An amazing interactive video in 4 parts, created from images from the NY Times archives. At any point you can stop and explore the content in more detail.
Great article on using digital microstories to draw students back into literature and teach skills from the standards. The authors address the purpose behind this strategy, links to digital microstories, and ideas for digital presentations from students. They also touch on citation of images.
UCF - imilar to movie trailers, video book trailers are short, minute and a half to two-minute videos that introduce the basic storyline. They differ from book reports captured on video in that in these productions the story is re-enacted with artistic and creative decisions made by the director as to what parts of the story are presented.\n\nTEACHERS: Are you interested in creating your own book trailers and posting the on this site? UB the Director is a curriculum model that answers the inevitable question from your students: "Why do I have to read the book if I can watch the movie about it instead?" Our curriculum teaches you and your students how to visualize the books being read and how to utilize the story invention process to create your own video book trailers. By registering, we will provided guidance on how to create video book trailers and how to add them to the Newbie's Corner our site.
I got this idea from another librarian in my district, and these signs are now on all my library shelves. She told me she found it in a book about library display ideas, but I do not know the title of that book. Where ever it came from originally, I cannot take credit for its simple brilliance; I am merely passing it along here.
January 5, 2015
Google Maps is an excellent tool to use with students to develop their spatial thinking. Beyond getting driving or walking directions to the other, this tool enables students to discover the world right from their classrooms. It is also a very good way to teach students about geography concepts, distance measurement, map readings and other fundamentals of mapping such as longitude, latitude, locations and many more.
"The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge - the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part - the part a machine can do. The real difficulty kicks in when you click down into your search results. At that point, it's up to you to sort the accurate bits from the misinfo, disinfo, spam, scams, urban legends, and hoaxes. "Crap detection," as Hemingway called it half a century ago, is more important than ever before, now that the automation of crapcasting has generated its own word: "spamming.""
This is one of the pages from a webquest on the Middle Ages, specifically designed to help students gain more from reading the book "The Door in the Wall". It contains lots of links to
"a collection of 140-character pearls of wisdom from educators using the social networking service, Twitter.
From behaviour management to interaction with colleagues, you will find practical advice and ideas contributed by classroom practitioners!"
2009 by Doug Belshaw
The following post is the first in a new series from Leslie Lees, VP of Content Development from ebrary. Academic Ebooks - The Shifting Landscape will discuss changes that are occurring with ebooks and implications for libraries and their users.
Teaching technique One of the tips I picked up from attending the COFHE conference from attending Anthony Beal's session was the use of Post-it notes for a different way to evaluate student perceptions. At the beginning of the session I gave the students two post it notes each and asked them to write down...
“I think the definition of writing is shifting,” Boardman said. “I don’t think writing happens with just words anymore.”
In his classes, Boardman teaches students how to express their ideas and how to tell stories —and he encourages them to use video, music, recorded voices and whatever other media will best allow them to communicate effectively. He is part of a vanguard of educators, technologists, intellectuals and writers who are reimagining the very meaning of writing and reading.
The keys to understanding this new perspective on writing and reading lie in notions of collaboration and being social. More specifically, it’s believing that collaboration and increased socialization around activities like reading and writing is a good idea.
“We find when writing moves online, the connections between ideas and people are much more apparent than they are in the context of a printed book,”
transmedia work
The MIT Media Lab tagged collaboration as one of the key literacies of the 21st century, and it’s now so much a part of the digital learning conversation as to be nearly rote. In his new book, “Where Good Ideas Come From,” Stephen Johnson argues that ideas get better the more they’re exposed to outside influences.
Laura Flemming is an elementary school library media specialist in River Edge, N.J. About three years ago, she came across a hybrid book—half digital, half traditional—called “Skeleton Creek” by Patrick Carmen.
“The 6th graders were running down to library class, banging down the door to get in, which you don’t often see,” Flemming said.
It is not only the act of writing that is changing. It’s reading, too. Stein points to a 10-year-old he met in London recently. The boy reads for a bit, goes to Google when he wants to learn more about a particular topic, chats online with his friend who are reading the same book, and then goes back to reading.
