Shiny New Tools: Flickr and More!

This week I played with lots of online tools for the classroom. One of the sites I explored was Flickr. I'd been on Flickr before, but it was just a way to transport a picture I needed to move. I uploaded pictures this week as well, but I played with some features that were new to me. One was tagging - makes sense, but I hadn't known it was on Flickr. One feature that I really liked was the annotation tool. You can add a note for any part of the photo. Even though I just added one note on each picture, I could see the Flickr pictures ending up as diagrams. Another feature I liked was mapping; it would be fun to go to certain locations and looking at all the photos taken there.

Check out my updated account:
My Flickr Account

I had time to play around with lots of other tools this week. Some were tools I'd already used, and found new uses for. I loved thinking of more ways to use Survey Monkey; it could be used for everything from a school satisfaction survey for parents to a reading habits survey for elementary school kids. I'd also used Google Drive at a school I used to teach at, but now I see so many ways for students to use it as a portal, such as collaborating with other students from home or building a portfolio.

Out of the other sites I looked at,  my favorite was Glogster. Glogster is a great replacement for the poster board, scissors, and glue sticks I've used with my students to show their knowledge on everything from dolphins to Rosa Parks. What's amazing about Glogster is that you can make multimedia posters. Imagine embedding video or audio into those cut-and-paste posters! I definitely want to use this tool as soon as possible. Big Huge Labs also looks great - I especially like the features where kids can make trading cards and magazine covers.

I also really liked video presentation websites like Voki, Animoto, and Jing. It looks so easy to use these tools, and the outcome looks smooth and slick. I look forward to using these sites to create my own presentations for students, and to also use them with students.

I wasn't particularly excited by Dumpr (a photo effects site), BubblUs (mind mapping), Zamzar (a file conversion site), or Doodle (scheduling). They all have their place, but didn't strike me as tools I'd want to use right away.

And last but not least, there's Stumble Upon. Although I can only think of limited uses for the classroom, oh. my. gosh. do I like it for my own use. I love that it brings your articles about your interests, and that they are all mixed together for you to, well, stumble upon. It's installed on my iPad already and I can tell I'll be using it!
 

RSS Feeds, Social Bookmarks, and Book Sites, oh my!

In our class this week, we investigated different RSS feed aggregators. I use Feedly to follow writing blogs (I hung on to Google Reader until about June 30th, the day before it closed!). I like the look of Feedly, especially on my iPad. I get overwhelmed with Feedly, but that's my own fault; I'll go two weeks without it and I'll have 100 feeds to catch up on! And I have a hard time skipping any. I'm working on it.

For my assignment, I looked into Bloglovin. It was simple to sign up, and adding blogs to follow was straightforward and user friendly. You can find your own blogs to add, or search through Bloglovin's categories. Once I'd chosen my three blogs to follow, Bloglovin made suggestions based on each blog. The suggestions were spot on, and faster than looking up blogs on a search engine. The reader part is pretty much the same as Feedly's. The page shows previews of the blog post, just like Feedly does. The post turns gray, or de-highlights, in the same way as well. Overall, I found Bloglovin easy to use.

The most interesting part of the assignment for me was which blogs I picked to try on Bloglovin. I chose to follow all elementary librarians' blogs. (It may have been a reaction to an observation I had this week at a high school, which made me really miss the warm and fuzzies of elementary school!) I liked Elementary Librarian, Mrs. Lodge's Library, and The Centered School Librarian. This content can be the beginning of my professional development blog following. I'll probably end up putting it on Feedly, though; I don't think I can handle more places to check!

I also checked out social bookmarking sites. I have to admit, social bookmarking was hard for me to understand. I investigated Delicious and Diigo and really liked the research-y aspect of Diigo. And, just like my obsession with school supplies, I was immediately booked on color highlighting and sticky notes! Diigo is already set up on my toolbar. See my Diigo.

Finally, I checked out Shelfari, Library Thing, and Goodreads I'm a longtime Goodreads member, and although Shelfari and Library Thing definitely have their advantages (free books to preview on Library Thing, good teacher links on Shelfari, etc.), I'm sticking with Goodreads because it's the largest and I can find many of my friends there. It's fun to see what everyone's reading.

Find me on Goodreads (My books) so I know what you're reading too!

Electronic Reference Collection on Symbaloo

For my other class (Instructional Resource Selection), we had to create an electronic reference collection, without using databases.

I used Symbaloo for the first time, and I loved it. It creates a dashboard of buttons, and you can customize it to your own needs (or the needs of your students). It's like LiveBinders or Only2Clicks in some ways, but it's more visually appealing.

I found traditional reference sources (Merriam-Webster, Almanacs, etc.), but also a ton of good research sites like Pebble Go and Classics for Kids (music information). So if you're interested, check it out!


My Symbaloo Reference Collection

Wiki Week

This week in my Emerging Technology class, we read about wikis and created one ourselves. I didn't want to create a school-related wiki, since I'm floating from job to job right now (unfortunately, my Library Media long-term sub job ends Monday).

I ended up creating a wiki for my writing group, NOCT Writers (Northern CT writers). (And yes, I live in Massachusetts, but it's close enough! Just one town over). Jeannie, Kate, and Rachel have known each other forever, and I met Jeannie and Kate through a Young Adult Novel Revision Retreat in North Andover, MA. We kept meeting at SCBWI conferences, and eventually they invited me to their meetings. They have great insights into my book, and come up with ideas I would never think of.

We've been having a horrible time scheduling meetings lately. We all have children involved in activities. So I thought that I could set up a Wiki for us, and that maybe sometimes we could post our chapters to each other in between meetings. We could either read each other's work ahead of time, before meetings, or read work when it's hard to get together.

Creating the actual wiki was fairly straightforward. I'm not sure if I did everything right - it seems to me that the tabs for each one of us should be more obvious from the front page. I'm not sure if this is just the way it's supposed to be, or not.

The good news is that, like this blog, I can keep coming back to it and improving it over time. Gotta love revision!