#22 Week 9 Ebooks and audiobooks

What a great resource this was. I have used ebooks, but had no idea of the number of collections that were available. It certainly opened my eyes to another way of linking up students, staff and others with books that might not be readily available. These are definitely sites I will share. This is an area that is underutilized in my school, so I will now need to take the time to develop an action plan to reach this audience.
I often refer people to the regional library collection, and they have had great success there. So this is another resource for people to explore. I am always amazed at what one can find on the Internet.
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#21 Week 8 Podcasts

There is an amazing number of podcasts available. The site EPN Educational Podcast Network had all kinds of amazing entries. It is impressive, and makes me want to try this in the future at our school.
I happened to be reading the book The Educator's Podcast Guide by Bard Williams so I decided to try some of their sites.
One site now charges a fee. I thought that was interesting. I found two school sites that were very interesting.
www.tclauset.org/wpa/
This is the Hanes Middle School in North Carolina. Truly impressive what they have done.
I also located Mabry Online.org Podcast Central
p://mabryonline.org/podcasts/
This is a school that really understands and embraces podcasts as a learning experience for students. Another impressive site.
I wanted to look up Grammar Girl but ran out of time. Another interesting idea that will need some more exploration.
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#20 Week 8 YouTube

I was unable to access YouTube from my home computer, and was blocked at school. However, this is one area I have had some experience with, and have seen the potential. Students love video, and if done correctly making a video and posting it on YouTube could be a worthwhile experience. But it would need to be structured well, and have assessments and rubrics along the way as a class.
There is an issue that I am reading and hearing about a lot lately, and I think it's time that schools address the issue. I am also a member of our school's Tech Vertical Team, and I do think this issue will be brought up. Cell phones are everywhere, and what happens when students take a picture or create a video from things that happen in a class, and then post it on YouTube. Do schools have policies in place? What if someone posts a class video that might put others at risk? What are the guidelines, and how do we make sure that both students and staff members understand them.
There is a great new book called "Digital Citizenry" by Mike Ribble that deals with all of these issues. Whose responsibility is it to teach these ideas? I am planning to develop a curriculum this summer for students in Grades 6 and 7 in my school as I feel the issue is important. Students love video, and at the age of my students many believe everything they see. I have students in Grades 3-7. It's an important issue, and one I feel we all probably need to pay attention to.
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#19 Week 8 Library Thing

What a terrific tool! This is really cool. I can see lots of uses for this. I will begin by keeping a list of my favorite books that I read. It will also be great for my course work as I can keep a running list of all the books I need to remember for future projects. This is a site that will have great appeal for many library users.
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#18 Week 8 ZoHo

What a terrific concept! Too bad that they don't let users under age 13, (I understand why), but consider how useful this would be for students at middle school level. I created a test document and emailed our tech and curriculum director. This would be a useful tool for working on our Vertical Teams. All the other options have great potential too. I think this could be particularly useful for teachers and high school students who did not have access to the same word format as the school might use, or who were away on vacation and needed to post a lesson or create an assignment. I can see that this will be a useful site to explore and use. When I go to work tomorrow I am going to share this site with some teachers who would find it useful.
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#16 Week 7 Wikis

I needed this refresher on Wikis. I had participated in using a group wiki before when we were writing information literacy rubrics. I found them very useful at the time. However, after that I forgot all about using them, and how useful they can be. This is an area that needs to be reexplored. We are in the midst of several curriculum revisions and creating benchmarks, and this tool would be very helpful. I am going to have to reacquaint myself with them so I can teach others on our curriculum teams to use them.
Some of the sample wikis provided were outstanding. I really liked the idea of the book reviews. I found several new titles I needed to put on my reading lists. I also liked the wiki created around job training. What a useful way to keep updated and current about all the needed training and expertise needed for a particular job.
A possible on-the-job use would be to create a wiki especially for your clerical staff between schools. This would be a great tool to keep up-to-date so you don't have to retrain your new personnal each time, and wonder what you forgot. I think I might suggest this to each school librarian and the one support person.
Students working in groups could really benefit from having a common wiki to share ideas and revisions with on projects they are involved in. It would help students to have one central location to keep their work. One problem here might be students that don't have computer access. Not having computer access will be a problem that needs to be addressed once schools start using more of these Web 2.0 options.
This was a great refresher for me. I have already begun to think of ways to use them with students, staff and within the actual library department.
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