At the Internet Librarian conference, Gary Price, (who now works for Ask.com) talked about some helpful websites for use with students. Newspaper Archive is now free to teachers, libraries, and students and includes Newspaper archives back to 1759!   www.newspaperarchive.com Exalead is a new search site which has some nice “advanced features” like searching for a phrase or helping you spell a word.  www.exalead.com Click on “advanced” to see those features. Clusty is a nice site for searching as well.  It has a simple screen, but […]

I’m watching a presentation on how to use Wikis for different “in-house” uses, like for posting school policies, sharing curriculum materials within a department, etc.   A wiki is like Wikipedia–a site where anyone can easily change, add, or edit it.  Some are passworded, and some are not.  A whole campus can use it as part of the intranet, or instead of the intranet, in order to facilitate communication across departments.   Several presenters talked about how their departmental shared folder areas on their networks were disorganized (Darren […]

I’m now sitting in a session on using Flickr www.flickr.com for libraries, but I see a lot of applications for schools.  Some of you may already use Flickr, which is a website that allows you to post photos and “tag” them by subject, share them, etc. They showed us some tools which have great applications for schools.  Most of the tools can be found at http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/ Fd’s Flickr Tools.  There are tools for making posters, magazine covers, movie advertisement posters, trading cards, etc.  For example, […]

I just attended a session on videoblogging and podcasting.   Although it’s easy enough to figure out what video blogging is, I hadn’t really thought about it that much. David King(of Topeka and Shawnee County Library) who has a website, www.DavidLeeKing.com/etc showed some examples of video blogs that woke me up to the kinds of creative projects our students could do(and are already doing, but not all in a school environment!).  This has so many applications for the classroom, as does podcasting. I have more details about […]

I went to several sessions today which focused on how our students are changing and need more media rich lessons.  One good session was about audiobooks and e-books. One great site for audiobooks is www.librivox.org.  It is a volunteer project with readers contributing books by reading aloud books from the public domain.  Your students could even volunteer to be a reader!  It has poetry, short works, and novels, and many classics are there.  This is a great and free tool. Microsoft Reader which is a […]

We just finished the first workshop on blogs, wikis, RSS and podcasts.  I found out about a really cool website, www.Rollyo.com.  It lets you as a teacher or the librarian set up a “list” of recommended websites for a particular type of project.  Then you can put the link on your website so students use a selected group of sites for their research.   I haven’t had time to look at it yet, but it sounds really useful and easy! I also saw a really neat […]

I’m attending the Internet Librarian conference and am going to be blogging “live” from the conference!   That way I can share things as I go with any of you on the staff who are interested before I forget them!  Second, I will have a record of things that I learned that I can refer back to.  The third reason is it seems like a fun experiment (although geeky!)   Follow along if you are interested!   Some of the sessions I’m going to attend at the conference […]