A
23 Things friend asked me to visit her TLA presentation during TLA conference last week. I am glad because it was a great discussion of using things pre-K /12 and I saw some ideas that were new to me...and fun and exciting!
There was a group of private school librarians who were presenting 2.0 things that they had used with their students during the past year. Some of them work in schools where every student has access to a laptop and nothing on the internet is blocked. Others operate with similar roadblocks that the rest of us must endure. But everyone encouraged the audience to do what they could!
As a group, they realize that security, working within the context of existing tools, advertising issues on some sites, filters, and time are all things that have to be considered with learning new things and teaching them to students.
Some statements that stood out to me were:
"Try everything! Try a few things, but try something!"
"It is ok to fail."
"
Joyce Valenza for real people" --paying homage to the queen of library 2.0 matters, while recognizing that not all of us can do it at her level!
My friend presented the project that her 2nd grade students did with
Flat Stanley and tied it to a
Google maps activity. They mailed Flat Stanley to long distance family members and asked them to take him along on an adventure and send pictures back. Here is
a link to an
Animoto about the project.
Her 4th grade students studied about magazines and then created a
magazine cover using animals and other science topics as the themes for their magazines.
Here is an Animoto about them.
Another presenter uses
Library Thing to advertise the new books that have been added to the school's collection. If my notes are correct, she scans the bar code on the back of the book and that pulls up a cover which she adds to other titles to make a collage. The collage is placed in emails to students and teachers and she also prints out a copy for reference when students come in. They often refer to the books by cover rather than title! I am not familiar with this procedure myself, but I'm sure it something for which there is more info. She also writes about books in her blog
Print Matters.
Another librarian talked about the benefits of
Google docs, especially with middle school students who can't drive themselves to collaboration opportunities. She told the group that her students come form 28 zip codes!!...and to do group projects is often impossible because the students live so far apart. But Google docs eliminated some the problems. She did mention that Google docs dow not support PPT 2007, but they found that
Zoho docs does so when they need to, they use that resource as well.
A few more topics covered in the presentation included:
Creating a ning for historical people of importance. Group them according the time period. The students write profiles, etc. based on the individuals they are studying.
LinkBunch.com...bunch links under one link to make sharing easier.
Their
TLA conference handout Get Busy: Unique Challenges in Private Schools and Web 2.0 is not active yet, but if it does become available, I will hot link it here.
They know who they are, but here is a visual record of my all my right-hands from today. They insisted that I had to be part or there would be no visual record. I am proud to be among them even though I did grumble a bit!
