Audio Manipulation

We worked with audio and I learned how to use audacity which I had never used before. But we had trouble getting it to post to the sandbox wiki. We mthought it might be that several people were on at once, but that still didn't work. OH WEll----i WILL TRY AGAIN.

Image Manipulation

We found images from Discovery Education and Flickr creative common and then uploaded the pictures into powerpoint to learn how to resize the image. I had never used Irfan before and I thought it was so cool. Now I know where my son had taken images and turned them into sepia. I hd done the image generators before and had created a traading card. This time I did a magazine cover and I had trouble getting the bullets to work.

photostory--olympics

olympics are so exciting this year. see this photostory. Well, it would not download. I will try again later. The kidecause it is funs will love working wiwth this b

THING 23 I'm done---HALLELEJAH

HALLELUJAH-----I'm done, I'm done, I'm done.

1. Favorites. There were several: I liked photo story even though I had trouble with it. I think the kids would really like working with this. I liked google docs because I could see how much the kids would use this to share info when working on group projects. Out of the awards list, I liked the biblio.com site because I know I will use this to find out of print books. I have several IB teachers that always want these hard to find books. I like wiki's because of the many ways that students and teachers could collaborate. I loved the image generator and I have already shared this idea with several teachers. I like rollyo because I can use this to create lists of websites when teaching my research units.
2. I love to learn new things. My mother always told me that I would make a good career student. I did learn so much from this experience and had fun too.
3. I was surprised about how much was out there to learn. Who knew that there was so many web 2.0 things to go through. I was also surprised that I could do all of it. At times I was frustrated because it seemed overwhelming but I just took it one thing at a time. (just what we tell our students to do)
4. I liked the program format. I really liked that I could do this on my own timing.
5. I would do this again. It was a challenge and fun at the same time. I will probably do it all over again this summer for more hours.
6. I really did have a good time. One word---FUN

THING 22 Ning a ling

Ok--just plain nings. I learned that they are a social networking tool. I really was aware of these things, I just didn't know that nings was the name. I have 2 boys and a daughter-in-law so I have seen their my space and facebook pages a lot. I found that it really is a good way to talk to my one son who can spend hours showing me "things" on his page and on others. I have learned a lot just from watching him. Both of those sites are very interesting because you can find out alot of information.

I did search High School Teacher Librarians and zeroed in on the group section. I found one for librarians that are in the IB program. This group could be very helpful to me as IB schools are rare. There are only 4 in Houston. I also loked at the Texas School Librarians. I was surprised to see Vaughn Branom and Dr. Bishop as members. I did join. I saw something interesting on book trailers and could see a use for those but alas----it is youtube which is blocked!!!

THING 21 Podcasts and Audio Books

I did it-----I had my doubts. I created a photo story about dictators. It is very crude attempt, but it is done. I chose dictators because my IB European history teacher does a unit on dictators. I admit that my LA sis did come down to my office and showed me how to do it, but when I got home and started on my own it became a little harder. I had trouble getting the microphone to work so it doesn't sound very good. Also I couldn't get a blank screen to come up so that I could type the opening. I will had to ask my sis what I did wrong.

Also I did look at audacity and played around on it a little bit. I was so surprised about all of the languages that were listed at the bottom. Who would have thought that Basque would be listed.

OK----I have had a problem adding the photo story. I will try again later.

THING 20 Explore You Tube and Teacher Tube

I did not know that you tube was create by 3 former pay pal employees. Google bought it for 1.65 billion--yes B is for billion. This site is so popular that more than 100 million videos are watched every day. I was aware of you tube and I have watched a few of them but I had never surfed around on the site. I searched libraries and looked at a couple but it was overwhelming so I went to teacher tube. I saw a great video on 21 century computing. I also saw " A New Way to Publish- the Rise of Web 2.0: It pointed out that learning was moving beyond the classroom. Children can learn from places all over the world. I looked up world history and saw lots of great stuff I can share with my teachers. Then I started looking up other areas ans was so surprised by the sheer number of videos out there. My teachers will love it.

