List, list, oh list…

A super organized friend of mine told me about 43 Things, a website that asks folks what they want to do with their lives, mostly the things they want to learn.  The goal: to make a list, to get inspired, to share your progress with others. In the spirit of collaboration using Web 2.0 tools, I was thinking about what a school librarian’s version would include to inspire and engage teachers and students.
My list, SO FAR:

1. Create a Wiki Booklist (PB Wiki for Education) for summer reading.  Teachers could attach files with study guides and questions.  Reviews and video trailers could be linked to grab the readers’ attention.

2. Move “literature circles” to classroom blogs.  Blogs are tried and true forms of interaction which motivate students to think, read, write and share!  If you don’t have a blog feature on your school website, check out Wordpress.

3. Podcast booktalks or book reviews via Bookwink,  Just One More Book or Voicethread.

4. Use Flickr to celebrate student art and activities or set up a student gallery.

5.  Do a survey and communicate with your learning community.  Embed a survey on your blog, wiki or web site.  Google has the most robust (and free) survey tool around!

OMG! What would you do if…

you met the Jonas Brothers!?*…NPR’s lead story today is “Take Our Survey: Are There too Many Surveys?”  Interesting overview of the science of surveys, how they impact human behavior, data crunching and truthfulness of respondents.   Surprisingly, I find that students love, love, love surveys!  Ah, their 15 minutes of fame!   If you click onto almost any kid/teenager website you will find a whole bunch of surveys ranging from single-questions about celebs, music, fashion, issues (Rhianna/Chris Brown) to longer surveys/quizzes about pop culture stuff.  It takes me back to my teen years when I used to hide quizzes from Tiger Beat and True Confessions magazines under my bed!  It was good to know I wasen’t such a dork!  Seeing the excitement of our students taking the Digital Native survey is neat.  I would definitely add this to my teacher’s toolbox and have students create their own as assessments or research & development of projects.  And… what would YOU do if you met the Jonas Brothers?

X grabs our attention!

X-games, X-Men, A/X – you know…all this pop culture stuff that uses “X” to shock us. Well, I recently stumbled upon Xtranormal, a website that invites the user to play, create and communicate.  Currently in beta, there are four different sets of characters that can be selected using a free account. (They look a little like those Playmobile people my kids used to play with), Once signed on, you begin to type the dialog. You can have a one character monologue or a two character dialog. In addition to typing the dialog, you can give the characters various expressions and actions, change camera angles, and add music.  Looks like fun for a language arts classroom or history project.

“If you can type, you can make movies.”  Go ahead, you know you want to try it!…

Road tested…

Sure, we’re all excited about these Web 2.0 tools, but we need the ones with the “Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval,” already road tested for your classroom.  In short, we want the quick and dirty version of what new cool tool you’re using and why you love it.  Enter NJ Tech Teacher Musing, a neat blog I unearthed that gives us a coolWeb 2.0 tool and a short explanation (lesson plan, really) on how she used it with her class.  In this entry she discusses Chatzy for a unit on Internet Safety.  Scan through it for some good ideas and be sure to check out the comments that add to the conversation.  The blog is organized, clean, professional; go ahead and book mark it right now.

Respect yo!

Lest we think these Web 2.0 tools just “showed up” in our teacher’s toolbox one day, let’s give a shoutout to the tech gurus who packed the toolboxes AND remembered to also include the instruction manual.  I’m talking about people like Alan November, Tim Wilson (Savvy Technologist), wonderwoman Joyce Valenza, Will Richardson and numerous others.  These folks have sharpened the proverbial “technology saws” and shown us the awesome educational power of these Web 2.0 “Killer Apps.”  Who are your tech gurus?

