Pageflakes As a Personal Learning Network Portal: Learning and Research 2.0

Back in January, I wrote a post about Pageflakes and the screencast we had created for our media center.  Now Joyce Valenza has inspired me with her latest blog post  about ways we can use Pageflakes with our patrons!  As Joyce points out, we can certainly use iGoogle with our patrons to help them design feeds through their GoogleReader accounts to keep up with the latest news on a particular topic from their favorite web resources:  news outlets, blogs, and RSS feed searches from a few databases.  We showed iGoogle to 9th graderst this past year, and they were very much impressed by the power of iGoogle, but now Joyce and Clarence Fisher  have me thinking about how we can use Pageflakes as personal learning network information portal.

I am not sure how I missed this, but there is a “Teacher Edition” of Pageflakes for educators—it is not really too different from the “regular” flavor, but the widgets and template are more tailored for items and feeds of interest to educators.   Pageflakes could be a powerful tool for teachers—imagine creating a screencast for your students around a particular unit of study in any subject area! 

However, I am really thinking hard tonight about students taking the reins and creating their own learning portal and personal learning networks; there is a student version of Pageflakes available, too!  As Will Richardson pointed out in this blog post,

“From a teaching standpoint, pages of this type can be pretty effective for bringing in potential content and then making decisions about what to do with that content. “

Take a look at these three examples: 

• Joyce’s test Pageflakes for Global Studies
• Lisa Spiro’s “Digital Humanities Research Portal”.   
• Will Richardson’s Darfur Screencast

All of these screencasts give us a tantalizing taste of how students could use Pageflakes as a personalized research portal.  Note how both examples pull in feeds from podcasts, authoritative news outlets, and vodcasts.   If students are blogging their research process, they can even pull in the RSS feed from their blog as part of their personal Pageflakes portal.  Note also that you can incorporate widgets for favorite search engines as well!  Students can also pull in their personal Google Library feed, You Tube videos, Teacher Tube videos, SlideShare presentations, del.icio.us RSS feeds….the possibilities are truly endless!  Organizational tools, such as sticky notes and “to do” lists, are also available. 

For the short term future, I want to experiment with Pageflakes as a personal learning network for students/information-research portal in three ways:

1.  Teacher-Librarian/School Library Media Specialist lens:  I will seek out a teacher to pilot the use of Pageflakes as a personal learning network/portal at my high school this fall.  We will work together to design mini-lessons to show students how to harness the power of Pageflakes for a particular research assignment.

2.  Classroom Teacher Lens:  As I do the  multigenre research project with my night school students this fall, I want to build a new requirement that they create their Pageflakes screencast to reflect their research.  We could easily incorporate screenshotsof the screencast and a live link to the Pageflakes screencast in their final Word document or better yet, move away from Word and create the final product in Google docs or as a blog/Wiki.  I could also create a blogroll to everyone’s Pageflakesresearch portal on my class blogs that I use with my students.

My third and more ambitious goal is to see if we could get one of our senior English teachers to collaborate with us and use a student created Pageflakes screencast (along with a research blog created by each student) as one of their artifacts for their Senior Project.  This is our school’s first year piloting the “Senior Project” since this year marks the rise of our first senior class—how exciting would it be if kids could easily view each other’s research projects and Pageflakes screencasts?

I will keep you all posted on how these three initiatives come to fruition this fall as the beginning of our school year is just three weeks away!  If anyone else out there is taking on similar collaborative planning projects, please email me at buffy.hamilton@cherokee.k12.ga.us —I am always happy to share ideas and experiences “from the trenches” with another media specialist.  Stay tuned!

A footnote:  Tonight’s blog post and the ideas that have come out of it are the result of my personal learning network I have established using Web 2.0 tools….I will be blogging more about this topic in September! 

Buffy Hamilton, Media Specialist
Creekview High School
http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com
http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com
http://webtech.cherokee.k12.ga.us/creekview-hs/mediacenter/

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 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!

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!