Thing 19 REVISED: Social Reading & Book Stuff

Another THING packed with great resources and information! After browsing through the information topics, I decided to explore a few of the resources that particularly stood out to me. I began by reading Edudemic's article "10 Websites to Help Students Connect with Books". I found it so helpful that I tweeted it out to my followers (MCSDlibrary) so that others may also explore some of the sites.

After that I checked out the Reading 2.0 LibGuides site - but I found it to be overwhelming. Too much information in all those tabs made my head spin. I'm sure it's a great resource, and if I have an afternoon to spend browsing through it sometime, I will likely re-visit it.

I spend a fair amount of time looking at the International Children's Digital Library. I love the philosophy of this website, and shared it with my colleague at the elementary level so she can add it as a resource on the District's elementary library webpages.  I also shared it with my Middle and High school foreign language teachers, and two of the three wrote back almost immediately thanking me for sharing the great resource with them.

Some of the resources in this THING were already familiar to me: Overdrive and GoodReads. However, both are things I've just barely touched the surface on.  I have the overdrive app on my iPhone and have knowledge of its use through our local public library system.

For the purpose of this activity, I chose to dig deeper into what GoodReads has to offer. I was intrigued with the idea of creating the widget to add to my library webpage and using it to make book recommendations. I spent some time researching how exactly to add a widget, and determined that it will require the assistance of my tech support guy.  Hopefully he will teach me how to add widgets on my own. I look forward to learning how to use the GoodReads widget on my webpages to make recommendations. Neat idea!

Thing 19: Social Reading and "book stuff”

At the time I'm writing this blog entry, Thing 19 seems to be missing as a link on Track 2 course page. I searched back through my e-mails from Polly and found the notice that Thing 19 was available, and saw from the name that it had to do with social reading and book stuff.

Since I'm not sure exactly what the activities were, for now I am going to write about what I currently do for social reading, etc.  Later, should I see the Thing 19 once again listed and accessible, I will revise/add to this blog with an update.  I was just concerned about not getting credit for all 10 things, and wanted something listed for Thing 19.

For social reading, I'm interpreting that to mean a combination of professional, online, and collaborative reading. Time seems to always be tight, but I find that waiting in my children's parent pick up line is the ideal time to get caught up! I always have a copy or two of School Library Journal, Tech & Learning, School Media Connection, or something similar on-hand in my car.  Right now there is a pile of magazines in my back seat with dog-eared pages waiting for me to come back to them and implement their great ideas!

I've also become a more dedicated Twitter user - following education and library-minded folks and organizations mostly. I use it as a means of sharing news and events in the school libraries as well, and several colleagues have joined, allowing us to use common hashtags for school-related info to keep our online community accessible.  This also allows for a collaborative aspect to take place outside of the classroom - sharing comments and reading each other's events, whether in district or with colleagues around the county, state, country or beyond - definitely something I consider "social reading".

Thing 20 Final Learning Activity

FINAL LEARNING ACTIVITY

1: What did you learn?

I have used SO MUCH of what I learned through Cool Tools! I am fortunate to teach two pass/fail courses in which I have much freedom to try out  new things. My 6th graders love the variety of activities I offer them - all thanks to the new discoveries I make through this online course. Sometimes I have a list in my planbook for ideas to "check out later" because there are so many I am interested in!

I learned that I'm just not an RSS feed kind of girl... this is the second attempt I've made at subscribing to some feeds and I find myself usually deleting the digest e-mails I receive. I don't know why this sort of thing just does not appeal to me.

2: What’s next?

As mentioned above, I have a list of things I want to refer back to and try out with my classes in the future. Projects often take longer than I initially anticipate, so I have a "waiting list" of activities to try out - especially the Web 2.0 type of tools. I love that sort of thing!

I also have plans to share some of these cool tools with my administrators and colleagues. We have a great new system set up in our District that allows teachers to voluntarily lead workshops on our Superintendent Conference Days. Other teachers can then pick and choose which workshops appeal to them the most.  I've begun going through the "Cool Tools" to create PD sessions to offer to my colleagues.  I've already taught one which focused on eBook resources.

My other primary thought / concern is access to this course's materials - once the course ends, I am hoping I can still access theses "things" and lists of ideas. Please tell me this is so!

3: Did you like learning this way?

Yes, I really thrive on this style of learning. Not only can I access the course at my convenience, but there is so much flexibility in activity choices that there is really something that appeals to everyone. I love the great variety of tools I was exposed to, and am already looking forward to doing Track 3 next year :-)

Thing 17: DIY - You Pick!

Such as fun "thing"... although too many fun things to explore and choose from after browsing through the "Top 100 Tools for Learning" and "New Tools" articles & links!  Several items caught my eye and were jotted down on my "check these out later" list, but I decided to focus on one in particular.

I've heard my students talking about Kahoot, so when I saw it appear again on these lists, I decided it was time to check out this new tool. What a pleasant surprise! It was super easy to create a free account, and I was able to make my first Kahoot in one sitting! I did spend some time browsing other people's public Kahoots on my topic (Digital Literacy) to see what they had done. I decided it'd be a great tool to use for whole class reviews, so I created one for my 6th grade class at https://getkahoot.com/

I'm not sure if you can view it if I'm offline, but students would go to https://kahoot.it/#/ and enter my game pin # on their own individual devices (phone, laptop, etc.). I used our class laptops when I did it.   At the time I am typing this blog, the pin # is 204834. I'm not sure if this changes each time I launch my Kahoot or not.

This was a GREAT experience all around. Students logged in to my game fine, and loved playing it so much they were begging for more questions! I can't wait to create more Kahoots for my classes, and am considering having students make their own Kahoot as an assessment tool they can administer to each other via whole class activity. Definitely a way to engage the whole class!