Thing 5: Social Bookmarking & Curation Tools

I myself am not a fan of the social bookmark.  I wish I were and I would like to be instead of putting everything in my favorites, but I don't like the look of delicious or diigo.  I like the groups that you had set up and I would follow those, but I just don't have the time to create and manage this huge task for myself right now.  Maybe by the time I am ready, then there will be a tools I prefer more than these too...

Love the look of scoopIt.  I really like this site and the examples you posted.  Seeing our work up there was nice to have it shown with photos, animotos instead of just words is really eye catching.  I had just signed up for pinerest a few weeks ago.  Not sure that I like that it is linking to FB or Twitter, but I guess some sites have to be.  I like what other people have put together.  I am slow at getting things on there.  It is very visual and I think it might work well for a class project to have a kids name on a box and have them create what goes inside of it whether for a research project or class assignment.  I'll have to work on this ideas.  The kids would love it.

Paper.li is interesting.  I likes the article from Joyce V about using it with kids vs scoopit.  I read about flipit a few weeks ago and can't wait to have a device where I could download it to try it out.  It sounds like a great tool!

I can see using some of these with kids, but would love to hear other people's thoughts on how to incorporate these with elem. school children.

Thing 4: RSS

Well with the last online class I signed up for Google reader which I didn't like at all.  Not exactly sure why, maybe it was how things looked on the screen looking at it again today, I still don't like it very much.

So I signed in to igoogle which is lovely.  I like having the option of moving, adding, deleting whatever I wish.  Having my gmail on the screen along with the weather, google maps, a librarian news feed as well as any blog I also wanted to follow.  The lovely calming green tea house theme also makes me happy at this crazy time.  I found a list making app... oh how I love lists and this fits right in!  As nice as my stickie notes that go on my computer screen!

Not to mention the children's book pick of the day.  The list could be never ending!  I Could see having my personal igoogle at home to enjoy and my professional one here at work!  Very cool.

As far as how it could be used for school libraries.  I would love to see our district be able to have the ability to have the feed on our library pages linking to new books added to the system or if a special event was coming up say an author visit... information the parents might need to know like "get your book orders in by..." to make sure the order arrives be the author....

I also took at look at the cool tools netvibe site.  That is awesome as well.  I love that there are tabs up at the top to keep you organized (us by district/place) and having all the blogs listed to keep up on when people post next.  I like the look of netvibe and the readability as well.  I may use this site for home use, but maybe someone has already created one place for librarian to get ideas and keep them at the ready so I wouldn't have to create it from scratch.

Behind again with troubles...

It is vacation and I find myself behind once again with my assignments.  I have mental trouble and can't see past my own thoughts... I have a 5th grade project coming up and the teachers want us to research a state with an open mind.  The students will have to find information to share with the class in the form of a PSA.  The kids would search for information, pictures then write a script to record to go along with the pictures.  I was thinking that Voicethread might be the way to go with this, but as I was trying to do this, the pictures I downloaded from the copyright free sites once entered to voicethread are grainy and blurry at best.  Now where to find pictures that will work?

Next problem.... I can't remember how to invite or have the students each sign up for their own accounts....  I don't necessarily want them to be one one account with different identities unless they EACH can be working on their own project since this is an individual assignment.

I have looked for other ways to have the students create their PSA without downloading anything to the computers -- which we are not allowed to do....  I am stumped and hoping for some intervention.... I suppose I could use Windows Movie Maker and have them record their voices there since we have this on our computers.  But I taught MovieMaker to them as 4th graders last year and the 5th grade teachers wanted them to do "something new"....  I can't seem to find a place to import pictures, if we can find good pictures, that will also let the student record their voices...  Animoto with let you import the voice file, but how to I go about recording the voice and can students have their own animoto accounts?  Argh!