Thing 9: Databases & Search Tools

Thing 9 came at the perfect time! I had just been asked my the 9th grade English teacher to assist her students with researching people from Time Magazine's Top 100 Most Influential People of 2014 list. They of course had already exhausted basic Google searches, and I wanted to make the most of this opportunity to share a good database with these 9th graders.

So... as suggested by the first learning activity for Thing 9, I investigated some of the databases available through NOVEL and the school library system to see which might be helpful with this "influential people" assignment. I needed something that was updated often and current, and decided to focus my energy on Gale's Academic OneFile.

Using the suggested checklist from Thing 9, I was pleased to see that OneFile met pretty much all of the criteria:
- Yes for RSS feed
- Yes for saving results (also able to e-mail, download, etc.)
- Yes for advanced search options (which is what I actually used with the students)
- And probably yes for the search widget, although I didn't pursue this (I did however create a link with the OneFile logo directly on my library webpage at http://www.millbrookcsd.org/highschool/library

I found that using the advanced search feature of OneFile allowed students to search for their selected person while limiting results to "Document Title" - I found that by doing this, we got better results that were more focused on helpful information about the selected subject. I'm now a believer in Gale's OneFile and am much more confident using this search tool and sharing it with students. I looked at the Database Info Sheet that was posted and thought it was great, but didn't think it was necessary to use at this point - but definitely something to file just in case!

I also found several of the Thing 9 articles helpful and interesting. After reading the article "7 Academic Search Engines Not Named Google", I tweeted it out and it was favorited by both my principal and some of the HS teachers I work with! I also downloaded and plan to print the "7 Google Search Tips for Students" poster. The colorful circle graphics will catch their eye for sure!

I also tweeted out the link for the downloadable audiobooks I came across on openculture.com as a result from a link in the article "15 Must Have Google Lesson Plans to Teach Students Effective Search Skills". Good stuff!

Lastly, thought not on the list, I did also explore how to better use Wikipedia for research as part of Learning Activity 3 on the list. I explored this topic prior to my 9th grade English classes, and demonstrated it along with Gale's OneSearch. I showed students how to use Wikipedia as a launching point for research, and how to scroll to the bottom and the use the "References" or "External Links" sections to link to more authoritative sites, as well as primary sources, Ted Talks, and interviews. I created a 2-sided handout featuring Wikepedia for Research on side and OneSearch on the other. The lesson was well-received by the majority of students who successfully located information on their "Influential Person".

A very helpful "thing" and highly relevant to my teaching... thank you!

Thing 8 Collaborating, Connecting, Sharing

I have used both Skype and the “Skype an Author Network” on several occasions and always had a great experience withi it. As the K-12 Library Media Coordinator, part of my duties are to arrange author visits for students in all grades. Of course, budgets are tight, so the Skype an Author Network is a great resource. It did take a fair amount of time to go through the alphabetical list and match authors to books I already had in the school libraries, but if you have an author in mind and can search for them directly, it would be quite easy to use. Keep in mind of course that big name authors probably won’t be found on this site.  Authors I have Skyped with include Jean Marzollo, Garth Stein, Michelle Knudson, and Caroline Starr Rose to name a few. I highly recommend!

For collaboration among students, I’ve actually had success using a tool not listed on this site - so I thought I would mention it. Prezi has a great “share” option that allows users to edit the same Prezi project simultaneously from different locations. Each person can see where the other(s) editor(s) are working with little “Mii” type characters. My 6th graders loved this feature, and it allowed for extra work progress to be made outside of class time.

I am part of a Google Classroom pilot project through my school district and BOCES this year, and have had a couple of training sessions on it. It seems intuitive, but I have not actually used it with my classes as a means of project grading… Google Docs shared documents/folders seem to be sufficient for my classes - but students do like the accessibility that having their work saved in Google Docs provides, and I can see my District moving in that direction in the future. 

I thought it’d be helpful to use the Calendar feature, and set up a system for my family’s schedule of after-school activities and special events. I shared it with my husband in hopes of it being a dynamic and useful tool, but it turned out that I still rely on my iPhone, so I didn’t find the calendar something that “took” with my family, and don’t see myself using it in a collaborative manner. HOWEVER - I plan to look into using it in school as a reference for teachers. I'm hoping I can set it on my library webpage and use it as a dynamic calendar that reflects library closures (for class use, etc.). Teachers can quickly look and see which periods the library is available. I think this would be very helpful!

