2010 Edublog Awards

The 2010 Edublog nominations are now underway!  You can nominate your favorite educational blogs here.  My nominations:

Best Individual Blog:  Adventures of a Guybrarian

Best Educational Webinar Series:  Michelle Luhtala: Using Emerging Technology to Advance Your School Library Program

Best Library Blog:  Doug Johnson, Blue Skunk 

Best Resource Sharing:  Free Tech 4 Teachers (I'm torn on this... he tends to win it a lot, and I don't really agree with the way he's commercialized his site, but when you're good you're good, and he's making obvious efforts to promote only commercial sites he feels are useful, sooo....)_

Make Parent Evenings Interactive

Our 5th grade teacher came to me yesterday asking about using the library space for her PYP presentations to parents.  Of course that was fine with me, but in the nature of these things, talk continued and I learned she was interested in  running a Power Point slide show of student photos.

Never one to let that one slip by, I suggested some other options and eventually we decided on something I think will be pretty cool.

We are going to do a quick video interview with each student talking about their project and what they learned in the process of doing it. We will load each video clip into VoiceThread and project that in a loop. (Or try to loop it--I need to research that!  If not, I'll be there to keep restarting it.)

On a separate, nearby computer set up with a headset, we'll load up the VoiceThread in a generic account (since most parents won't have VoiceThread accounts), and allow parents to comment on their child's (or another child's) presentation/video.

Great encouragement and feed back for the students, fun for the parents (I hope!), and, of course, completely embeddable on the school website to promote your program.

Google for Librarians

Want some specific ideas for Google in the library?  Well, Google has a periodic newsletter geared especially towards that.  You can find back issues here.

Live Blogging: iFollett Workshop

Attending the iFollett workshop in Macao.  I'll post interesting tidbits as they pop-up and elaborate on them later.

8:45:  Chris Smith, from Shambles.net, introduced us to Titanpad.  Powered by EtherPad (which I've blogged about before), it's a tool for setting up back channel chats for classes, workshops, etc.  Very powerful, and a great way to monitor and adjust, field student questions, etc.

10:40:   Ann Krembs--our job as librarians is to be risk-takers.  Technology is kids' language, and we need to learn it.

LOC photostream on Flickr.

11:00:  Edistorm--Wallwisher on steroids.
            Student Interactives from Read/Write/Think
            Kerpoof:   digital storytelling tool
            TypeWithMe:  similar to EtherPa; real-time collaborative writing
           ArtPad:  collaborative drawing

Mental Health Break

High speed video of popcorn popping. Awesome.

Documentaries Just Got a Bit Easier

A heads-up from my friend, MaryBeth.

Thanks to a partnership between the LOC,   and the Schools of Education at the College of William and Mary and the University of Kentucky, the search for primary sources to include in U.S. History documentaries became a little bit easier.

The group compiled a set of copyright-free documentary kits on eleven different topics, with more coming soon.  Each set includes primary source documents and media, and focuses around a research question. For example, the Civil Rights kit asks the question: "How did the actions of young people after the Brown decision help continue the struggle for civil rights?" whereas the kit on Chinese immigration asks "How was a national identity constructed by the American reaction to Chinese immigration?"

Personally, I think their questions need some work.  I would prefer to see research questions forcing students to develop an argument within their documentaries, rather than just reporting.   Simply removing the "how" from the questions above would improve them.  "How" merely requires a list, while "did" asks students to take a stance and defend it with evidence. Much higher level of thinking!

Even better, of course, would be to work with students to develop their own research questions.

Nevertheless, the kits are useful, if somewhat limited in topics at the moment; one hopes they will continue to develop more and more kits!

On the Road to Borneo...

It occurred to me, I posted that I was competing to present at the EARCOS conference, but never posted whether I was selected or not.  Whoo-hoo!  I'm going!  I'm definitely looking forward to it.  If nothing else, I'm sure that, after 6 months of weather well below zero, I'll be ready for the tropics!

Coming soon:  I'm creating a  test  to use with students pre and post research training.  I want to start documenting what (and whether!) they've learned.  Will post the Google form when it's done.