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.
Training
Google gadget tutorial
23 Things at the Connecticut State Library
The Connecticut State Library launched 2.0@CSL last week, a 23 things Learning 2.0 project for State Library staff.
Kris Abery, Sharon Clapp and Nancy Peluso were the masterminds behind the project and have done a terrific job putting this program together. The project will run for 13 weeks and is using a wiki as it’s ‘base of operations’. There are over 50 staffers signed up already. Yay!
I’m a frequent visitor to the CT State Library and am really excited to see this project underway. I hope they’ll be able to roll it out for library staff all over Connecticut in the near future. Kudos to Ken Wiggins, CT State Librarian, for supporting and encouraging this project.
School Library Workshop
This past weekend, I had the great pleasure of teaching a workshop for school librarians in the Dutchess & Ulster BOCES School Library Systems. 14 librarians gave up the weekend to be locked away in a training room! We had some great discussions about technology and schools. And everyone went away having learned about some new tools and with plans in place to share what they learned with students and other teachers.
Everyone set up a delicious account and had instant network of colleagues. Throughout the weekend they all added links to their accounts. And they tagged them all with a unique tag for the group so they could create an RSS feed for that later in the day.
The group now has a wiki where eveyone introduced themselves and shared their plans and ideas that came out of the weekend. And they also set up a personal homepages using iGoogle and learned how to add RSS feeds from many different sources.
Amazingly everyone stayed awake for an after dinner session where we did some karaoke with Sims On Stage to get our blood flowing again. And everyone then joined Twitter! I was just going to demo some social networking tools and suddenly everyone was twittering! Again, they had a built in instant network.
The session ended on Sunday with time for everyone to explore the resources in the class wiki, time to work on their own projects and to share ideas with each other.
I don’t know about everyone who participated, but I came away excited (AND exhausted!) Thanks so much to Danielle Boyea (Ulster BOCES SLS) and Rebecca Gerald (Dutchess BOCES SLS) for organizing the weekend. And to everyone who attended. It was an inspiring and fun weekend.
School Library 2.0 Weekend Retreat
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!)
Hope to see you there! Sponsored by the Dutchess County and Ulster County BOCES School Library Systems.
A Dozen Back to School Uses for Big Huge Labs Trading Card Generator
In a class last week, someone suggested using the the free trading cards generator at bighugelabs.com as a ‘get to know you’ sort of exercise at the beginning of the school year. That got me thinking about and looking for other back to school ideas for this fun tool.
Like all the tools at bighugelabs, this one is very easy to use. Upload a photo/graphic or grab one from your flickr or photobucket account, enter a title, caption and some text and shazam, you have a cool trading card. You can download the trading card to your own computer, post it your flickr account, copy html code to put it on a web/blog/wiki page or print it out.
Some ideas – please share your ideas in the comments!
- Book Reviews – find a photo that expresses your feelings about a book you’ve read. Write a few lines about what the book meant to you.
- Student book reports - Use the 2-sided Character Trading Card generator from the ReadWriteThink to create a summary of the book, notes about the characters, plot and more. (sample card)
- “5 facts” reports – Find a photo or graphic of a topic. List 5 facts about that topic. Expand this to a podcast of the ’5 facts’ (that idea from the Beverly (MI) Elementary School Podcasts) and use the trading card to illustrate the blog/web/wiki page listing the podcasts. (more…)
Food for Thought: an innovative learning program for RIT staff
Food for Thought is an innovative one day learning program for campus staff at RIT:
A full day of learning sessions on a variety of topics that range from application-specific workshops,
to explorations of technology trends, to how-to instruction,
as well as some uniquely fun diversions are being planned.
Participants can pick from 24 workshops scheduled throughout the day. The day also include lunchtime brown bag sessions, lightning talks and an ‘Extra Helpings’ one-on-one help service. What an impressive program.
Read all the details about how the event came about and how it was implemented in Janie Hermann’s interview with RIT’s Jon Jiras on the Library Garden blog. Another program idea to think about stealing! Thanks to Janie and Jon for sharing all this information.
