Excursion Island AND Last Post For The Summer

Excursion Island--I think the slide ap is a great one and I would be very happy to share it with our faculty.  My favorite of the other offerings is Judy Brown because it is annotated and fits the things I do (or intend to do if I ever get the time).  Of course, my true favorite is JibJab!! Let's make a librarian one :)

I notice that the Great Sea of 2.0 has a lot of similar offerings which can be like the sirens' song.  So SuprGlu and TaDa might soon be my life rafts.  I have so many accounts so many places from these summer sessions....

And so to Reflection Island
1. What were your favorite discoveries or excursions on this learning journey? I liked lots about each Island, but my heart belongs to searching. 







2. How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals? I am renewed in my excitement about 2.0 and my determination to get it in our classrooms.  I am much more interested in having the students do the media productions than in doing it myself.






3. Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you? I am amazed how much FREE cool stuff is out there.  I am also delighted the district is moving to the cloud--wonder how that will affect our student outcomes this year?





4. What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept? I love it and I thank you for putting it together.  I have been trying to migrate all my existing Google accounts to the BISD Google one and think some is going to get lost, so this is my bon voyage to you.

SEARCH ISLAND July 7, 2011

Here is one of my favorite articles about searching, using brain + internet, and being a lifelong learner.  I love Joyce Valenza! http://blog.schoollibraryjournal.com/neverendingsearch/2011/06/08/i-hope-youll-search-with-skill-a-revised-letter-to-my-grads/

I agree that we will have to be much more conversant with guiding our teachers and students to finding academically acceptable information and citing it.  I realized this last year.  Even with databases, high quality websearching is vital.

Here's my bucket--I think the government sites were among the most interesting and useful.  I also loved the metadata engines.  I've been teaching ipl2 for years, from before the merger. And I'll be showing the world geography teachers the One Nation for sure.

SKYPE July 7, 2011

Here's what I did:  I contacted BISD district technology department to see if we can use Skype, what type hardware and permissions would be involved etc.  And if not Skype, then something similar? They are going to get back with me and I have asked for permission to share that reply.  So...pending approval from technology, I would like to ask the English teachers which contemporary novel(s) will be studied this year.  Then I would be happy to contact the author and see about a Skype interview.  The other best application IMHO would be the converstations in real-time with other classes learning English as our kids study their language.  I especially think this would be fun for the German and French classes as it's harder to find native speakers here.  The most useful link to me was, "Met Any Good Authors Lately?" from SLJ  http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6673572.html

LIBRO Island Part 2

School Library Journal  Unexpected treasure is this great blog for books for guys  http://guyslitwire.blogspot.com/ and the SLJ Teen Newsletter archives.  AND copyright lessons designed to be taught to our students.  Another chance to not re-invent the wheel. There's something in almost every dropdown menu.  There are too many blogs to read, but what if I read one a day.....

VOYA I love this magazine, and the eVOYA is the treasure. The best part is the teen pop culture, even if you aren't in secondary, most of us want to be current and cool and just reading the answers will get you there.  I send this out to my faculty occasionally to remind them that our students are not us.  It ups our street cred (hall cred?) And the book lists are great because they have fine-tuned age appropriateness as well as quality and popularity indicators.

Libro Island 1 June 23 2011

ALA-poking around in the ALA site, I discover online education possibilities, some of them free and the others a lot cheaper than driving to Clear Lake.  These would be great for library in-service, to get comp time and just to be a better more current librarian.  For example, I am pretty sure I need to watch "RDA: Benefits for Users and Catalogers"  How about "Introduction Guide to Reference" General Editor Denise Beaubien Bennett and ALA Publishing staff introduce you to Guide to Reference, with more than 16,000 fully annotated entries describing essential print and web reference sources. Holy cow! I paid big bucks for less than that in library school.  There's about 30 offerings just under school libraries including one on using books to counteract bullying. 
Who knew?  I always just looked at the reading lists.

TXLA also has cool and free continuing education, but the most interesting link is INTELLECTUAL FREEDOM http://www.txla.org/intellectual-freedom

YALSA  WWW reading challenge, of course, and I am going to seriously check into it a.s.a.p.
                    http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/wrestlemania1112  BUT I also blush to realize I missed Teen Tech Week which might have let me let them loose in the library to really use all their 2.0 plus acumen to my delight.  Here's YALSA's take--Teen Tech Week is a chance for libraries to throw open their physical & virtual doors and show their communities all the great things they're doing for teens with technology.  Here's mine--why limit it to teens?  String around my finger for next year!! Virtual string, of course.
alsc-- I like the external  relationships link.  http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alsc/externalrelationships/organizations.cfm

Blogger's Island responses

These animated teachers are..animated!  Nimble, flexible, modern, open and they really reflect the 21st century student attitudes toward technology and social networking.  I like the verbs  illuminate  & extend possibilities but the one that really applies right now is overcome.
 One of my goals for 2011-12 is to get two teachers to move away from pamphlets to a 2.0 presentation for the final product and PowerPoint doesn't count. This video explains why.

 My other goal is for every incoming and current BWH student to have a GoogleDocs account, or something similar.  What do you think?

Another voyage June 7, 2011

I love this course! And sometime I will try to get some new stuff on my homepage.