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/

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

Cool Tool: “Kwout”!

We all know how cumbersome it is sometimes to work with screenshots when we are creating screencasts or handouts as part of a tutorial or “help” resource.  You have to use the “alt” and “print screen” keys to capture the image; then, you have to use some kind of photo editing application to edit and clean up your screenshot.

Labor no more!  Kwout is a free and cool new tool that debuted in December 2007 that allows users to capture screenshots with ease; furthermore, you can embed that screenshot into your webpage or blog.   You can even embed the image into Flickr!

The first thing you have to do is visit http://kwout.com/.  At the bottom of the screen are two options for grabbing the “bookmarklet.”  As an Internet Explorer user, I simply right clicked on the first option and saved it to my “links” folder under “Favorites.”  This puts it into your “Links” toolbar at the top of the browser. 

Once you have taken these steps, you then browse to the web page that has information you want to grab.  Simply click on the “kwout” button that is automatically installed when you follow the directions in the previous paragraph, and depending on which option you chose (open in a new window or open in the same window) earlier, the webpage will load along with the “Kwout” tools.  You just click and drag the area you want to capture; then click on the “cut” button.  Your embeddable HTML code will appear in a few moments so that you can then copy and paste that code into your blog or webpage, impressing your patrons and fellow colleagues!  

Meda Montana Hallyburton Brendall: Veterans History Project (Library of Congress via kwout

There is also now a “My Kwout” feature.  What does this do?  In the words of the “about” page, “My Kwout”:

“my kwout” is a collection of the sources that you quoted via kwout. With “my kwout”, you can share with your friends what you are/were interested in. You can also use it as like your online bookmarks.

Please note that “my kwout” doesn’t show a source until you post the quotation to your website/blog except Flickr, SNS (such as MySpace and Facebook) and other private sites.

The latest quotations may not be shown for a while. We update “my kwout” pages periodically, once a day or more often.

Give Kwout a try!

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!