dipity

A timeline of various things happening in my life currently...

Created by janetbell on Nov 9, 2010

Last updated: 11/11/10 at 08:21 AM

• Googling Google Earth
  Nov 10, 2010 3:58 PM

  Google Earth has been a fun application to dip into from time to time. How many of us have, at one time or another, checked out our homes, our work places, places where we used to live on Google Earth? When presenting a display of ways to use SMARTBoards in the classroom at our 2008 Open House (the one before the school was built), I created a .kmz file (the Google Earth file format), that provided a Google Earth tour of where the school is located...followed by a fast-paced journey of places where we could end up, virtually or actually. A year later and some of us had already travelled to California and New York - we talk about using Google Earth for language arts, math, social studies and science activities, but really I wonder how much it is really quite important to use to help students visualize our global community - to help them develop a better sense of our role as guardians of our planet.Within Google Earth, you can add or subtract layers to reveal streets, maps, ocean view, zoomable Panoramio photos...or you can click on the Earth Gallery link and choose from a myriad of other layers that can be displayed on top of your images. You can add your own images directly or through sites such as Panoramio. You can also add other layers of your own, to annotate, label or otherwise customize your maps. You can record a tour of your locations.  Whether for personal or educational use, this tool is fun to fiddle with.The potential to explore volcanoes, glaciers and other Earth science and Science, Technology and Society topics in science and geography and even history in Social Studies, is beginning to take off with educators. In math, the website Real World Math provides a fascinating glimpse of how Google Earth can be used in a diverse range of math activities, from measurement to fractals.  Google Lit Trips is a well-known site sharing .kmz files created by teachers engaging students in Google Earth activities in language arts - from novel studies, to author studies, to genre studies, the use of place, fictional and actual, in literary analysis is significant, and the more students can develop a sense of setting, the better.  Last year, my grade ten English students used Google Earth (along with some other web links) to explore rural Alabama, when beginning To Kill a Mockingbird, and to find the Globe Theatre, when starting Romeo and Juliet.  In each instance, the Google Earth activity was not a central lesson focus, but provided an interesting starting point for conversation.  The samples of student class collaboration in creating tours shared on Google Lit Trips are inspiring and show well the value of collaboration today within a technology-mediated environment.  Following are screenshots of math and language arts Google Earth activities, from Real World Math and Google Lit Trips: Google Lit Trips, The Kite Runner Google Lit Trips, "Fifteen Poets"My favorite Real World Math activity is basic - one that challenges students to measure out a small distance (e.g. 100 m) and then measure the distance across Australia (but could be Alberta or Canada), and determine how many steps, or even how much time would it take to walk across the country.  The other advanced activities I look forward to sharing with our math teachers to see what they think about them for regular and/or IB students. Real World Math The Real World Math site itself includes lots of supporting documentation, such as Xtranormal videos introducing Google Earth processes and an online community.Overall, I find Google Earth a little bit more "style" than "substance", primarily because it isn't up-to-date.  If we could view a volcano as its lava flows, or simply see our own houses in the right season, that would be wonderful.  It feels as if it is something static posing as something that isn't.  It does provide us with "real-world" educational possibilities, but the data one can glean about current events through other web sources will at this point still be more current.  As the web evolves further, I expect this will evolves nicely alongside!  I'd recommend it, but either for motiviting to-do activities at the start of class, or for larger activities if the students and teacher are interested in the learning curve to do that.
  http://janetbell1.blogspot.com/2010/11/googling-google-earth.html

• From Flowchart How-tos to Mindmap What-ifs...with LucidChart
  Nov 10, 2010 3:55 PM

