I’m looking forward to meeting with 20 teachers at the Ft. Plain (NY) Central School on Saturday Dec 6. At 8 am! On a Saturday! Wow, you guys are dedicated souls.
This is going to be a 2.0 “tech camp” training day. We’ll be covering social bookmarking with delicious.com. We’ll use iGoogle to create a personal web portal and as a place to pull together RSS feeds from blogs, news sources, databases, delicious and more. iGoogle is a fun and useful tool that students can use to gather research material. (more…)
This tutorial from SEOish on How to Make Google Gadgets uses google gadgets to teach about making google gadgets. Love the video next to the gadget editor. Clever and effective.
Last year I fiddled around with creating some simple Google Gadgets for the catalogs of my local library systems. Mostly to figure out how to create them, but also because I’m lazy. I wanted easy access to all my local library catalogs in one place, on an iGoogle page.
I haven’t looked at editing gadgets since then, so I was excited to learn that it’s much easier to make gadgets now. Sometime during the year, Google added a nifty gadget to help create gadgets. That sounds confusing, but it’s just another little iGoogle tool that helps you edit, preview and launch your own gadgets. This tutorial helped explain how to use it.
So, while looking at other library catalog search gadgets tonight, I wondered if I could ‘borrow’ code to make something slicker than my original clunky gadgets. I found Andrew Schulz from Pierce County (WA) Library System had a very elegant gadget for their Polaris catalog. A quick copy of the code and editing of the catalog URL and it was working for my local library. Woohoo!
Any recommendations on good models for other systems?
There are currently about a dozen listings including programs related to reading, storytime, gaming and more. Detailed notes will help you implement similar programs.
Have your own great program? Contribute! This is part of the ALSC (Association for Library Services to Children) Children and Technology Committee’s ChildTech Wiki.
Coming up next weekend (September 27 and 28th), I’ll be facilitating a workshop for School Library Media Specialists. I can promise you it will be a weekend full of learning, laughter and a lot of fun. The workshop will be held at the Hudson Valley Resort in the Catskill Mountains, so it will also be full of beautiful mountain views.
The new AASL Standards for the 21st Century Learner include inquiry based learning and student-to-student collaboration for learning. Integration of new technologies is a given. Students need to know how to use ALL of the tools available to them to work effectively and efficiently. Many of the newest tools, such as wikis and tagging, provide for collaborative work. School library media specialists are strategically positioned to lead learning communities in the responsible uses of technology for learning. This two day fall retreat is designed to help library media specialists gain a comfort level with some of the Library 2.0 technologies (blogs, wikis, de.lic.ious, Flickr, Library Thing, Podcasts). Sessions will be informal and collaborative. Strategies for integration into the curriculum will be offered and shared. (Dutchess BOCES SLS Blog)
I love this weekend retreat format for training. It gives everyone an opportunity to immerse themselves in learning, while providing time to relax and network with colleagues. I’ve seen so much learning going on outside of the classroom at these retreats, in what one colleague has dubbed “canoe time”, sharing ideas and inspirations while outside the classroom (whether in a canoe or not!)
My laptop came back today and still doesn’t work. It did work for a few minutes. Enough to lull me into nice feelings towards Dell. They did the work in a hurry and got it back to me in speedy time, but it still doesn’t work.I once again had a long call to Dell tech support while a very polite person handled me with kid gloves. “thank you for patiently waiting miss polly” – I’ve heard that phrase about 50 times in the past 10 days.When they said they’d send a technician to fix it, I momentarily thought hooray! But then the “let me set your expectations” phrase came out. Another one that I’ve heard too much of.
It seems that the next day repair service I purchased means 2-3 business days. I do realize that at 8 pm on a Wednesday, next day would probably mean Friday. But 2-3 business days was turning into next Monday – a full 2 weeks after the initial problems.
Not happy, I asked for the supervisor. After another “thank you for patiently waiting” there was no supervisor to be found. The technician (who truly was polite through this whole thing) then managed to turn the 2-3 days into “I assure you your computer will be working by the end of the day on Friday”.
What annoys me, is that I had to get angry to get the next day service that I paid for. I’ve had Dell computers for years, ever since I moved from a Mac to a PC. And the tech support and next-day repair service used to be quite good. What’s happened?
Do I hear a Mac beckoning me back into the fold???
I’m looking forward to meeting with 20 teachers at the Ft. Plain (NY) Central School on Saturday Dec 6. At 8 am! On a Saturday! Wow, you guys are dedicated souls.
