Between sessions I've been talking to librarians from across the state and hearing one heart-breaking and enraging tale after the next. One librarian's district has just make ALL of their librarians part-time-- involuntarily. A Philadelphia librarian spoke about a statistic she had to read nationally (because it wasn't found locally) that Philadelphia is the nation's leader in pregnant 10 and 11-year olds..and they are set to cut school nurses, instrumental music, school librarians, health classes and art. Every time two librarians are together you will hear blood-curling stories of essential services to children being heartlessly cut. One woman's small town has no library-- and all school librarians' jobs are on the chopping blog. WHERE WILL THOSE KIDS FIND BOOKS TO READ??
Some highlights from today's second session:
Karen's Top 10 Web 2.0 Tools-- check this out: http://pslaconf.wikispaces.com/
Helpful tools for educators:
* Facebook as an advertisement for the library program-- use it to connect to parents and students about the program, curricular connections, core content links, pictures and video that relate to things you are teaching. Create a FB page for your library. Be careful to be absolutely clean in what you post! Be aware of restrictions district-wide on the use of FB.
* Book Trailers-- look on the Teacher Librarian Ning for great examples of student-made book trailers. Be careful with copyright violations-- go to http://copyrightfriendly.wikispaces.com/ as a resource for copyright friendly images to use. Upload to Vimeo. See the PSLA wiki for more info on resources for images, kid-made book trailers or other uploading sites.
* goodreads sometimes has book discussion groups with authors, you can intro it to your kids and have them introduce you to their favorite authors, books, etc.
* online surveys-- surveymonkey.com and there are others to use too, googledocs lets you embed your surveys into other sites--- find out what kids are reading, what books they liked best, what they'd like to see offered at the library, (book purchase request), feedback on projects, pre-and post-assessments for content lessons, etc. You can teach kids about how to evaluate data with surveys, too-- what makes a good or bad question, is this a good reflection of the attitudes of a population, etc.
* glogster.edu as a pathfinder for all kinds of content areas-- vocab glogs, career research, literary glogs, etc. Link 10 glogs together to make one project so you have plenty of room on it and don't put too much stuff on each page. The .edu site limits the use...you might have to pay for extended numbers of students' accounts.
* twitter feed can be embedded in your page-- and you can send out info all the time to students and parents-- watch hashtags such as #tlchat, #edchat, #edtech, #psla11-- Joyce Valenza says twitter and Diigo make her appear super smart-- she gets to gain from other people's wisdom
* screencastomatic can help you make a screencast so you can have videos of you teaching stuff to kids, parents and staff: check out: Saddleback Library, McNeil Library, Tulsa Community College for examples of good screencasts. See Bekci Kelly's Screencast Page on the PALibrarians wiki. Zamzar will convert Youtube videos to videos you can download and upload to other sites. Khan Academy is an important and up-and-coming source.
No comments:
Post a Comment