Journalism 2.0

Yesterday I did a lesson on RSS feeds and Google Reader with Mr. Tamanini’s 2nd period Journalism class; here is our pathfinder at http://webtech.cherokee.k12.ga.us/creekview-hs/MediaCenter/journalism2.0.htm .

 Many of the kids seemed really impressed with the concept of RSS—most had never heard of it!  They also seemed excited about the uses for Google Reader, too.  We looked at RSS feeds for major news outlets and talked about how to capture those feeds into their Google Reader account.  It was interesting to see how some did not care at all, but how many took to the concepts like a duck to water! 

The students have had an assignment in which they have been building a page in FrontPage—the Creekview Claw is currently hosted under Mr. Tamanini’s web directory.  One of the students, Falyn, was frustrated by FrontPage and asked me for some help today during her lunch period.  We talked about some options for FrontPage, but then I asked her if she was interested in setting up her own “journalist” blog.  She immediately said yes, and 30 minutes later, here is what she and I had built together:

http://falynblog.wordpress.com/

This may not look like much at this point, but I cannot tell you how excited and proud she was of what she accomplished today.  Mr. Tamanini and I have discussed the option for next year of him creating a master blog that will be the “host” of the online edition of the newspaper.  I am going to show him how to add users so students can add content to the blog, but he will have final moderation approval.  I think it would be cool for each student journalist to have his/her own blog, too—those could be linked in under the blogroll.

Falyn’s eagerness to jump in and try the blogging was energizing and refreshing.  She is going to come in for help over the next few days during lunch, and I am going to teach her some basic concepts of blogging.  I was sure to also review online safety procedures as well, and she was very receptive to that discussion. 

Journalism 2.0@ The Creekview High School Media Center, March 2008 via kwout

My Latest Library 2.0 Moment: Video Tutorials Made with Camtasia

We are proud to announce the debut of our Video Tutorial page @ The Unquiet Library! http://webtech.cherokee.k12.ga.us/creekview-hs/MediaCenter/video_tutorials.htm These tutorials are viewable in Windows Media Player, but we will also be converting them to an iTunes friendly format so students and faculty can download them into their iPod players as well.   Our first set of tutorials will focus on how to cite particular information sources in NoodleTools.   If you have not been able to attend training or have not used this resource yet (or have, but are still learning), these tutorials will be extremely helpful for you and your students! Stay tuned and check this page often!  We will be updating as often as we can. Don’t forget out new podcast page, too! 

http://webtech.cherokee.k12.ga.us/creekview-hs/MediaCenter/Podcasts/podcasts.htm

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! 

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

Aha!: Library 2.0 Moments of the Week!

While I am on the “high” of my “Library 2.0″ moments of the week, I want take time to jot down a few thoughts!

VoiceThread, 12/11/07

For the last few days, I have been working with a student on a VoiceThread project.  This student is one who has not had a successful school experience in the last year.  In an effort to help introduce research concepts, I collaborated with this students’ teacher on a research pathfinder; we decided to have him create a VoiceThread as his learning artifact.  Patiently he researched his topic using books and our research databases; he also used some web resources he liked.  With help from both me and his teacher, he drafted mini-paragraphs so that he could have about 1 minute of narration for the four major strands of information he focused on related to his topic.

The “aha!” moment for me came on 12/11 when we recorded his first slide in VoiceThread.  When he listened to the playback of what he had read and recorded, his eyes lit up, and I saw an excitement in this student I had never seen before.  Last year, he was frequently sullen and not excited about his schoolwork at all—to literally see his eyes light up with joy and pride in his work—words really can’t describe how wonderful it felt to see that in this student. 

Thank you, VoiceThread!  This web 2.0 tool helped this student see that research could be fun and helped him feel good about his work—huge steps for this pumpkin!

Google Scholar, Google Library, Google Books, Del.icio.us

I used a combination of Web 2.0 tools to locate information sources not in our collection as well as to tap into existing information sources we do have as part of our virtual collection.    I then integrated the RSS feeds for these resources into a pathfinder I created for one of our Honors English teachers.

Conversations I’ve had recently with UGA librarian Nadine Cohen and UGA Professor Mary Ann Fitzgerald have had me thinking about how I could harness the power of Google to point students to quality information sources with more ease.  First, I used Google Scholar and Google Books to search for nonfiction texts that we did not have access to through our databases or print collection.  I then created a “My Google Books Library” to create an online collection that the students could access through a RSS feed link. 

 

If you have not used Google Books, you MUST check it out!  Books are searchable and some can even be downloaded as PDF files; plain text options are also available for viewing.  Students also get “similar books” suggestions available through Google Books, and they also have bibliographic data available at their fingertips for that particular book.  Students can also subscribe to our RSS feed for this feature and keep up with the latest additions to our Google Books!  These tools are powerful because they provide access to materials you might not be able to obtain in print and increase accessibility to these resources to EVERYONE 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 

The other tool we have been using as part of our research pathfinders this year is del.icio.us.  Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web 2.0 tool that allows you to bookmark and catalog your favorite web resources with “tags”—think of tags as keywords or subject headings.  You can access these resources from any computer—not just your home computer.  For this assignment, I tagged some articles from our GALE Virtual Reference Library (GALE is the only vendor right now that we can “infomark” directly to articles, but we are hoping more vendors will get on board with this feature). 

I then used Google Scholar to search for scholarly articles related to our research topics.  While we can’t use Google Scholar to interface with our databases in the ways that college libraries can at this point in time, we do have access to JSTOR, a college level database of scholarly research articles covering all disciplines.  Because JSTOR is a vendor partnered with Google Scholar, we can use Google Scholar to search for articles and then “tag” those articles with our del.ici.ous account.  While some would argue doing this takes away the element of students searching for articles on their own, I would counterargue that this method is more of an “entry” into the database that will hopefully entice students to further explore that information source once they have acquired a “comfort zone” by looking at what we have put on the “menu.” 

The teacher was extremely excited about these new tools and felt it was a major improvement on the research pathfinder from last year (we collaborated in 2006 on this same assignment).  The students will be in here tomorrow and Friday, and I think once they have time to get “immersed” in these tools, they too will feel excited and energized about the research project. 

It makes me feel good to know that I can provide our students access to new materials we don’t physically own!  I also am excited that I can use web 2.0 tools to help my students “mine” or find an entry into quality information sources we own but that may be intimidating to students.  I hope that this hybrid of web 2.0 tools will make our database resources and books seem “cooler” and more relevant to our students.

That is today’s Library 2.0 roundup!