Sorry Harry, You've Been Upstaged

I've spent these past few days immersed in a fabulous book. What could be keeping me up leafing through the pages, filling my brain with a smorgasbord of ideas? In one of her postings on TeacherlibrarianNing Jeri Hurd recommended Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms by Will Richardson. This book is more than living up to her endorsement and my copy is bristling with stickies and notes as I plan for September. My wish list includes starting some wiki pathfinders with staff and colleagues in other schools. (Thanks for this idea, Joyce!) Showing staff and students how to use social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and furl. Finding more ways to incorporate flickr creative commons images into assignments.
For example:
*What would any given character's flickr album look like? Would their collection of images look different at the beginning of the story and at the end?
*If you wanted to send a powerful message to the world on a specific topic what images would you use? Compile those images in a flickr badge. Can others discern what your message is from viewing your badge?
*select an image representative of a theme. Then select areas of that image to annotate with your own commentary or questions.

A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words

Image is everything, or so they say. These are some of my great finds of resources for digital images that can be used freely or with some restrictions (use the phrase creative commons when searching):
TASI or Technical Advisory Service for Images is a great site which focusses on finding and using digital images.
Other sites to check out are:
morgueFile
And of course flickr

There are many government agency sites with free images and I hope to develop a list of Canadian sources over time.

More on blogs

I recently signed up for an iGoogle account which I use solely for the purpose of keeping track of the blogs I like to read as they are updated. This saves me having to check each one individually and lets me pick and choose which ones I wish to read.
This morning brought me a lovely overview of recently posted ideas on how to improve presentations from Joyce Valenza's NeverEndingSearch on the School Library Journal site. If your students need a PowerPoint tune-up this would be a great place to start. I plan to share these ideas with my staff come September as well as incorporating them into my own work.

BCTLA blog

Thanks to Val Hamilton for creating a blog for BCTLA news posts.
BCTLA blog This is a great way to keep up with the latest news and add comments.

Ready for more?

You might want to check out Joyce Valenza's blog post on SLJ for July 8: The NeverEnding Search. She presents a truly dazzling smorgasbord of Web 2.0 tools to explore; and here was me thinking I'd have an early night! And if you still haven't heard of TeacherLibrarianNing you really should take a look or better still join. It's an online meeting place for a wonderfully supportive, creative group of librarians and the perfect place to pick up new ideas, ask questions and meet with like-minded people from around the world.

Toondo

The idea to create this came after two long and intense days of learning the automated system the library will have come September. I can see using a tool like Toondo to bring some interest and humour to the library website. It didn't take long, the program is very intuitive and it was easy to load into this blog.

By bookminder | View this Toon at ToonDoo | Create your own Toon

Update, I notice that Toondo has become Toondoo. Feb. 2010.

School Library 2.0 Week 3 Thing 6

The toys in Flickr provide lots of fun and some possible educational uses. Earlier I created a Flickr Badge and have been thinking of ways to use this with a class. How about having students find photos to support a theme, choose photos that a character in literature might have in an album or which represent significant aspects of their character (What would Lady Macbeth's Flickr Badge look like?), plan an imaginary trip, choose photos that would provoke discussion around an issue or community event. Or they could choose photos which represent novels they have read over a given time period.
You could use the Create a Personalized CD/DVD Cover tool to make a cover for a compilation CD of the protagonists favourite music/music to enhance the theme of the story. Have students use the magazine cover maker for an event in history or a biography of a particular person or character.
The possibilities are endless. It would be interesting to give a class an assignment to meet specific curriculum related objectives while making the best use of a flickr tool and see what they come up with.