Lastly, I further investigated Google Drive and LOVE it - particularly for the accessibility features (makes life easier when I can access work files normally stored to the District server while at home!) AND for the shared documents feature. I set up a folder for each of my classes and have had students share classwork with me via that shared folder. So easy and the kids love it, too! This allows me to provide guidance and feedback more efficiently than just relying on in-class conferences.

Thanks for some more great resources!

Thing 7 Podcasting and Screencasting

What a fun topic with so much to explore! I think the easiest and most helpful thing for me to do this time is simply go through which resources and tools I spent time exploring. Besides meeting the requirement for this class, I like to think of this blog as my "go to" for refreshing my memory when I'm ready to use these tools with my classes.

I really enjoyed watching the video about the Sequoyah Book program and how the 4th & 5th graders used audioboo.fm and QR codes to post book reviews online. I think this is a great idea and something I hope to try with my 6th graders. We have MacBooks for class use though, so I will need to see if using them instead of iPads and iPods will work.

Although probably not something I plan to incorporate into my own class in the near future, I will definitely share the StoryCorps.me site with other teachers who may require interview based projects. I love how the templates and question ideas are already there to guide interviewers based on their relationship with the interviewee. Looks like a great resource.

Another tool that I really liked but will probably not be able to use in school due to Internet radio being blocked is AudioBoom. The way Polly's example was so easily embedded in our Thing 7 text shows just how easy to use this source can be. I may play with it at home though, and see if students can at least listen to the files I embed... will need to investigate this further.

I LOVE the idea of how Flipgrid works and will definitely try this out with my classes at the end of the quarter as a means of informal assessment. I may ask them to share the most valuable thing they learned during our 10 week class and then use the Flipgrid on my webpage as part of my introduction to future class sections.

Screenr is a resource that I have checked out and found really easy to use. Due to my current recovery from strep throat and sinus infection, I opted not to record my already nasally voice! But you can view a brief screener I created to show how to search for a book about horses on our library catalog at https://www.screenr.com/qhL7 .  I think it might also be helpful to use Screencast.com with my 10 week Digital Literacy class. I probably wouldn't need it to record a class lecture; However - I often run out of time for class presentations and end up grading a student's project without them present. I loved the idea of using screen casting while grading their projects so that they can still get that more "active" feedback, rather than just a rubric and grade handed back to them. Very cool!

Overall, I found Thing 7 to be very helpful and the tools easy to use. Thanks!! and on to Thing 8 :-)

Thing 6 - Curation Tools

Thing 6 introduced me to several new tools and I enjoyed experimenting with many of them. Since I am already familiar with Delicious social bookmarking and Pinterest, I focused on some of the other tools - but I did begin following "Cool Tools" through my existing Pinterest account :-)

I was surprised (pleasantly) to learn that although I hadn't realized it, I've already been "curating" resources for years - I just haven't called it that, or used some of the newer online tools to do it. After reading through some of the articles, I found the most helpful ones to be those that gave ideas for how we curate resources for library users.

Flipboard sounded interesting to me, so I created a new account and looked around. It wasn't completely intuitive to me, so I'm starting out with it by following the suggested "In the Fishbowl" board as well as a few others I came across that sounded interesting to me. I'm not sure how much I will use this account, but appreciate the opportunity to explore this resource.

My favorite new resource from Thing 6 is Storify! At first it took me a while to figure it out, but once I created the account and took the "tour", I decided to give it a try with a quick sample "story" consisting of grant opportunities and grant ideas for school libraries. I haven't gone through the resources I curated yet, but my "story" can be viewed at https://storify.com/missbook/grant-project-ideas

I can see myself using Storify more than Flipboard, especially when in the early phase of researching something. I explored both of these sites on my laptop, so I am anxious to check the App Store to see if these have iPhone mobile app options next. Looking forward to Thing 7!

