I have to admit that I looked ahead at our assignments and started my Thing 5 in the beginning of the summer. I had been very jealous of everyone who has had a Symbaloo page and I wanted to add a page. So, I started exploring Symbaloo. If anyone isn't familiar with Symbaloo it is really a bookmarking page, but it creates visual icons to go with your quick links that makes it easier to remember the resource. It is super easy to create and is a perfect tool for me. I have set it as my homepage and can access all my favorite sites with a quick click of the mouse.
Although it is very convienent to not have to type in addresses anymore, that is not the only benefit. The greatest benefit to me is that I have put all those tools on it that I know and want to use. This way when I am looking for ideas for tools for projects, I can quickly look at the tiles and find tools that I otherwise would have forgotten about. It has already come in handy this summer when mapping with teachers. I can't imagine how helpful it is going to be during the school year.
My one concern was that I wasn't sure there was going to be enough room for all of the tiles I was going to create. At this point I have been able to keep creating new rows, I am not sure how long I can do that for. I think eventually I am going to need to start creating new pages and maybe even organizing my pages so that presentation tools are one page, collaborative tools on another and so forth.
Since I wanted to to take Symbaloo a step further for my final project submission I started a Symbaloo page for the kids this week. This is going to be set as my homepage for the computers in the library. This way when the students login all of the everyday links will be setup for them. This will save everyone time as I can't always get to everyone as quickly as I would like. In addition when I am doing tech projects with Kindergarten all by myself, they will just be able to click the icon to get to the tool. I am so excited about this time and stress saver. I can't believe I didn't think of it sooner. I haven't quite filled my school one yet, so instead of having empty tiles I made all of them blue tiles with a link to the Lake George webpage. This makes it look nicer and if someone happens to click on it they can access useful resources from our school website.
Here is the Symbaloo I created for me earlier in the summer:
http://www.symbaloo.com/mix/homewebmix3442
Here is the Symbaloo I created for my students to finish off my final project:
http://www.symbaloo.com/shared/AAAABcy0wnoAA41_zwxhmA==
I look forwarded to viewing all the final projects. I have enjoyed learning from everyone all summer. Good luck with the start of your new school year!
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Friday, August 16, 2013
Thing 4: Mapping and Geolocation
It's hard for me to believe that I haven't ever taking the time to sit down and explore Google Earth, but I really haven't. Yes, I have viewed my home and other locations to see yet another unique and amazing tool put out by Google, but I never really explored it and its options. So, for this assignment I decided that was what I was going to choose to explore.
I started off by visiting the classroom resource page and was very excited about some of the project ideas. I loved some of the ideas such as "Explore the animal kingdom and endangered species with the National Geographic layer and other content. ". However after taking a few seconds to explore it I realized that I didn't know anything about the basic features of Google Earth and that is what would be the most beneficial to me having had no real experience at all. So, I decided to take the Google Maps e-course. I watched all of the tutorials and familiarized myself with the MANY features (I love the layers). Of course I got a little sidetracked with features I wanted to explore for personal reasons, but overall I looked at the tool with classroom projects in mind.
Ideally, I would love to use this tool with a Kindergarten project I am currently doing. They do a huge project on communities and build brochures with "Pages" of places to visit while in Lake George, rules of the community, etc. It would be great to have them place markers on Google Earth of the different places in their community and attach a picture and label to go with it. However, I fear that this will be too difficult for them and very stressful on me to have 18 Kindergarteners working on this at once with no extra hands. I hate to make that my excuse though, so maybe I will try to think of a way I can still make this happen.
If I am not going to do this with Kindergarten, then I come to the dilemma of what grade to do this with. In our third grade classroom we are looking for one more "tech/library project". This grade is very willing to try new things, but we have done many elaborate projects with them that I would like to do a project that was a little less involved with them. Third grade does a unit on mapping skills with teaching "keys, legends, etc". Can anyone think of a way to use Google Earth to include these features? Ideally, it would be nice to do a project where they had to do a little research and then include that on their map. They currently do a project on Australian animals. I had an idea that they could put a marker on the map identifying the location where they can find the animal they are researching. However, I feel like this would be just another add on to an already elaborate project. It would be nice if I could somehow come up with a project where the map was the "knowledge product". Any ideas are welcome! I would love to hear ways that you guys are using Google Earth and Google Maps in your classrooms.
