Thing #23 1/2 (Week 9) Summary

My favorite discovery was Zoho writer. Now I'm anxious to learn more about the other applications to see if they are as easy to use and as full-featured as the writer. Like many of us, my workday is so busy that I appreciate not having to spend an enormous amount of time just learning how to save more time. I don't think that I would have tried all these things if they we're required for this course, but I'm so glad that I did because the experience has given me the confidence to connect with the digital natives in my high school.
I managed to complete everything on time, but I did think that the pace was a little fast. I would've been happier investigating fewer technologies in depth rather than just touching on 23. And I'm quite disappointed in the grad credit option from Fresno Pacific, even though I'll be finishing up with that this week too. (I hope.) It would've been much more effective if students had been able to sign up at the beginning of our discoveries so that we could've used that forum to post our thoughts.
An overworked, yet appropriate one word summation of this experience? AWESOME!!

Thing # 23 (Week 9) Copyright & Creative Commons

I found this passage on the School Library Learning 2.0 homepage, attributing the idea for this course to its original creator:

"Learning 2.0 is a discovery learning program created by Helene Blowers. Content and style for School Library Learning 2.0 and Classroom Learning 2.0 have been borrowed and duplicated with permission, under a Creative Commons License."

Our Thing #19 was LibraryThing. In the original version it was "Select any site from the Web 2.0 list and play with it."
One thing that I wish our version had kept was the incentives and prizes - for completing all 23 things, they got an MP3 player. If they completed them early, they were also entered in a drawing for a PDA! Better yet, there was a final drawing for a laptop!

Thing # 22 (Week 9) eBooks & Audio eBooks

My only exposure to audio books has been with the purchase of a small starter collection of Playaways for my school. The students who have checked them out have been very enthusiastic and I'll be buying more in the future, even though they are quite expensive. I like them because it can be used without any other equipment, but can also be plugged into a boombox for classroom use.
I haven't ventured into the realm of eBooks for my library, even though they are available from various vendors. And I certainly couldn't advertise free downloads since teachers and students are prohibited from downloading anything to school computers and would have to do so elsewhere.
I own a Palm E2 that I use for inventory and it also has the capability of downloading eBooks, but I seldom use it as such. I prefer to read on a larger screen than 3"x 4" ! Has anyone seen or used the new Kindle ? I'm curious to see if that will take off better than the older eBook readers.

Thing # 21 (Week 9) Podcasts

I wasn't really sure I'd benefit much from this exercise because we can't view or create podcasts in school, but I did find a series of videos that a vocational school in Illinois recorded that might convince our technology coordinator to allow selected classrooms to use them for educational purposes. I've posted the podcast of an electricity and robotics class that I'm sure our electricity instructors could use. I wasn't able to embed it into this posting, even though I tried to follow the directions. I'm also adding the link to this slideshow that goes along with the podcast.
I had a considerable amount of difficulty viewing podcasts for this section. The tutorial from Yahoo wasn't available and Podcast.net and Yahoo Podcasts took too long to load or kept hanging up my computer. I had better luck with the Educational Podcast Directory, but there were also quite a few links there that I couldn't seem to view.

Thing # 20 (Week 9) Discover YouTube

I found this video from the Alliance Library Sytem on YouTube that I'm going to try to share with you. Hope it works! I found it when I searched for libraries on second life.
This is a great example of using second life for educational purposes. Is this how American history will be taught in the future?

Thing # 19 (Week 8) LibraryThing

I've used LibraryThing for both a personal book collection and for the summer reading program at my school. You can see on my blog where I added my father's railroad books - I created the list to share this interest with other train enthusiasts out there. I noticed that many people are using LibraryThing for online book clubs, so when our English department got together this year to select the summer reading books, I sent them a link to a YA lit club so that they could read some reviews of current literature.
This past fall, I catalogued last year's summer books and posted them on my library web site so that students would make comments, but so far no activity. This year, I'll make sure that they know about it beforehand. I'll also be able to use the recommendations for further reading feature for those students who want to read similar titles.
The LibraryThing for Libraries project that would integrate the features of LibraryThing with an existing OPAC really seems like a great leap forward. I noticed that it's mostly public libraries that are using this, but I think that it would be great for schools as well. Not only could students search by keyword and subject headings, but also by more familiar sounding tags. And they could also add their own reviews as well as reading others.

Thing # 18 (Week 8) Online productivity tools

This is a picture of my daughter Jennie (last one on the right) with her Irish Step-Dancing team that recently competed in the All-Ireland competition. They came in second! First place went to an Irish team.

Part one...I'm writing this blog post in ZoHo Writer and I'm very impressed with it, especially with the emoticons! (Why can't I see them in Blogger? I tried importing them as pictures, but I couldn't insert them here.) It's nice to be able to write and publish within the same program. They also have several other applications like a spreadsheet program, etc. I'll try out Google Docs to see how they compare. On a related note, I'm using the OpenOffice suite on my new computer since it didn't come with Microsoft Office and I'd recommend it to everyone. My daughter Jennie, the step-dancer, is a free-lance pharmaceutical writer and she uses it for all her work. Why buy an expensive program when you can use an open source alternative that has all the features you need, plus the ability to save in any format? The only thing OpenOffice lacks is the web-based access, which would be a very desirable addition.

As a writer, my daughter has occasion to collaborate with her clients, so maybe she'd also like to use a web-based product like ZoHo or Google Docs. And I can definitely see how teachers could use the collaborative feature with student reports as well as for creative writing assignments.

Part two...Well, I just gave Google Docs a quick tour, trying to add and edit the subject as above, but it failed my test! I couldn't just upload the photo, but had to insert it as an image. However, when I did so, the upload failed - maybe the file size was too large. Also, I couldn't find any place where I could add any comments in balloons or any emoticons. Now, I'm not the type to elaborate my writing with all that stuff, but it was appropriate for the text of my blog. So, maybe Google Docs is a tad more serious than ZoHo? I didn't try out any of the other applications, so I can't comment on them.