You say tomato….

and I say tah-mah-toe.  One of the valuable insights we explored tonight with our student survey was grownupspeak v. kidspeak.  Ahh…interesting stuff and well worth revisiting for our survey questions. So, at this point, we are NOT calling the whole thing off…In fact, we’re more than a little bit interested in 

How Kids See the World:

• - The Web is always on.
• - The Web is mobile.
• - Google has always been around, and is the core source of search information.
• - Cell phones are the default phone.
• - Apple TV, Netflix, and the Web are where shows and movies come from.
• - iPods are where music comes from.
• - Everything is play-on-demand. Nothing is appointment-based.
• - Most all software is web-based.
• - We share pictures and movies with relatives always.
• - We never get lost (GPS).
• - We buy what we want (Amazon).
• - We learn things from our friends (news via social networks).

Barrel of Monkeys

I left class tonight with lots of good feelings.  Lots of brainstorming, sharing, collaborating and fruitful dialogue among the MAIT-ees.  I seem to thrive on this kind of back and forth, sharing ideas, questions, problem-solving and discussion.  I loved hearing about Jill and Marc’s projects with storytelling tools and student writing.  And, as luck would have it, I came across this new site.  And I’m the first to admit, that the site name caught my eye almost at once.  So, I had to check it out -One Million Monkeys Typing .

On this new community story-telling site, members collaborate on writing a story (perhaps even a novel), without the pressure or obligation of ever completing the story by themselves. Founded on the simple premise “read, write, publish”, the project encourages members to create new segments for “story trees”. Before beginning a new story, you must first contribute to a few existing stories. Once you’ve become part of the writing community, you receive permission (or in One Million Monkey terms, a “seed”) to start your own story tree.

Sounds like fun!  Lets all jump in!

Mush! Mush! Mush!

I was absolutely turned-on and fired-up over Amy M’s Iditarod lesson!  Loved donning the winter gear to get us in “Alaska mode.”  I was feeling all “Maverick-y,” wink, wink…  Its amazing to me that one nugget of information (we all knew it was a dogsled race in Alaska) could have the potential to get a class full of adults excited and talking and asking questions and impressed about the LAST GREAT RACE!  How much fun!  I want to be in Amy’s class, really and truly!  Talk about motivation!  And I loved seeing the student’s work and what they chose to include for their project. Constructivism at its best – an interesting lesson that opened my eyes to how one teacher managed to integrate technology (web site and Power Point) into a truly wonderful and inspiring lesson.  I went home and asked my husband what he knew about the race.  After he went on a very sarcastic and clever rift about Sarah Palin and her Iditarod run ( where  she turned down all kinds of ”support”), he told the story of Balto (nice enrichment lesson with this link, Amy M) …do y’all remember that?  Bravo Amy M! 

Tell me a story…

Okay, the cat is out of the bag (or out of the hat…)…we are going to play with digital storytelling in Prof. Ackerman’s next class.  Very excited about this because I want to dig deeper into VoiceThread, Animoto and those other cool digital storytelling tools.  I just stumbled upon a website from MIT Media Labs (the same people who brought you siftables), called Scratch.  Those genius geeks never cease to amaze me.   And I’m not being snooty here…I want to come back as a genius geek!  So, for now, Ill settle for “Book Nerd.”  The MIT Media Lab seems to be like a playground for smart, creative, fun, interesting and dynamic folks who play and brainstorm and invent stuff!  I only hope the generation we are growing now will still experience the wonder of authentic, messy, mudpie play - and not the “sitting in front of a screen” or having books and toys that “talk to you” kind of play.  This Book Nerd  can dream, can’t she?

A place for everything…

and everything in its place.  Jill didn’t have to persuade me too much on the wonder of graphic organizers.  After all, librarians are the Wizards of Organization! It must be all those good old-fashioned library school courses in  indexing, MARC record tagging (NOT a new concept to Librarians), cross-referencing and “doing the Dewey” all around the stacks.  Isn’t it great when we can use these organization tools to cluster, group, map, brainstorm, organize, and create hierachies, relationships and families?  So simple, and yet so effective!  VISUAL THINKING at its BEST!