Now that I have touched on "ideas for classroom uses" for Google Earth and Google Maps I wanted to briefly discuss the issues that I had while using them. First, I had no idea that Google Earth was a download. Where did I miss this along the way. I thought that I was going to be able to get on the internet and start using it. I feel embarrassed that I didn't know that. Anyway, I had to try a few times to download it as it just didn't seem to work the first few times. Once I got into it I followed the step by step directions that I saw in the tutorial I watched on Annotating Google Earth. Everything worked great except when I tried to add a picture. I would copy the link just like it suggested in the video and it wouldn't work. Hmm... that meant time for a Google search. I watched a Youtube video and another tutorial by Google that was different from the original one I watched and I couldn't figure it out. In everything I watched it says something about an embed code, but I don't know where to get that. I think if I could figure that out I would be all set. I also tried to add my own photos, but I wasn't able to find the browse button they were referring to under the "Get info" option. I would LOVE help with this. Usually I find that I can figure things out after reading and watching tutorials, but I can't seem to. Other than that I found everything else fairly straight forward. I was able to add descriptions, change the view that was displayed, add layers, and much more.
If you haven't used Google Earth I think it is very useful and I feel it can be easily used with may curricular areas. For those of you already using it, I look forward to hearing some of your idea.
I started off by visiting the classroom resource page and was very excited about some of the project ideas. I loved some of the ideas such as "Explore the animal kingdom and endangered species with the National Geographic layer and other content. ". However after taking a few seconds to explore it I realized that I didn't know anything about the basic features of Google Earth and that is what would be the most beneficial to me having had no real experience at all. So, I decided to take the Google Maps e-course. I watched all of the tutorials and familiarized myself with the MANY features (I love the layers). Of course I got a little sidetracked with features I wanted to explore for personal reasons, but overall I looked at the tool with classroom projects in mind.
Ideally, I would love to use this tool with a Kindergarten project I am currently doing. They do a huge project on communities and build brochures with "Pages" of places to visit while in Lake George, rules of the community, etc. It would be great to have them place markers on Google Earth of the different places in their community and attach a picture and label to go with it. However, I fear that this will be too difficult for them and very stressful on me to have 18 Kindergarteners working on this at once with no extra hands. I hate to make that my excuse though, so maybe I will try to think of a way I can still make this happen.
If I am not going to do this with Kindergarten, then I come to the dilemma of what grade to do this with. In our third grade classroom we are looking for one more "tech/library project". This grade is very willing to try new things, but we have done many elaborate projects with them that I would like to do a project that was a little less involved with them. Third grade does a unit on mapping skills with teaching "keys, legends, etc". Can anyone think of a way to use Google Earth to include these features? Ideally, it would be nice to do a project where they had to do a little research and then include that on their map. They currently do a project on Australian animals. I had an idea that they could put a marker on the map identifying the location where they can find the animal they are researching. However, I feel like this would be just another add on to an already elaborate project. It would be nice if I could somehow come up with a project where the map was the "knowledge product". Any ideas are welcome! I would love to hear ways that you guys are using Google Earth and Google Maps in your classrooms.
Now that I have touched on "ideas for classroom uses" for Google Earth and Google Maps I wanted to briefly discuss the issues that I had while using them. First, I had no idea that Google Earth was a download. Where did I miss this along the way. I thought that I was going to be able to get on the internet and start using it. I feel embarrassed that I didn't know that. Anyway, I had to try a few times to download it as it just didn't seem to work the first few times. Once I got into it I followed the step by step directions that I saw in the tutorial I watched on Annotating Google Earth. Everything worked great except when I tried to add a picture. I would copy the link just like it suggested in the video and it wouldn't work. Hmm... that meant time for a Google search. I watched a Youtube video and another tutorial by Google that was different from the original one I watched and I couldn't figure it out. In everything I watched it says something about an embed code, but I don't know where to get that. I think if I could figure that out I would be all set. I also tried to add my own photos, but I wasn't able to find the browse button they were referring to under the "Get info" option. I would LOVE help with this. Usually I find that I can figure things out after reading and watching tutorials, but I can't seem to. Other than that I found everything else fairly straight forward. I was able to add descriptions, change the view that was displayed, add layers, and much more.
If you haven't used Google Earth I think it is very useful and I feel it can be easily used with may curricular areas. For those of you already using it, I look forward to hearing some of your idea.