THING 19 Web 2.0 Awards List

I really like going through all of these awards but again you can get lost in them and time passes without you even being aware. I went through alot of them but I found a few that I really liked.

Biblio.com is a great site that lets you look for books that are out of print and then gives you a source to buy from. I have a couple of history teachers that are always asking me for books that are out of print but they still think that the books are essential for research for their course. they will be thrilled that I found this site.

Furl is a social networking site that allows you to share and explore people's favorite sites that they have bookmarked. You can search through the the site. I search books and found over 51,000 sites. I think I should have narrowed the search.

Writeboard is similar to Google docs. It is a sharing site that is web based. It lets you save every edit, go back to any piece, and compare changes. This site has tools that let you edit, export as plain text or an e-mail. You can invite as many people as you want to collaborate on a writeboard.

Wet Paint is a free wiki website. It is easy to add content ans has an easy edit tool bar. It works like a word processor. You can even add photos, and you tube videos. I liked the idea of a school PTO using this site to keep people up to date on what is happening at the school. It could share fund raising plans and events. It could post meetings, create volunteer sign up, post photos, and have attachments for all forms such as membership. Also school clubs could use this same idea.

THING 18 On line Productivity Tools

Open Office was frustrating to work with. It took so long to download and then I had trouble with it. It took 3 tries to get it to work right. But once it was done I could see that it could be a good thing. The great thing about it is that it is free to use. Which could be a great thing to people that can't afford the price for Microsoft office. The program has about the same stuff as microsoft and I found it easy to use. One of the tools is Impress which will let you use 2D and 3D clip art, special effects,and animation. It also has easy to use drawing and diagramming tools. Draw allows you to communicate with graphics and diagrams. I really like the old appleworks when I used their draw program so maybe this will take its place. Of course it has a writing tool as well as spreadsheets like excel, and presentations like power point. Information can be transferred between all of the 5 office products.

Goggle docs is a great place for students to save work. They could then have access to a file similar to their norway folder. This way they could access their work from home and would not have to save to a flash drive. Another good thing about is tool is other students can share and work on the same document. You can also publish your work online as a web page. This is just one of the many things that Google has to offer. They truly will rule the world some day.

THING 17 SANDBOX WIKI

When I was a little girl you could always find me outside playing. I had a sandbox and loved building cities and digging to China. This learning 2.0 sandbox is a different kind of playown the sandbox you can leave comments either on your own or respond to someone else's ideas This way you could build upon any type of sharing. It is fun and the kids and adults would enjoy using it. I did get a little frustrated when Itried to link to a couple of pages. I still am not sure that it worked.

THING 16 Wiki Wiki

Wiki's are a great way for people to collaborate. The name comes from a Hawaiian phrase, wiki wiki, which indicates something fast. Everyone on the planet should be familiar with Wikipedia which was my first exposure to a wiki. All the kids at school talk about going to wikipedia first even though I try to tell them that sometimes the information may be changed.
I like the "you tube" video that made it real easy to understand the concept. The video is called "Wikis in plain English" This shows a video that uses a camp out as an example of how a wiki works. It is cute and easy to understand. I would use this video as an intro for my teachers.
I looked at several of the examples of library wikis that I thought were useful. One of the best ones was "Must Have Graphic Novels Secondary" that came from the teacherlibrarianwiki
FrontPage site. It is a great place to get ideas on what graphic novels people are talking about.
This site has lots of places you can go for help with selection. Another site that I thought was unbelievable is "Library Success: a Best Practices Wiki" It has any and everything in it that a librarian could ever need. It has such things as reader's advisory, reference service,
selling your library, management and leadership, materials, selection, training, technology, and even information sharing.
There were several examples of how a wiki could be used in the classroom that I liked. Teachers could really get great ideas from these sites:

