Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Thing 4 You tube

This is a great way to share videos. I learned that you tube was started in 2005 and 70 million videos were viewed daily. The mega giant, google, owns it.

Last year my speech teacher wanted to use some academy award acceptance speeches in her classroom. We played around uploading the speeches into zamzar so that they could be viewed in our school district. It worked great and the kids enjoyed it.

I can see how it could be used by kids that want to use videos that they make as a project. The kids watch you tube every day and are very familiar with how to use it. They would love to use this application with various projects.

Thing 3-- Like Skype--free, zip,zero, nada


I have known about skype for awhile. We researched it because some friends of ours take groups of people to Israel every year and they were complaining about the high cost of calling over there to talk to their guide. My husband showed them how to use it.


The best thing about it is it is FREE. My son and his wife live in Kentucky and we are going to have a first grandbaby in July, so the web cam feature is a must for us to be able to keep up with the baby every day.


I think it would be agreat idea for student who are out of school for a long period to be able to join their class using skype. Also classes from all over the world would be able to communicate with each other.


I looke at a few of the other services and found the EVA phone but it limits the use to 5 minutes per call. Gizmo is a free service that can create a conference room but you would have to have the connecting phone number handy.

Thing 2 Word play, and voki

I really liked this "thing" and the new 2.0 items that I explored.
Wordle and word shift were similar because you could point out the most prominate words in a speech or text. It is a fun way to play with text and use with word relationships. I practiced with putting in words that had to deal with the French Revolution. These words could be used projected with an LCD to introduce a unit.

A glog would be a wonderful way to change the way a poster can be made for a project. I think the kids would like this idea much better than the old traditional poster---and it was fun to do.

I made a voki and I attempted to add it to my blog. We will see if it actually worked. It didnt work. I will try again later.

I went to Bookr and made 2 books. I was alittle frustrated with this program because of the picture choices that I had and I thought it was a little hard to use. The pictures scrolled by so fast and they were hard to see unless you added them to the book. Then I attempted to add them to my blog but was unsuccessful.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

Thing 1---registration for the beach


I am all registered for this second go around to learn new techniques that will help challenge the 21st century student. As librarians we must be on the cutting edge ready to teach not only our students, but also the teachers on the new ideas that can be used in the classroom.


I liked the viedo that showed how the students of today can take charge of their learning by using connectivism and build a network to use for learning. Kids of today are so used to computers that they learn best when they can use that computer. I loved the idea of searching for articles and blogs on the topics that they are researching. Then the student can create his own blog on what he has learned so he can get comments from others. I especially loved the idea that they can download lectures from college professors and get information from the best teachers in the world.


I liked the words to describe the student's teacher; words like modeler, learning conceirge, change agent, and my favorite,learning architect. I think the librarian can play a major role in this learning process by showing the student where to find all of the information he is needing. The teacher and the librarian are a team that can plan and then execute the learning problem that will be presented.