Monday, July 29, 2013
Thing # 3
It's embarrassing to admit, but PLN's are something that I do a terrible job keeping up on. Well, at least technology wise. I keep up on my professional journals, collaborate with other librarians, attend workshops, talk with colleagues, but I can't seem to get in the habit of tapping into all the great PLN's on the Internet. I do take webinars and this class but not much more.
The last time I took one of Polly's classes I tried twitter. I was instantly intrigued and tried all of the hash tags she recommended, but I really couldn't figure out how to tweet (I know it's basic, but for some reason I struggled and still do). Then to be honest I never went back and checked it out. So for the sake of this assignment and to build my PLN I decided to give it one more try. I have to say I still feel uncomfortable with and have no idea what I am really doing. I am not sure why this is. I think if I just keep going back to it then I will become more comfortable and hopefully catch on. So, I added the App to my phone so it would be readily available to me. That way when I am bored in the doctors office I can check it.
When I was exploring on my twitter page, I didn't create my own tweet, but I did retweet one new tech tool I learned, which I am sharing here http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/10-cool-ways-libraries-can-use-vine/ (an App for creating 6 second video clips) and I retweeted a cute idea for the library. Maybe you guys could follow me. It would be fun to have a follower! I can't promise I will tweet much myself, but I will keep retweeting. If you are looking for people to follow I highly recommend Shannon Miller. She shares a lot of great resources!
I tried to check out Google Reader for my second PLN, but it has been discontinued. For some reason I have no interest in joining LinkedIn and I really don't want to start too mant PLN's because there is no way I will be able to maintain them. So, I decided to build upon my fb account and expand upon my professional "friends". I joined the NYLA group, which will be great for staying updated on things going on here in NY. From what I could tell there are lots of posting for jobs, but a lot of great resource sharing as well. I joined Children's Literature Connection and at first was a little hesitant because there seemed to be a lot of posts with pictures, but then I dug back into previous posts and found some good information about upcoming conferences and book titles I was interested in. I also liked the ALA page but as far as I could tell it wasn't an open page so I don't think that I could join it??? They had a lot of great information on it though. The New York State Reading Association was a group I joined within the last few weeks and I have to say I have already received great resources from things that have been shared. If anyone hasn't joined that group I would highly recommend it.
I am happy to say that after spending a few hours playing around with twitter and fb I am excited. I know for sure that fb is going to be great for me. I am on everyday and it is is natural to my daily routine. I am not sure why I didn't think to tap into this resource sooner. As for Twitter, I am going to make it my mission to stick with it for a month. Hopefully, that will give me enough time to feel comfortable with it. Who knows maybe I will be creating my own tweets by then.
I look forward to reading all of your posts and hopefully I can start following some of you!
When I was exploring on my twitter page, I didn't create my own tweet, but I did retweet one new tech tool I learned, which I am sharing here http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/10-cool-ways-libraries-can-use-vine/ (an App for creating 6 second video clips) and I retweeted a cute idea for the library. Maybe you guys could follow me. It would be fun to have a follower! I can't promise I will tweet much myself, but I will keep retweeting. If you are looking for people to follow I highly recommend Shannon Miller. She shares a lot of great resources!
I tried to check out Google Reader for my second PLN, but it has been discontinued. For some reason I have no interest in joining LinkedIn and I really don't want to start too mant PLN's because there is no way I will be able to maintain them. So, I decided to build upon my fb account and expand upon my professional "friends". I joined the NYLA group, which will be great for staying updated on things going on here in NY. From what I could tell there are lots of posting for jobs, but a lot of great resource sharing as well. I joined Children's Literature Connection and at first was a little hesitant because there seemed to be a lot of posts with pictures, but then I dug back into previous posts and found some good information about upcoming conferences and book titles I was interested in. I also liked the ALA page but as far as I could tell it wasn't an open page so I don't think that I could join it??? They had a lot of great information on it though. The New York State Reading Association was a group I joined within the last few weeks and I have to say I have already received great resources from things that have been shared. If anyone hasn't joined that group I would highly recommend it.
I am happy to say that after spending a few hours playing around with twitter and fb I am excited. I know for sure that fb is going to be great for me. I am on everyday and it is is natural to my daily routine. I am not sure why I didn't think to tap into this resource sooner. As for Twitter, I am going to make it my mission to stick with it for a month. Hopefully, that will give me enough time to feel comfortable with it. Who knows maybe I will be creating my own tweets by then.
I look forward to reading all of your posts and hopefully I can start following some of you!
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Thing #2 continued...