Sample School Wiki
Sample Literary Circle Wiki
Sample AP World History

THING15 Web 2.0, library 2.0, and the Future of Libraries

I like the idea of changing the "mind set" of librarians and libraries. I am from the old school; when I started, we had card catalogs and research was done with books. We have come a long way baby! Now we are in an explosion of technology that almost grows faster than we can keep up.
According to the video " A Vision of Students Today", kids will only read 8 books but they will read 2300 web pages and read 1281 facebook paages. They spend 3 1/2 hours on line. They write only 42 pages for class but will write 500 e-mails. These students of today must be multitaskers. They are also preparing for jobs that may not exist right now. I can't read a book and listen to music at the same time. But thses kids have grown up with all of this technology around them. They adapt quickly to new things. I go to my 24 year old sons when I have a problem with the computer.
Dr. Wendy Schultz said in her article "To a Temporary Place in Time," that libraries are communities. She futher says that in a 2.0 world that the "library is everywhere, barrier free, and participatory." We the librarians will become the "experienced tour guides." I like that---we can be seen as helping travelors as they begin to chart their jouney.

THING 14 TECHNORATI

According to Wikipedia Technorati indexes over 112 million weblogs. The name points to the technological version of literati or intellectuals. I listened to the people of technorati talk about their site. They like to think that they track conversations. They are interested in what a regular person has to say for example rather than a critic. they feel that this site lets people connect with one another. One of the men thought it was about the human experience. I enjoyed looking at the video of all of these people talking about their site.

I searched for school library learning 2.0 and found 1652 results. I looked at a few but to see all of them would be daunting. I also found lots of posts on the library 2.0 "things" that we are doing here in Spring Branch. In fact I found a couple of our people in the blog section. I also looked at the top 100 blogs, top searches, top 100 blogs by authority, and top videos. again, I got lost in this site with several hours flying by. Oh well, back to the real world.

Thing 13 Del.icio.us

This is not just a place to find delicious food although you can search the food tags
Del.icio.us is a place that lets you oraganize your bookmarks or any other other places you want to save. This site looks easy to use and is nicely put together. I liked the "tags to watch" area. I looked in the library, technology, travel, and google tags. I got caught up in the google and recipes tags. You could lose hours here.
Another place I looked was Digg which is the same kind of site but in this one the user is in charge of which sites are the most popular. You can rate story with a thums up or down button. You can contribute by submitting an interesting article, video, or podcast. It will appear in "upcoming stories". Another feature is a friends share folder that is kinda like my space or facebook.

THING 12 ROLLYO

I started out very slow with this site so I looked at what others had done with their Rollyo. After that I got excited. I began to think of how many times that I had worked with teachers to find web sites for a particular lesson. I had to type all of it up and hand it out to each student. Rollyo would be the perfect place to put all of these sites and the kids would love it. The teacher or I could put these rollyos on our web sites. One of my history teachers is a big library user and I am always working with her on research. We just finished working on a World War II unit so I thought I would creat a World War II site on the Rollyo. It was fun and easy to do. I could do searches from there such as "home front" and "women in the war". I plan on showing several teachers how to use this.

I still like to use I Keep Bookmarks as well. It kinds works on the same principal. Several people can add to this site at the same time if several teachers are working on the same unit.

Thing 11

Library Thing

Ok--don't throw me into the briar patch!!! I could get lost in this one. It is just books, books, books--my favoorite thing. I loved it because it is a site for book lovers. I started making my list and it could go on forever. I liked the Zeitgeist to see all of the places you could go such as 25 most reviewed books, top 25 authors, top books, and others. I got lost in the groups, so many to see and read. All in all a most excellent site. I am now reading the new John Grisham boo, The Appeal. Also I added 2 of the new James Patterson books. He is my new craze. I love reading his books.

Thing 10

I had some trouble getting some of these sites to work so I got frustrated. The Sites were blocked from school and when I tried at home I had trouble again. I will try again tonight. I did use the Image Chief to make a sign which was fun. I had already made a trading card with another "thing" and I shared that with my 7th grade teachers to use with their Texas History charactors unit. The teachers were excited and they thought the kids would have alot of fun using it. They plan on using this technology.

