WEEK 8 - THING #18

I didn't realize that sites like Zoho existed. I am a Word fan so I tried not to judge Zoho to harshly. I created an account and set about playing around in Zoho. Since I love poetry, I typed out one of my favorites by Marge Piercy. I was able to pick a different font and make the title red. I also inserted a picture. There weren't many formating options for images, but the finished result was decent. I wanted to put a boarder around my poem but did not find an option for that (that is not to say it doesn't exist). The real problem came when I tried to post my poem to my blog. The help section said I should click on the "Publish" option on the tool bar. I searched for 30 minutes for the "Publish" button to no avail. This is dissappointing because I thought this was a really nice selling point for Zoho. If anyone figured this out, I would love to know.

Zoho would be useful for me and my school work. Since I do some of my school work on my lunch break, I have to save said homework on a flash drive at home and REMEMBER to bring it to work. With Zoho, you could access it anywhere. Although, I think I might wait a while to try something like this. Homework is precious you know!

Anyway, since I could not post my poem from Zoho, I saved it as a .pdf on my desktop and will try and paste it into this post.

OK, I am not able to post the .pdf file so I will just paste the poem.

WHAT'S THAT SMELL IN THE KITCHEN
All over America women are burning dinners. It's lambchops in Peoria: it's haddock in Providence; it's steak in Chicago: tofu delight in Big Sur; red rice and beans in Dallas. All over America women are burning food they're supposed to bring with calico smile on platters glittering like wax. Anger sputters in her brainpan, confined but spewing out missiles of hot fat. Carbonized despair presses like a clinker from a barbecue against the back of her eyes. If she wants to grill anything, it's her husband spitted over a slow fire. If she wants to serve him anything it's a dead rat with a bomb in its belly ticking like the heart of an insomniac. Her life is cooked and digested, nothing but leftovers in Tupperware. Look, she says, once I was roast duck on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam. Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

By: Marge Piercy

WEBQUEST

Here is my WebQuest. The template was easy to follow and helped me get my thoughts in order. Like others have stated, it kind of messed up your numbering (which is strange because it actually states to make sure you number your instructions). I also wish you were able to do a little more customizing but overall I think WebQuests are very useful. Here is mine. The Native American project is for a 5th grade social studies class. I could not get it to post a link so I just copied and pasted it!

Name:____________________
Date:_____________________
Subject: Social Studies
Professor: Ms. Ruble

Introduction: With Thanksgiving Day coming next month, now would be the perfect time to learn about Native Americans. The Native Americans lived on the North America continent long before Columbus "discovered" America. It was the Native Americans that helped the English settlers survive their first harsh North American winter. Let's have fun learning about these amazing groups of people.

Task: For this project, you will be writing a one to two page report on a Native American Tribe. You may chose a tribe from the North, South, East, West or the Plains. Your report should described the type of housing, clothing, food and crafts that pertain to your tribe. You will also be constructing a Kachina doll.

Process: 1. You will use the Rollyo website provided to conduct your research. 2. A "research notes" page will be passed out. You will search for information on your tribe's housing, clothing, food and crafts and write your information on your notes page. 3. You will use these notes to construct your first rough draft (Don't forget to use your own words and not the websites). 4. I will check each rough draft and will let you know if you can start on your final paper. 5. After your paper is completed, you will start on you Kachina Doll. Please read about what a Kachina Doll is and search for instructions on how to make a Kachina Doll on the Rollyo site. 6. After you have printed your instructions, you may go to the craft corner and create your Kachina Doll. 7. After your doll and paper are finished you will present both to the class.

Resources: I have created a Rollyo site title "Native Americans". This is where you will be doing all of your research.
http://rollyo.com/cathier/native_americans/
Native American Rollyo

Evaluation: Your paper will be graded on content (did you include housing, clothing, food and craft information), grammar (no typos and correct punciation) and construction (must have clear introduction, body, and conclusion). Your presentation will be graded on your delivery (speak loud enough to be heard and clear enough to be understood).

Conclusion: To celebrate our new knowledge of Native Americans, we will have a "Thanksgiving Feast". You will be asked to bring in a poster decorated with the types of foods that your tribe eats. These posters will be put on displayed around the classroom. Snacks and drinks will be provided for our "feast".

WEEK 7 - THING #17

I went to the sandbox provided in the California classroom 2.0 curriculum connections wiki and edited the page with my comment about origins of old sayings. I enjoyed reading others random thoughts some of which were quite entertaining. I also went to the section about the 23 things and learned about a voki talking avatar. I have to experiment with that! Taking the idea I saw in the sandbox, I think having students collaborate on a class story would be fun and interesting. As a class you could decide on a topic and each student would contribute maybe 4 or 5 paragraphs to the story. This could be blown into a really big project by having them create illustrations for the story and actually making it into a book to put in the classroom library!