After all that time and work I put in yesterday to create two screencasts on using OverDrive, I woke up this morning to an email from Paige saying that the interface and features on Overdrive are going to be changing in a few weeks. Just when you think you are getting ahead... I am sure the rest of you are going to get Paige's email as well, but I wanted to give you a heads-up in case you were thinking of making a screencast using OverDrive.
Monday, July 15, 2013
Thing 2: Screencasting
Thing 2: Screencasting
I was so excited once again that the tool we are learning this week is one that I have wanted to try for awhile. I have parents and students ask me all the time how to access Overdrive. I find it works best to take the time to walk students through it individually at the point in which they need it. When I would present it as a whole group, it would motivate students to want to use Overdrive, but I would need to actually walk them through it once they tried to do it themselves. Therefore, I thought it would be nice to have a screencast embeded on my site with step-by-step instructions how to do it.
After looking over all of the choices, Screenr was the tool that appealed to me most because I wasn't interested in doing screenshots. I struggled with Screenr for a long time, but not actually because of the tool. The tool itself was actually very easy to use. At first I needed to download Java, which was long overdue. Once I did that I thought I would simply, just push record. Well, unfortunately it wasn't that simple. I would push record and it would keep loading but nothing would happen. Finally, I decided to try a different browser, I was using Firefox (I know...). That did the trick! It loaded right away when I used Google Chrome. It took me a several tries to complete my screencast, just because I misspoke, but the tool itself was very basic and easy to use. I would definitely recommend it. Especially if you are looking for a simple tool for the students to use.
Here is the Screenr I created for using Overdrive:
The other tool I tried was Screencast-o-matic. This was another very simple tool to use. I did have to do a little downloading at first because I have 10.6 version of the MAC. Once I did that though, it was simple to use. I did actually like one feature better about this tool compared to Screenr and that is that it put a big yellow circle around my cursor, which made it easier for the viewer to follow. I was worried about having to upload this directly to YouTube to get a code to embed, but I didn't need to. Once I uploaded it to Screencast-o-matic I was able get the embed code. This was actually nicer than Screenr too because I was able to choose the size I wanted my screencast box, allowing me to format it to fit nicely on my website. Overall this tool is very easy to use and would be simple for students to use for projects of their own.
Here is my screencast for how to download a book from Overdrive to your kindle.
Next year we are starting Classroom 21 in the elementary school, as I mentioned in a previous posts. I could see the kids creating Screencasts next year in that classroom. They could use it for several instructional purposes, but I was thinking it would be neat if I had them use this to show me how they determined the site they were using for one of their research projects was actually a credible site. They could point out the different areas of the website that they used to base their decision on. Then I could use these to instruct students at the lower grades. If I was to use do this with the students I would be sure to use the Screencast planning sheet that Polly shared. I am interested to hear some of the ideas that others have for students using this tool.
I look forward to seeing what tools each of you tried and I am hoping to get some great ideas. In the meantime, if you want to check out my LMC webpage with my screencast you can visit: http://lakegeorgelmc.weebly.com/resources.html
I was so excited once again that the tool we are learning this week is one that I have wanted to try for awhile. I have parents and students ask me all the time how to access Overdrive. I find it works best to take the time to walk students through it individually at the point in which they need it. When I would present it as a whole group, it would motivate students to want to use Overdrive, but I would need to actually walk them through it once they tried to do it themselves. Therefore, I thought it would be nice to have a screencast embeded on my site with step-by-step instructions how to do it.
After looking over all of the choices, Screenr was the tool that appealed to me most because I wasn't interested in doing screenshots. I struggled with Screenr for a long time, but not actually because of the tool. The tool itself was actually very easy to use. At first I needed to download Java, which was long overdue. Once I did that I thought I would simply, just push record. Well, unfortunately it wasn't that simple. I would push record and it would keep loading but nothing would happen. Finally, I decided to try a different browser, I was using Firefox (I know...). That did the trick! It loaded right away when I used Google Chrome. It took me a several tries to complete my screencast, just because I misspoke, but the tool itself was very basic and easy to use. I would definitely recommend it. Especially if you are looking for a simple tool for the students to use.