  LucidCharthttp://www.lucidchart.com/documents/view/4cdb6c03-4764-40ac-b2ff-1aed0aff7362LucidChart is a slick online flowchart maker.  Its interface and advantages are numerous:You can maintain a free account by renewing your free trial indefinitely, with limited storage space (fair enough, for free).  You can publish to the web - flowcharts or even flowcharts with other flowcharts embedded within them.  e.g. The original troubleshooting SMART Board displays flowchart I created above started off as one assisting colleagues in knowing when to ask me to help and when to ask our tech person to help, then linked to what you see here as a secondary hyperlinked (right from inside the flowchart) document.You can publish as a jpeg, where you can simply click on it to enlarge it (as in the image posted above, here.) You can brainstorm ideas right on here and then move them around on the page.You can make linkages between ideas and sort them, adding shapes and thought bubbles as well as sticky notes in two colors.You can change font and font format (bold, italic, etc.), background theme, add color...lots of customization options.I believe LucidChart would be an excellent tool to use whenworking through the inquiry process with students or with teachers Here you can move your stickies around with a single finger on your SMART Board - or, better still, engage a student to move the ideas around, directed by the class.  This is arguably even better than completing this in SMART Notebook, because the resulting chart can be saved online right away - so all the teacher needs to do is provide the link to the students so they can access it from home - much easier than having students open a document in Notebook Express or Notebook.Creating instructional materials for students or for teachers, such how to search an online database or how to fix your SMART Board display (as above).This tool easily meets the "free" criteria in terms of little to no time investment learning it.  I think more than one type of mind would find this appealing:  it is very structured, and would appeal to the logical-mathematical types - yet its visual nature, and the tactile task of organizing ideas on it, would appeal to other learning modalities as well.
  http://janetbell1.blogspot.com/2010/11/from-flowchart-how-tos-to-mindmap-what.html

• Dipity Timeline Created
  Nov 9, 2010 8:41 PM

• Notebook Express and Google Presentation - time to leave the linear behind?
  Nov 7, 2010 1:46 PM

