My Very First Podcast!

I am very excited to announce that we are beginning our podcasting programs here at The Unquiet Library!  We will be available on iTunes later this week (check back for more info on this!), and you can also view us at Podcast Blaster. 

You are also welcome to listen to our audio MP3 files we use to create our podcasts at our media center podcast page!  We will be updating our podcasts in the next few weeks, so tune in to hear exciting tutorials, announcements, book reviews, poetry readings, and interviews! 

Students Find Social Bookmarking Del.icio.us!

Well, I did not have time to do my quizlet today—we have been covered up with classes—but I just got the ultimate affirmation from a student in the 7th period class that is researching the Jazz Age today!  After she set up her own del.icio.us account and started bookmarking resources, I heard a student exclaim, “This is the new MySpace!”

You know you have made an impression with a tool if they compare it to MySpace! 

Students Get a Taste of Del.icio.us

Today Ruth and I introduced our 11th Jazz Age Research Pathfinder to Ms. Pickart’s 11th Honors American Literature/Composition classes.  Of course, we always want to create effective pathfinders for all our students, but I felt the impetus to do with this group. 

Why?  Of all the students at CRHS, our juniors are the ones I feel we have impacted the least.  We mainly saw them in English classes last year, and that was it.  We have seen them even less this year as juniors when the trend should be the opposite as they should be doing more research and more rigorous coursework.  Let’s also not forget they are now less than two years from being college freshmen!  I was so troubled by the lack of progress I saw with information literacy skills during 2006-07 that  I even raised this concern about this group in my end of the year report last May. 

However, this post is not about that challenge.  Instead, I wanted to briefly blog about how students reacted to our introduction to our Creekview HS Library del.icio.us account and how we integrated it into our pathfinder.   Because the honors juniors seemed to be so resistant to our research databases as sophomores and because we have not seen them using them this academic year, I wanted to be sure to try and bookmark some “goodies” from our GALE databases into our del.icio.us pathfinder for this project as did Ruth.  Sometimes if you can lead the horse to water, he will indeed drink!     I found with that our del.icio.us bookmarks to JSTOR and GALE articles (those are the only databases I can do direct article links for right now) seemed to be a great entry point for our honors sophomores in December, so I thought it would prudent to try this approach with our honors juniors.

While many students tuned out the mini-lessons on the pathfinder in the 5th period class, one student actually wanted to create a del.icio.us account from that class, so I showed him how, and then I showed him how to add our “network” to his so that he could get to our del.icio.us account more easily.  He seemed really excited about having his own account and tapping into it; I also showed him how he could do infomarks with the GALE articles at his request!  Yeah!

The 7th period class seemed more receptive to the mini-lesson, and many of them seemed very impressed by what del.icio.us can do.  They asked some good questions about this service, and I noticed many of them right away to our del.icio.us links, including the ones to specific searches and articles we had bookmarked in our account.  Yes!  I decided to add two additional links to our pathfinder this afternoon:  one is to the “about” page from del.icio.us, and the other links to the “getting started and creating your account” page. 

IfI have any time tomorrow, I will try to create a little quizlet or survey (Quibblo?) they can do quickly to get feedback on how helpful del.icio.us was to them.   Stay tuned!

The Unquiet Library@Pageflakes!

As we shiver through the cold weather, sleet, and snow that has hit the metro Atlanta area this weekend, I have had a different kind of “flake” on my mind:  a cool Web 2.0 tool I  discovered this weekend called Pageflakes. 

What is Pageflakes, you may ask?  It is a cool Web 2.0 tool that allows users to create personalized online desktops similar to that of iGoogle.  Users can easily add widgets or “flakes” related to education, photos, social bookmarking sites, news, podcasts, fun games, and even comic strips! 

I created a pagecast for our media center this weekend to help promote our library resources; we will be adding additional pages featuring podcasts (student created as well as librarian created!) in February.  Our pagecast is designed to give our users another avenue for accessing our library resources as well as provide a little fun for them where they can play online games, listen to our podcasts (coming in February), and view RSS feeds to some of our most popular library resources.

