PK6 Media

Overall, The 23 Things has proven to be a very good experience.  Even though, we have only scratched the surface of what Web 2.0 has to offer, the online course has given me the basic knowledge necessary to continue learning on my own. 

Learning about social networking will definitely open new doors.  I plan on using many of the resources and tools we explored to develop or improve lesson plans.  As mentioned in my voice thread, it is our responsibility to embrace changes and model best practices to help our students develop the skills they will need to face the future.

Paige and Shelley, thank you for giving us the opportunity to become better learners.

After spending 30-40 minutes exploring Classroom 2.o, I started noticing valuable forums that dealt with teacher-librarian issues.  Even thought limited in numbers, the forums focusing on lesson plans included quality discussions.

It was not until I opened the wiki-based list contained in Educational Networking(social networking technologies for educational purposes) that I found two Ning networks under the category “Library”.

• Library 2.0: Librarians and the Internet, Social Media, and Web 2.0 (4,925 members)
• TeacherLibrarianNing: A Community for teacher-librarians and other educators (4,761 members)

TeacherLibrarianNing created by Joyce Valenza proved to be the most valuable network with a 365 “Elementary School Librarians” member special-interest group and forums ranging from storytelling to databases.

The Google UK School site recommended by Free Technology for Teachers offers great ideas for integrating Google Earth and Google Maps into your exiting curriculum.  Each lesson plan, developed for the primary (ages 7-11) and secondary (ages 11-14) classroom students, provides a lesson plan and activity sheets downloadable in both pdf and word formats.

The site provides 8 lesson plans for the primary and 13 lesson plans, divided in 3 sub-categories (geography, history, and citizenship) for the secondary classroom students.

After spending approximately 1 1/2 hour on Pageflakes, I am still debating whether I could use this tool on an on-going basis.  At this time, I am more comfortable using pageflakes as a personal portal with a few basic flakes and links to websites I use on a daily basis.  Another tool, I have yet to discover, might better serve that purpose.

I will need more time to determine whether I can use Pageflakes as a student or professional portal without duplicating information already available on my blog and in my Reader.

Google Docs provide the basic functionality necessary to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.  Google Docs is most useful when used as a collaborative tool (multiple users updating one document) or when a document needs to be accessible from any computer.

Teachers can use Google Docs to collaborate on lesson plans or evaluations while students can use Google Docs to complete team projects from home.

TeacherTube provides some great ideas for classroom projects… but YouTube remains my favorite… by a mile.  I love the 2-3 minute educational videos that can provide a visual for younger students.   Here are some ideas to supplement your traditional lesson plans.  Example: St.Patrick Day: Ireland, Irish Music by Andre Rieu,  Traditional Irish Harp Music, River Dance, Fun. 

If you are worried about projecting “YouTube” videos on your screen, press the “freeze” button, on your projector control, while you navigate to the video of your choice.  Once you have found your video, make the video full screen to remove any unwanted information, then press “Freeze” again to play the video.  Have fun!

 Promote reading while having fun…   

.

Producing a “bare bones” podcast is quite simple and can be used in the classroom in conjunction with a number of lesson plans.  Students can be recorded while reading aloud, presenting book reviews, or performing reader’s theater workshops to improve fluency skills.  Keep older recordings to show improvement.  Students will love to hear how much they have improved.

Lost track of time… again…  After almost 2 hours, I have only sampled a small fraction of the podcast categories available.  I am intrigued by the Florida Department of Education podcasts presented under Itunes U -> Teaching & Education -> K-12 and intend to continue my exploration when I have a few minutes of free time.  

Here are the podcasts I subscribed to:  1) Itunes -> Poscast -> Education -> K1-12 -> Free Audiobooks for Children (produced by Let Me Tell You A Tale) 2) Itunes -> News & Politics -> CBS News -> 60 Minutes – Full Audio (produced by CBS Radio New)   My subscriptions will more than likely change as I discover new areas of interest.

While exploring ”Additional Resources”, I discovered Learning in Hand, a great website maintained by Tony Vincent.  Under the podcast category, Our City Podcast invites students from around the globe to submit a recording about the city they live in. It is a great educational idea that would integrate well in our Global Curriculum.

Professional Use:  Even though my initial reaction is to continue to use the high quality tools I have learned to rely on over the past few years, LibraryThing introduces new information, such as recommendations and statistics, that can prove useful for collection development and lesson plans.

Classroom Use:  None.  According to LibraryThing: “The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) severely restricts what information can be collected from children under 13. For this reason, children under 13 are prohibited from using LibraryThing.”

Personnal Use:  I like the fact that members and LibraryThing, based on the collective intelligence of the various libraries, can make book recommendations.  Examples of recommendations include:  Member recommendations – Special Recommendations – Special sauce recommendations! - Books with similar tags, People with this book also have…, etc.

Delicious!!! You made my day!!!  For the last few years, I have had to add the same websites to my ”favorites”… on my work computer and the computer connected to our projector.  Keeping the two “favorites” lists in sync has proven to be a challenge.   Delicious solved this issue in the few minutes it took to learn this simple tool.