Thing 5 - Digital Storytelling & Presentation Tools

I really enjoyed exploring the resources on Thing 5. Some I was already familiar with, and others I had never heard of. Of particular interest were the presentation tools. Both of the classes I teach rely heavily on using Web 2.0 tools to demonstrate student learning, so I was excited to try out some new ideas to use with them.

While scrolling through the list of resources, I read several of the items in the "Tools, Tips, and Resources" section and found many helpful.  I also viewed the "Power of Bunkr" demo and found it looked too advanced to use with my 6th graders. I also watched the "Don't Let the Pigeon be the Principal" and thought that was adorable! I would definitely do something like that with my classes sometime in the future.

To update my library webpage, I decided to add a Voki of myself introducing the library. You can check it out at http://www.millbrookcsd.org/middleschool/library. As part of my class's author study of Tim Green, who will be visiting our school in May, I am going to have them create a Voki of either the author himself, saying biographical info, or a Voki of a character from one of his books telling about the story. I think the kids will really enjoy this!

Another new tool that I plan to use with my classes in the coming weeks is the timeline feature on Dipity. I had never heard of this, but have been wanting to find a good timeline creating tool online that my classes could use for their author study project. I created a Dipity account and experimented with a sample timeline. It seemed pretty easy to use, although users only get 3 timeline projects for free before having to subscribe to a larger part of the service, so it will work for my class, but not sure how many students will want to go beyond 3 timeline projects...

I have played around with StoryBird and Voicethread and had a couple of students use it, but did not find them something I wanted to incorporate into my classes. One of my favorite presentation tools is Prezi. I created a simple one to use with my Digital Literacy class for a lesson on creating research questions. It serves two purposes - it serves as an introduction to what Prezi is, AND it is the tool I use for the lesson on writing research questions. It can be viewed at
http://prezi.com/hlrjblzapviq/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share
After going through the research process, each student will create their own Prezi on a topic of their choice as their final project for my 10 week course. They will love it!

Thing 5 was a lot of fun - a good mix of what I already knew and things I had never heard of. On to Thing 6...

Thing 4: RSS

Well, this has certainly been my least favorite "thing" so far - and the most frustrating... perhaps because I have very limited prior experience using RSS feeds... I'm not sure.  I don't really follow blogs, and I prefer to just visit sites that I want to be updated about, so this has never seemed like a tool that I would make use of.

As per the course activity directions however, I did sign up and create a dashboard on Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com/privatepage/1#General) and played around on that for a while. Using the Netvibe search bar, I found and successfully added "YA Books Central" (http://www.yabookscentral.com/blog/latest ) to my Dashboard. However, I was not able to figure out how to add an existing RSS feed from a site I was on. I went to www.slj.com and clicked on their RSS feed icon, but could not figure out how to get it to save to Netvibes.

Additionally, my computer didn't seem to cooperate, or I was dealing with firewall issues, because every site I clicked on the RSS feed icon for, I kept getting error messages that no reader was installed - I didn't see an option for adding the site or blog to my Netvibes account.

Overall, an exercise that reinforced my reluctance to delve into the world of RSS... happy to be moving on to Thing 5.

Thing 3 - Personal Learning Networks

As always, I found this "thing" very interesting and helpful. As a long-time Facebook user and a somewhat "seasoned" Twitter account holder, I was interested in learning more about how to use these tools in an educational setting. I have still not ventured into the land of Facebook for my school libraries, but HAVE had a Twitter account for about a year now, to which I post (tweet) links for interesting or helpful articles I come across.

I do struggle with determining my intended audience though - I'd like to have more students following me, and use Twitter to announce new books that arrive, or special contests, etc. but most of my followers are colleagues. I need to work on ways to make @MCSDlibrary more student-focused.

While completing "thing 3", I explored several of the links and articles that were recommended, and even tweeted some out to my followers, including:

"Facebook Guide for Educators" (which was favorited by my principal - yay!!)
"Does Facebook Really Have a Place in the Classroom?"
"20 Interesting Ways to Use Twitter in the Classroom"

After that I thought I'd challenge myself by creating a Twitter widget to add the feed to my library websites. I used the link under option 3 to create the widget and attempted to put it on my library webpages. However, I could not add the HTML code on my own so am now waiting for my technology help desk to assist me with getting the widget on the site and working. I am hoping that this may attract more followers!