Thing 9

I found that there were lots of things to go through with this"thing". I am not sure how many of them I would actually use, but I did like a few of them. Bloglines was easy to use and you can search for your interests or can create your rss feeds like google reader. It seemed to be the easiest to use of all of them. Of course google rules the world and google blog search is easy to use. Everyone knows how to navigate through any of the google sites. Technorati was intersting but it seems to have so much stuff on its home page---just lots to go through. Cool Cat Teacher was a good site that I would recommend to my teachers as a helpful place to go. I liked School Library Blogs as a specific place for librarians to use.I did not like Topix because the comments seemded to get to radical and I got tired of it quickly. I though Syndic 8 was hard to use. I got bogged down in this going through all of these sites. But I can see the usefulness of some of them.

Thing 8

RSS feeds. I never really knew what these were. I had heard of them but had never explored. Now I realize what that symbol was. My school PTA president sends her newsletter as an RSS feed. Then I realized that MSNBC and CNN etc. were all RSS.
1. What do you like about RSS and newsreaders.-----It is so cool. I like that you can get up to date information.
2. How do you think you might be able to use this technology? I opened a google reader account and started 2 folders, one for news and one for blogs. Now I don't have to search every day for all of this info. I get a notice when something new comes up.
3. How can libraries use RSS or take advantage of this new technology? You could make your website or blog an RSS feed. The teachers at a school can have their students up to date on their websites.
Really cool stuff.

Thing 7

GOOGLE is taking over----it is everywhere. I had fun looking at all of the google things that were listed, but I know there are even more than those on the google site. I played with all of them. I really liked the google notebook because I could see how it could be used with kids working in groups especially. They could all search and then share the notebooks. What a great way to get you research in order. We have used google scholar here for several years. since we are an IB school, our kids do pretty heavy duty research for all of their classes plus the big extended essay that everyone must write. It is a 4000 word essay and has to have extensive research. Who doesn't love google earth. I see kids playing on it all of the time. I have seen teachers use it in geography lessons and I am sure it could be used in lots of other areas as well.

Thing 6

This site had lots of stuff in it and I kinda got lost going through all of it. Time can get away from you as you surf around. Mapr is very interesting. I had seen this used with a terrorist site that uses the map to show what terrorist activities are happening around the world at any given time.The site that lets you create magazine covers was interesting. Back in high school my boys had to creat a "man of the year" magazine cover and inside articles for a history class. I wish they could have used this site. I am going to attempt to make a mosaic using the pictures that I took when we took our IB students to use the Rice University library. This could be used to promote our IB program. So many thigns to go through ---so little time. I came back and made a trading card for my 7th grade teachers to see. I had introduced this to them to use with their Texas history charactors unit. It was fun and easy to do.

Thing 5

I have played around on Flickr and learned quite a bit. A friend had actually used Flickr to share some photos that she had taken at a wedding of a fellow teacher. She was able to share these pictures with all of the other teachers. I played with a download of a picture of our school and it was easy. I even added a tag. I looked at the library groups and explored some of the posts of libraries all over the world. I could see how teachers could use this site to share photos that students were working on and also could share field trip photos. There are probably lots of other ideas that I haven't thought of. Come on some of you out there---what have you thought of?

thing 4

I have registered my blog and have begun, but today I already had trouble remembering my username and password. It is hard having so many log-ins so I must now remember to start a folder so I remeber how to do all of this. I guess I am having to many senior moments. Plus it has been a week since I started my blog. Oh well---I will have to write every thing down from now on.

Thing # 3

Well I didn't think I would get here, but here it is avatar and all. The avatar was fun, but too many choices--ha. Maybe it would have been more fun to have on a ball gown or a ski outfit or better yet---jammies. I went with jeans because that is what I am in when at home or traveling-- have to be comfy. My daughter-in-law blogs all of the time and that is how we keep up with their lives since they are so far from home. I always wondered how she did it, now I know.

Thing #2

I have started to create my blog and this is my first post about Thing # 2. I was not a big fan of Steven Covey so this is hard for me to try to pick a favorite but I guess I would choose # 1 as my hardest one to do. I am not a goal setter. I usually just go with the flow. I think I would choose # 2 as my easiest one to do. I love to learn new things and read all of the time. I take a Bible study course on Tuesday nights that I find interesting and challenging.