Using Pageflakes is fairly easy:  you create an account, and then you add content to pages you create by simply selecting content-based widgets you want on your page.  You can add RSS feed widgets to your favorite resources that are not on the diverse menu available through Pageflakes, too.  You also have many themes and color schemes as well as layout schemes to customize your page.  To make your page viewable, you then choose the option to make your “page” a “pagecast”; once you take this step, your page is viewable to everyone else via a static link. 

This is a tool teachers could also use to complement their websites; students can also  create their very own pageflake account at http://student.pageflakes.com/.  Best of all, the service is free, and as long as your district does not block it with their filter, you can log into it and edit it any time while at school.

You can learn more about Pageflakes in this PC Magazine review from December 7, 2007.  To get an idea of what a library-based pagecast looks like, please surf over to our newly created pagecast at  The Unquiet Library Pagecast!

Buffy Hamilton, Ed.S.
Creekview High School
http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com
http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com

Library 2.0 Reflections: RSS Feed for Our Website

I have successfully created a RSS feed to our official library website!  You can subscribe to our CRHS Media Center website in one of three ways:

• Our official RSS feed
• Via FeedBurner
• Via email

We know many of you already subscribe to our blog, but our media center “official website” is where we house many important resources, including our research pathfinders, research databases home page, FAQ, monthly reports, and much more!  Be sure to subscribe to both our blog and our official website!

Engaged Learner Class Response 4: Impact of Interactive Whiteboards

Student Engagement, Visual Learning and Technology:  Can Interactive Whiteboards Help?
William D. Beeland, Jr.
http://www.prometheanworld.com/uk/upload/pdf/student_engagement.pdf

At our last session of our Engaged Learning class for Media 21, our discussion centered around whether or not interactive whiteboards make a difference in creating engaged learners.  We seemed to come a consensus as a group that these tools are like any other piece of technology—training and teacher philosophy/pedagogy can play a significant role in how effectively the teacher uses the tool, and consequently, how effectively the tool may engage the student learner. 

In an informal survey of one department at my school, the teachers indicated that they felt the SmartBoard was a helpful tool for engagement, but like anything else, it could lose its effectiveness if overused.  Teachers expressed varying degrees of satisfaction with its effectiveness for engagement.  One teacher whose board is not mounted shared a great deal of frustration, stating the board could really not be used effectively until it was mounted and one of a more appropriate size for the classroom where it is housed was found. 

I think that training is crucial in order for teachers to use SmartBoards effectively.  While many of our staff members have had the basic training, few have taken anything beyond the “starter class” offered by our ITS to learn strategies and to see concrete examples of how to use the SmartBoard for more than lecture notes, announcements, and PowerPoints.   We don’t have many Teach 21 teachers yet at our school, so perhaps our administration could consider requiring teachers to attend a SmartBoard class that focused on resources for getting lessons…something beyond the “starter” version that most teachers have already taken.   I don’t think we have yet tapped into the “interactive” potential of our SmartBoards as a whole just yet on our campus. 

This may already be in existence, but what if a Wiki or shared drive were available to all high school teachers in each subject across the district that had existing lessons?  For example, someone at Cherokee High may have a fabulous SmartBoard based lesson on persuasive writing strategies or direct objects.  If the lesson were available to all other English teachers, then perhaps teachers might feel more at ease using the SmartBoard and would feel empowered to have these resources readily available rather than inventing all new lessons from scratch. 

This last class has inspired me to develop a page of SmartBoard resources; I plan to enlist the assistance of our great ITS and IT at my school to help me create a resource page for our faculty.  Ruth and I personally are extremely excited about the prospect of us getting a SmartBoard for our library lab—already, we are thinking about how we could use it to improve our instruction on NoodleTools and database skills mini-lessons…we definitely want to make those more hands-on and interactive for our students!   This is one tool I cannot wait to have in our library, and I think it will be the “next big thing” as far as equipment to help us teach more effectively in the library!