WEEK 7 - THING #16

I like Wikis. I think they are easy to use and practical. I had some experience with PBwikis in one of my courses. I remember having to put a library budget on the wiki. We used a table copied from word. The formatting was tricky but I think that just for basic word processing a wiki is a sufficient tool.

I looked through the websites and can I just say, is Meredith Farkas everywhere? She created the Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. I have read her name numerous times since I started this LS program. She is definitely a mover and shaker in the library technology world. Anyway, I really liked the her wiki and added it to my Google Reader. I also need to look through the list of library blogs available on Library Bloggers Wiki. The list is extensive! In the TeacherLibrarian Wiki I read about a librarian that offers a Books ala Carte services. That is an idea I will tuck away and hopefully use someday.

I can see that one of the most obvious uses for a wiki in a library would be for book discussion and reviews. As far as the classroom, I would setup one like the Westwood Schools teacher, Vicki Davis has (one of the samples posted in week #7). Her wiki is not just for special projects that are here today and gone tomorrow. She definitely has a lot going on in her wiki and makes it an active part of her classroom. It has won many awards.

WEEK 6 - THING #15

I found an example of a modification of this program. Below is a link to a Power Point presentation created by Allen County Public Library located in Fort Wayne, IN. The presentation shows how they modified the 23 things to make it their own. Also shown is how they pitched it to the board and how it was implemented. Very interesting!
http://www.iolug.org/programs/2007-2008_01_Fall/IOLUG.2007Fall.Robinson.Learning2.0.pdf

Would you believe a friend of mine admitted to me she doesn’t use the library because it intimidates her? That said, I think that Library 2.0, among other things, needs to be about making patrons see that the library is there for them and not some information warehouse that they don’t, or are not permitted to have the key to. The latest technology should be implemented only if it improves the patrons experience in the library, not to make it more confusing. Michael Stephens wrote in The OCLC Newsletter, that librarians need to be careful of technolust. He also mentioned that it is important that the library be transparent. Including the patrons in new projects and getting their feedback would be a good start. So that is what Library 2.0 means to me, a library with a logical balance between user-centered and technology-friendly atmosphere.
http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/002/3.htm

WEEK 6 - THING #14

When I first opened Technorati, it looked like a difficult site to navigate through. Thing 14 instructions said to check out popular blogs, searches and tags. If they didn't have the link right there, I don't think I would have been able to find it in their website. Looking past that, there is quite a lot of info on this site. I did search "School Library Learning 2.0" and "Classroom Learning 2.0" and found many blogs and blog posts relating to these topics. However, when I searched tags I got no hits for either of them. I really enjoyed searching the popular blogs. Boing Boing was really interesting. I can't believe that they have editors, senior editors and whatnot. Is this a business for them? If not, when do they find the time to keep up with all the latest info that is available there?

I guess I didn't really understand the concept of tagging until I read chapter 8 in Nancy Courtney's book. The advantages that I find to be most important regarding tagging is inclusiveness, currency and low cost. With inclusiveness, people can find those rare allusive topics that controled vocabulary may not allow. For example, if you practice shamanism, thereare many buzz words that only shamans would know. Currency is important too. It takes minutes to update and create tags. It takes a lot longer to update "a large taxonomy". Low cost seems to be the biggest advantage for obvious reasons. Some disadvantages are the lack of hierarchy and gaming which is like spamming. There are no relationships in tagging. With gaming, anyone can just make many many tags for any content. This is a serious tax on the tagging system.

Tagging for personal reasons may not be a good idea for me. At work, I file a lot of information and I find that what I file stuff under depends on the mood I am in. I am a very inconsistent person for which tagging probably wouldn't be helpful.

WEEK 6 - THING #13

Delicious is pretty cool. I checked out the SJLibraryLearning2 account. I clicked on a bookmark named TweepSearch. It had a Twitter tag, so I clicked on that. Then I saw a bookmark called 100 Ways to Use Twitter in Your Library. I do not know much about Twitter, so I thought this would be a cool site to check out. This lead me to wanting to save the site which lead me to making a Delicious account for myself. Once there, I imported all my favorites from my computer, which was very easy. I don't know if this is the kind of thing I will keep up with for a month and then forget about it. Regardless, in the meantime, I like it.

I am curious about people putting bookmarks in their accounts that might have a virus associated with them. Does something in Delicious prevent this from happening? My daughter just recently put a virus on my home computer so I would be leary of clicking on just anyones bookmarks.