Here is the Screenr I created for using Overdrive:
The other tool I tried was Screencast-o-matic. This was another very simple tool to use. I did have to do a little downloading at first because I have 10.6 version of the MAC. Once I did that though, it was simple to use. I did actually like one feature better about this tool compared to Screenr and that is that it put a big yellow circle around my cursor, which made it easier for the viewer to follow. I was worried about having to upload this directly to YouTube to get a code to embed, but I didn't need to. Once I uploaded it to Screencast-o-matic I was able get the embed code. This was actually nicer than Screenr too because I was able to choose the size I wanted my screencast box, allowing me to format it to fit nicely on my website. Overall this tool is very easy to use and would be simple for students to use for projects of their own.
Here is my screencast for how to download a book from Overdrive to your kindle.
Next year we are starting Classroom 21 in the elementary school, as I mentioned in a previous posts. I could see the kids creating Screencasts next year in that classroom. They could use it for several instructional purposes, but I was thinking it would be neat if I had them use this to show me how they determined the site they were using for one of their research projects was actually a credible site. They could point out the different areas of the website that they used to base their decision on. Then I could use these to instruct students at the lower grades. If I was to use do this with the students I would be sure to use the Screencast planning sheet that Polly shared. I am interested to hear some of the ideas that others have for students using this tool.
I look forward to seeing what tools each of you tried and I am hoping to get some great ideas. In the meantime, if you want to check out my LMC webpage with my screencast you can visit: http://lakegeorgelmc.weebly.com/resources.html
Monday, July 8, 2013
Thing #1: Curation Tools
I was so happy to see that this assignment was directly linked to something I have been wanting to do. Although this is only a start, this is a nice way for me to get started on creating Pinterest boards for teachers that I am collaborating with.
At our school our sixth grade teachers are starting Classroom 21 next year, in which teachers and students participate in project based learning while providing 1-to-1 computing for the students. Last week we had professional development days in which we started planning out our first theme and we determined that each class will be reading The Watson's Go to Birmingham as a read aloud. I told the teachers that I would work on putting together some resources for them to accompany the book. I started building a spreadsheet for them using Google Docs which is nice because it is easily accessible to everyone, but I didn't love the way it looked. I am a more visual learner so my mind works better with set-ups like the boards on Pinterest. Besides I am not great with spreadsheets as you can see below.
I thought it would be nice to build a board on Pinterest and share that board with them. The board turned into a great resource board that will give the teachers ideas to use with the book and other nonfiction titles and primary resources to pair with it. However, I couldn't find a great way to share the board with them besides adding a the link to the spreadsheet I had already created. After MUCH research and a LOT of trial and error I did determine that if you create a business account you can embed your board. So here is my board. My next step is to add a section to my school website where teachers can easily access this board. As you can tell this is something that can be very useful in my educational setting. This could really take off!!!
In case anyone is interested in how I was able to embed my board, I found this blog post to be the most useful: http://monikarunstrom.com/blog/2013/03/how-to-embed-a-pinterest-board-on-your-blog/
I was so happy to see that this assignment was directly linked to something I have been wanting to do. Although this is only a start, this is a nice way for me to get started on creating Pinterest boards for teachers that I am collaborating with.
At our school our sixth grade teachers are starting Classroom 21 next year, in which teachers and students participate in project based learning while providing 1-to-1 computing for the students. Last week we had professional development days in which we started planning out our first theme and we determined that each class will be reading The Watson's Go to Birmingham as a read aloud. I told the teachers that I would work on putting together some resources for them to accompany the book. I started building a spreadsheet for them using Google Docs which is nice because it is easily accessible to everyone, but I didn't love the way it looked. I am a more visual learner so my mind works better with set-ups like the boards on Pinterest. Besides I am not great with spreadsheets as you can see below.
I thought it would be nice to build a board on Pinterest and share that board with them. The board turned into a great resource board that will give the teachers ideas to use with the book and other nonfiction titles and primary resources to pair with it. However, I couldn't find a great way to share the board with them besides adding a the link to the spreadsheet I had already created. After MUCH research and a LOT of trial and error I did determine that if you create a business account you can embed your board. So here is my board. My next step is to add a section to my school website where teachers can easily access this board. As you can tell this is something that can be very useful in my educational setting. This could really take off!!!
In case anyone is interested in how I was able to embed my board, I found this blog post to be the most useful: http://monikarunstrom.com/blog/2013/03/how-to-embed-a-pinterest-board-on-your-blog/
Monday, July 1, 2013
And we're off...
I am excited to be starting my second SLS Cool Tools class. I enjoyed the last class I took of Polly's and find that I still use many of the tools that I learned. I look forward to reading all of your posts!
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