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Games @ Lunch Break

Nov 1st, 2008
by pollyalida.
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Lunch break Our lunch break today was too short to get any game playing going – school librarians know how to eat quick and network at the same time! But I did get a few games out for people to look at.  In honor of ALA’s National Gaming Day coming up on Nov 15, we had Pictureka and Top Trumps. And Quiddler too. All these are new to me, so I was happy to have an excuse to buy them.

But what I really loved about this, was the reaction of a couple of the librarians who started thinking about how they could use the ideas behind these games and have kids create their own games! Kids could make their own Top Trumps cards by using a big huge labs Trading Card making tool.  Use a photo from flickr, add some facts, print them out and play! Cool!  Pictureka-ish game boards could be created with clip art collections.  All themed around topics being covered in classes. Creative and fun.

Glogster: taking posters to a whole new level

Oct 24th, 2008
by pollyalida.
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Glogster for Education lets you create online posters with graphics, photos, text, video and audio. Wow, what a great tool for student projects. I can see lots of other fun uses for this in public libraries too.

Though Glogster has been around for a while, I just heard about it today in a twitter post from Buffy Hamilton. Seems the Glogster for Education service has just recently launched.

For a great example of a class project using Glogster, check out Buffy’s 11th grade lit project on Thoreau and Emerson.

School Library Workshop

Sep 30th, 2008
by pollyalida.
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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.

Growing Into Inquiry workshops for School Library Media Specialists

Sep 25th, 2008
by pollyalida.
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I sent out a plea for help today to my school library buddies, asking for some curriculum links for an upcoming workshop. Mary Ratzer, a former School Library Media Specialist, now a consultant (Learning Curve Associates) sent me a wonderful list of Inquiry Lesson Plan Sites that she uses in her workshops.

“We use these sites in a workshop called Growing Into Inquiry where we transform flat, task oriented, fact detecting research tasks into inquiry process gold. It is our strategy to thereby implement the Information Inquiry Curriculum that 50 SLMS wrote with Linda Fox and me in 2006.”

I’ve had the pleasure of attending presentations given by Mary and am in awe of her knowledge, enthusiasm and ability to engage an audience. I’ve also co-presented some workshops with her and learned so many new things in the process.

Don’t pass up a chance to attend a presentation or workshop by her! 

21st Century Skills Conversation Starters

Sep 25th, 2008
by pollyalida.
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Judi Repman of Georgia Southern University wrote a great post a few days ago on the Georgia Library Media Association blog on starting conversations with educators about “21st century skills”. She’s gathered a wonderful list of videos to get those conversations started. One of these (shown below) builds on the Kansas State video A Vision of Students Today.

A Vision of K-12 Students Today

Her post prompted me to gather videos I’ve used for school workshops into one wiki page. And I’ve added a few news ones from Judi’s selections. Thanks Judi.

2.0 in the Classroom & PBS Election Curriculum

Sep 10th, 2008
by pollyalida.
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Earlier tonight I received a note about a live webcast discussing the PBS multimedia Election 2008 curriculum and the Web 2.0 tools and resources that are part of the curriculum. Wow, I’m so glad I clicked through to it, even though I got there a bit late.

The material they’ve created is just terrific!  Access, Analyze, Act: A Blueprint for 21st Century Engagement will help you “discover the power of social media while promoting your students’ civic engagement.” This is a treasure trove of ideas, resources, interactive tools, lesson plans and more – all showing the enormous power and value of 2.0 tools. And what better context than this presidential election.

Use these resources to show the value of these tools and why we need to open our classrooms to them.

In addition to this terrific content, it was really interesting to see Elluminate in action.  (more…)

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