Not So Distant Future

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 when you sort, it groups the sites into categories so you don’t have as much to sort through.  Great for students!   www.clusty.com

There are a lot of map sites he recommended–for those of you into maps–try World Wind from Nasa  http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/ ,  Skyline Globe http://www.skylineglobe.com   or Ask.com’s new map features (which include a little animation of how to get somewhere on your route!)  www.ask.com

Gary Price keeps up with sites like these daily on his site www.resourceshelf.com.

Happy hunting! 

Technorati Tags: IL2006

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 Chase of Stony Brook University Library referred to the network folders as a woodpile–good luck finding anything!) and how they were using a wiki to reorganize all their documents in a more logical and shared way.

There are different wiki sites that you can use, like pbwiki.com, or jotspot.com, or the software Wikipedia uses, (Media Wiki).

If it is within a department, all of the members of the department can have the password and participate in adding content to the wiki, sharing materials, posting news of the day, working on a handout together, since multiple people can edit the document.  An added advantage is that no one person has the task of posting all the information.

This also has a lot of possibilities for classes, as a few of you who have tried wikis know.  It’s a way for you to be a “lazy teacher” as Ian Jukes put it and for the students to do the work building a knowledge base.  Wikipedia is the perfect example where contributers created the content, not the staff of Wikipedia.

Darren Chase shared a site I hadn’t seen before called WikiMatrix, where if you are REALLY into finding the best wiki software, compares all of them.  And there are many more than I realized.  http://www.wikimatrix.org/
He also commented that he never knew he would have a job where he got to say the word ”wiki” to an audience over and over and they took him seriously.

This is the last update from Internet Librarian, since I have to go catch my flight!  I’ll share more when I get back.

Technorati Tags: IL2006

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, in about 1 minute, I created this fake Magazine cover using a photograph I took yesterday.  The tool pulls in your photo and adds the information to make it look like a magazine–it’s very easy!  Here’s my “magazine cover.”

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/output/magazine989668.jpg

You can imagine all the possible applications for student projects, for classroom handouts you are creating, etc. etc.

The workshop was an hour, and this is just the tip of the iceberg on Flickr, but check it out if you haven’t before!

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 how to get started that I will share later, but to look at some clever videoblogs, check out this clever one he did about sidewalk art in Kansas City  http://davidleeking.com/etc/2006/07/sidewalk-art.html#links

(You may have to scroll up a little to see the picture of his face–click on it for the video)

Anyway, I’m sure all of us can imagine the creative content our students could come up with in a video (or just audio as a podcast) format.

It’s interesting having this conference here because the outside is so beautiful and peaceful and inside the conference center there are so many ideas and techie things floating around that it is almost overwhelming.

One thing I like about video blogging is because you can bring the outside in.  If I had a video camera, I’d show you what it looks like here, but instead I”ll bring in a photo.   Imagine it moving and there you have a videoblog.

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 free download, can also be used to download electronic books to your computer.  You can read the books from your computer or have them read to you(although it uses a “computer” voice).  There is a cost for some of the books;  however, it is less than a physical book would cost.  http://www.microsoft.com/reader/default.mspx

The International Children’s Digital Library is an online library with children’s books from all over the world, published in all different languages.  (a great site for foreign language teachers!)  There are three formats that you can read the books in and you can zoom into the pages to see them more easily.  http://www.icdlbooks.org/

The speakers also showed us these incredible “portable” book readers from the Follett company.

They are smaller than a mini-cassette and they come with little earbuds.  The little device contains one book in the player, and can be checked out from a library.  http://www.flr.follett.com/intro/playaway.html  Students just check them out and there is now downloading or player needed!

The speakers also talked about Itunes audiobooks, and they are having their students record audio booktalks that can be downloaded from Itunes.  Here is a link to all of the audiobooks available on Itunes. http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/audiobooks.html  Evidently Best Buy has a grant program, and the two librarians applied for a grant for four Ipods for their library so they could download audiobooks and check the Ipods out.  Great idea…

Just a few things that I learned today…  

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 example of using podcasting(which is really just a recording of a person talking) for booktalks that students can record and put up on website to share, or on the library’s website.    (They use Audacity software (audacity.sourceforge.net) and Lame software for this.)  All you need is a microphone and the internet.

Another cool idea I heard would be great for independent study students, and that was having the student write their paper on a wiki site.  Then you as the teacher could have a password and get in and read their paper as they went, offer comments and advice, and help them revise it.   I hadn’t thought of using a wiki that way.

There’s a lot to absorb, but I’ll come back with a lot of great ideas for getting students interested via some of these projects.  The next presentation is on e-books and audiobooks.

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 have to do with wikis and blogs.  There are also a couple on using electronic books(ebooks) or Ipods in the library.

Another interesting thread is how Google (especially) is changing searching and some of the changes in how search sites work.    Google has a new feature called Google Scholar that allows you to search academic journals and buy the articles you need(These articles are the type of thing you would use in college classes, etc.)   Right now, colleges and libraries pay for databases that search these.   So there is a panel discussion on the effects of this.    It’s starting to turn the search world upside down!

I’ll post ideas or links as I learn more!