“We tell our kids we want them to know what it’s like to walk in the shoes of the main character,” Flemming said. “I’ve had more than one child tell me that before they read ‘Inanimate Alice,’ they didn’t know what that felt like.”
Stein says it’s better to take advantage of new technologies to push the culture in the direction you want it to go. Stein is fully aware of the political and cultural implications of his vision of the future of reading and writing, which shifts the emphasis away from the individual and onto the community. It’s asking people to understand that authored works are part of a larger flow of ideas and information.
VocabGrabber analyzes any text you're interested in, generating lists of the most useful vocabulary words and showing you how those words are used in context. Just copy text from a document and paste it into the box, and then click on the "Grab Vocabulary!" button. VocabGrabber will automatically create a list of vocabulary from your text, which you can then sort, filter, and save. Select any word on the list and you'll see a snapshot of the Visual Thesaurus map
links for book Library Mashups by chapter. See also delicious.com/librarymashups
n Library Mashups, Nicole C. Engard and 25 contributors from all over the world walk readers through definitions, summaries, and practical uses of mashups in libraries. Examples range from ways to allow those without programming skills to make simple website updates, to modifying the library OPAC, to using popular sites like Flickr, Yahoo!, LibraryThing, Google Maps, and Delicious to share and combine digital content.
A programmer can start from scratch and become a professional with the help of James P. Long's "Python Programming For Beginners" book. Those who want to get a good grip of what programming language is should get from this Python book.
Librarians feel compelled to acquire eContent from only one distributor because it is too confusing – for them, for students, for teachers, for business managers - to purchase eContent from a variety of distributors, thus materials selection is driven by who they buy from, not what a
igns with the curriculum. This is a classic example of the tail wagging the dog.
It is our job to develop our collections, aligning them with our school/district’s curriculum – not to buy ready-made packages from vendors. It is our job to create, instructional materials, and to determine how to best assess our students’ learning. This requires granular knowledge of our patron base, our curricula, and our collections. You can't fake this. It takes a long time to build that knowledge base. If we relinquish these responsibilities to commercial interests, we literally sell out our own profession.
eContent requires meticulous, patron-aware (rather than traditional) cataloging. It is virtually (no pun intended) impossible to “display” eContent. There is no way to physically put it in the hands of students, if students are using their own technology. This is not happening for a few reasons:
Since vendors and library management systems have made it possible to import MARC records, librarians, as a whole, have been falling out of the cataloging practice.
Cataloging is time consuming, and tedious work.
Cataloging, as we learned it, doesn’t work for our students. We have to reinvent it. For example, at New Canaan High School, we add the project name as a subject heading to each title in the eCollection that supports it.
In BYOD programs, library programs should be undergoing significant instructional transformations that evolve as students’ facility with mobile technology increases. The ratio of print to digital content should be contingent upon students’ ability to access eContent. Developing a system to calculate this would help school librarians make sound decisions about format choices."
Abstract of video: Based on original data, the talk considers disparities in people's Web use skills and how skills relate to what people do online. Those who know how to navigate the Web's vast landscape can reap significant benefits from it. In contrast, those who lack online abilities may have a harder time dealing with certain logistics of everyday life, may miss out on opportunities and may also obtain incorrect information from unreliable sources or come to rely on unsubstantiated rumors.
This study sought to collect data from teens and librarians about their preferences and recommendations for the effective design of physical library spaces for teens. Librarians and teens at twenty-two U.S. public libraries filmed narrated video tours of their young adult (YA) public library spaces. The researchers used qualitative content analysis techniques to analyze the video data and to develop a framework for guiding the design of effective YA public library spaces. In addition to providing specific recommendations for user-centered YA library space design, this study highlights the need for continued user input into the design and maintenance of YA public library spaces as teens' needs evolve and vary across time and from community to community.
"What lifelong learning needs do recent graduates have once they finish college? What information sources and systems do they use for continued learning? During fall 2014, the PIL research team surveyed 1,651 recent graduates from 10 US colleges and universities. Read the survey trends report with preliminary findings from our study (10 pages, PDF, 229KB).
"Preliminary Trends about Recent Graduates' Lifelong Learning Needs and Practices," Alison J. Head, Project Information Literacy Research Summary, February 17, 2015."
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review: