Thing 3 - Personal Learning Networks

I had an opportunity to watch the Todaysmeet site that Polly mentioned on Monday with the group of Ohio teachers.  We used this site for a professional development day in Saratoga to ask questions or comment on what we were discussing at each building.  I can see where this would be extremely helpful.  Not sure I li8ke to format if you come late to the discussion or if you turn away from the monitor... the comments bump down in a weird way so I had to keep trying to get to the last one I read.  lots of good ideas and links posted.  I saw some good ideas and thoughts flow by.  Twitter feed suggestions, teaching ideas with this media... even having the students use this site to get their thoughts out and see what others are thinking, then take the next step and write out "something".  Saw a new Pinterest board I plan on following as well.  Just sparking more interest and ideas with this summer course... so thank you!

Thing 2: ScreenCasting

Oh boy... this was one thing that I wasn't sure of for myself when I saw it on the list of to-dos... but after watching and learning more about the possibilities I am hooked.  I love several of the programs that are out there including Screenr.com and Screencast-o-matic.com.  I lost internet at our house so I have been planning to record at school today, but lo and behold my computer here at work will not let me use Java!  Argh!  I was planning on doing a small screencast of how to find the OPAC and do a simple search.  I have one more idea to see if it will work here, but I am not sure I can get it to work.  Will post again if I can or come up with something else....

I also looked at present.me.  That is great!  I would love to have my fifth graders do a presentation with this site this year!  I had tried other things in the past but it got overwhelming for them.  If they could create the slides in PowerPoint then move them over and record themselves I think they would get a kick out of seeing themselves on the screen as well as using the common core standards of presenting and technologies.  I could even have my fourth graders present one or two slides instead of an individual presentation.  I looked through some of the sites ideas and love the idea of using it for sign language as well.  I teach my kindergartens some sign language and this would be fun for them to see on the screen.


UPDATE:  I had to switch computers and it lets students run java, but not on my computer.  I used screenr.com to create a simple catalog search... the first one the sound didn't work and the next computer wouldn't go past the login screen once the screencast was made... argh!   I have to go pick up my son but will try these again on a different computer this week.  The site is super easy to use and if you plan out what you want to say and demonstrate it goes great!  Wish me luck for later this week to try once again!

Thing 1 -- Curation Tools

I enjoyed reading the other people ideas and what each had tried out for their school like Scoop.it and Pinterest for collaboration planning.  I have used Pinterest for a while now for my own teaching ideas, but signed up for an account specifically for my library.

What a great idea to create a special account just for my school library page.  I have been meaning to do this for a while... and now to try embedding Pinterest pages... very nice!


I would like to be able to have books that I have read as examples for the kids to see and look at for some reading suggestions. Or even parents. My only issue for the moment is that Pinterest won't find images from my catalog only the Titlepeak page which doesn't exactly link back to my own circulation stuff. Will keep working on this part.

New Summer Course Thing 1 -- Intro

Hello!  Took me forever to remember where this blog from the first part of the course was and today after a lot of digging I found it!  Can' keep a librarian down for long!

Will continue to work on each module here on this blog.