of highly usable, quality and original material that you could use.

Fish4Info is an example of an open source catalog. It's a great solution for libraries who have yet to automate. I definitely liked the "Amazon" feel to it which makes it intuitive for the novice.

Are you interested in a global project? Check out http://primarysource.org/.

I attended a workshop, Gaming Your Library, that emphasized Johnny Chung Lee's position that students have an organic information need that relates to their own lives. Students need someone to meet them where they are to take them where they need to go. Hence the idea of applying gaming strategies to the learning environment. Recommended title: Marc Prensky's Don't Bother Me, Mom, I'm Learning. I'm putting it on our next order.

Loved what I saw from the Cleveland Museum of Art's videoconferencing presentation. One was featured that combined art and wellness through a study of self-portraits. The question was asked: What do artists reveal? Lots of food for thought. Definitely check it out.

The librarian from the Frank Sinatra Performing Arts High School showed us how she had the students use a variety of online programs to create pathfinders on various topics. The collaborated in Google docs, shared and discussed on Wikispaces as they reflected on their sources through a Read/Write/Think 3-2-1 strategy: What did you discover? What did you find interesting? What is one question you still have? Peer editors completed a reflection: I read...I noticed...I wondered...The final rubric asked the students to contribute what they could teach others, what they still need to learn, what they need to get better at, and what they would like to see done differently.

At the copyright workshop, I was reminded of the "poor man's copyright" strategy. Mail your original work in a sealed envelope to yourself. Don't open it. If you want to do some reading on the subject, there's actually a graphic book called Bound by Law. With so much original work being posted online, it is incumbent upon the "poster" to make sure he or she has permission.

Computers in Libraries:

The Computers in Libraries Conference with its corollary, Internet@Schools East in Washington, D.C. is in its 23rd year. Planned to coordinate with the marvel of cherry blossoms in bloom, this conference offered resources and ideas for us to implement with our home libraries. Some of the time, I have to confess, I proudly noted: we already do that in Uniondale! And we've gone even further down that particular path! Other times I was furiously taking notes, capturing as much as I could to bring back to all of you.

I'm going to share with you some of my favorite newly discovered gems, together with the name of the workshop I attended. Hope you find this useful!

RSS@Schools

Steven Cohen is a law librarian in Huntington who probably has the marketshare on RSS feeds. He has a daunting 900 or so and must have given up any semblance of a life to read even a little bit of each. In any case, why RSS? I know we've talked about the reasons to let RSS into our library lives--the ability to bring all our best-loved sites into one place precludes the annoyance of having to search for them--and remembering to do so! As librarians, posting feeds on our websites for students and teachers could be particularly helpful.

A few familiar and new gems, in no particular order:

For gathering your feeds--Google Reader http://reader.google.com/

Search library feeds--http://www.libworm.com/

Open archive for library and information science--E-Lis http://eprints.rclis.org/

Track bills, issues, members in Congress--Open Congress http://www.opencongress.org/

Voters database in Congress http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/

Monitor changes to webpages http://watchthatpage.com/

Create feed for a webpage http://page2rss.com/

Highlight quote on page and go directly to that passage--very cool and worth a try! CiteBite http://www.citebite.com/ I created an example for you here: http://pages.citebite.com/q4u0q6q1ewsx

A lot of databases have rss feeds, most notably EBSCO. Check them out.

Steven Cohen has a lot to say on his librarystuff.net blog.

Professional Journals

As you know, one of my addictions is to professional journals where I am amazed by the gems of helpful hints, resources, and plain old good ideas that are shared. The April/May edition of LMC (Library Media Collection) is full of articles that 1) spur thinking or 2) confirm that we are on the right track. At our next meeting, I'll share some with you. Of special mention is Joyce Valenza's "A Few New Things" (not to us--we're doing so much!) and "'Old School Meet' School Library 2.0: Bump Your Media Program Into an Innovative Model for Teaching and Learning". Classroom Connect's April issue includes great ideas for livening up literature lessons and an assortment of other tips and treasures. It's available online at http://connectednewsletter.metapress.com/content/111m23380v2utvxu/fulltext.pdf.

I might have shared the article, "The Power of RSS" from Multimedia & Internet@Schools (January/February 2008) with you already. It's an easy-to-understand overview of RSS feeds and their use in the library setting. You have to set up an account to view it: http://www.mmischools.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=13387. I was especially intrigued by the idea of beginning a research dialogue with a student and setting him or her up with a mechanism to receive additional articles and resources as they become available.