  Notebook ExpressAround in beta for at least a year now, SMART Notebook Express seems to be doing the sensible thing by providing an online tool wherein students can open and view Notebook files posted online by their teachers.  No longer will students need to download Notebook software onto their computers to access these files.  So far, this is really the only useful thing about this new manifestation of Notebook...BUT even this has a glitch, which when experimenting in there tonight, surprised me:  Notebook Express will only open URLs that are specific addresses of Notebook files.  This means that if a teacher has uploaded a Notebook file to Google Docs, or to a Ning site, a student will  NOT be able to view it in Notebook Express, because the URL will end with the Google Docs (or Ning) id# of the document, rather than the .notebook suffix.  How disappointing.  A student can still open a posted Notebook file, though, if the teacher has uploaded it to an online space that doesn't wrap the file within another URL.To test this, I uploaded a cut-down version of a presentation I made almost two years ago in Calgary, on the subject of SMART Boards and Student Empowerment, to my iDisk.  You can view the presentation using Notebook Express by doing the following:Open http://express.smarttech.com/ - it takes a couple of moments for the application to loadWhen given the choice to Open an Existing Notebook File or Create a new Notebook file, choose to Create a new Notebook File.  (I know, not too intuitive here...)Once the new file has opened, to to the File menu inside the application and scroll to Open URL...In the box that appears, paste the following address:http://idisk.mac.com/janetbell1//Public/StudentEmpowerment-XtraLite.notebookOnce the Notebook file loads, it works just as if it were opened in Notebook; you can move objects, click animations, and even use the eraser to erase pens (e.g. on the page with the magnifying glass, you can move the magnifying glass, and the "erase" the blue space behind it to reveal the text hidden beneath). This file is over 2MB in size, and works well; I earlier tried loading a more complete versions of the same document and it stalled loading the 24 MB file.  My sense is for a quick lesson review, this will work fine, as long as you have accessible webspace where you can keep the file without it losing the .notebook suffix.You can create new pages on Notebook Express, but at this time, these pages are very, very basic.  None of the advanced tools and customizable options (pen properties, object properties, etc.) are available.  All you can do is write on the whiteboard and reveal things bit by bit with the screen shade...or erase them with the eraser.  Oh, and you can add and delete pages.  I think that is it.  I decided not to provide a demo on  my blog once I discovered that you can't even insert a piece of clipart or a photo from your hard drive.In fairness to SMART, this online tool is still in beta.  I hope that once it's complete it will allow you to create more interactive presentations online; I also would give my right arm to have it enable collaboration.  That would transform the interface entirely, if more than one person could use the whiteboard at any one time - it would beat even the downloaded version then!  Imagine a series of questions on the board and you asking your students to complete them as quickly as possible.  "You have 5 minutes to complete these questions together - GO!" - and within minutes the whole board fills up with the responses students add in from their respective laptops and other devices...that would be nice. :)  Or...maybe even better, imagine using the little Flash interactive tools from the Lesson Activity Toolkit...The next step...mashing it up:Since we are also exploring the concept of mashups, I'd like to share again this presentation (previously shared on the Learn All Ways blog's The Beauty of Photosharing blog post) - starting in Notebook, the slides were exported and saved as jpegs, then uploaded to Animoto, mashed up with a soundtrack and presented as follows - the result is a dynamic slideshow promoting the use of SMART Boards at our school, created for an Open House held before they had finished building the school:Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.Contrast the kind of hands-on engagement in manipulating the objects in the actual Notebook file through Notebook Express (reminds me of the whimsical way we approach "lift the flap" books) to the in-your-face energetic presentation of the montage of images in the Animoto-recreated version of a Notebook presentation.  Now think further - imagine taking that Animoto montage and remixing it in other ways... below is posted a screenshot of the new interface on Animoto for remixing - lots of options to wonder about:Google PresentationUnder continual revision, Google Presentation is slowly catching up to where it can compete as an online presentation tool.  It is no PowerPoint and no Notebook yet, however.  The interface looks better than it used to, and it does hold some superb features, such as a comprehensive toolbar (and menu bar), customizable sharing options, including viewing and editing capabilities, and chat functionality, so students and you can collaboratively create the document.The drawback is the "look" and "ease of use" are just not there yet. Whereas Blogger gives you lots of options to customize the look and feel of a blog, and Google Forms gives you a range of template options for your form, the templates in Google Presentation are no better than the very first templates that came with PowerPoint in Office '95.  I bet this will change soon.I actually find Google Presentation is a very good presentation tool for students to use because if they are working with a partner on a presentation at school, they can both continue on it at home in the evening, conversing through the chat as they write, if they are online at the same time.  This functionality is super. (In contrast, in Notebook Express, there is nowhere to save a document online, so all material is stored on your hard drive, not "in the cloud" or accessible by othere at all.)The glitch?  We are right back to the comments I made in my introductory blog posting - without experimenting with the elements of design and exploring how sometimes "less is more" students, like teachers, can inadvertently create presentations that are not particularly engaging at all.  Not only that, but they seem unaware that they haven't completed things properly.I see one role of the teacher-librarian to be the one who brings to light and celebrates excellence in student work.   The wall of the library is the wall of the whole school's "classroom" - with models of excellence in learning around them, students can gain a better sense of what they should be trying to do.Setting the stage for mashups...The following (previously shared on the Learn All Ways blog's The Beauty of Photosharing blog post) Google presentation contains inspirational slides created by students at Lillian Osborne last Fall (2009).  It exemplifies the power of asynchronous collaboration under the umbrella of a single idea. I have also exported these images, saved them to disk and uploaded them to the 'Net in a Picasa album, so they can be repurposed when exploring other tools in our presentations and multimedia assignment.<p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><p><br><br>To</p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p></p>To conclude, then,if you are looking for a quiet, hands-on manipulation of objects to focus user attention on the content, then students working with files created by each other or by you, Notebook Express may be the online tool for you.If you are looking for a traditional (aka "like PowerPoint") linear presentation - but with the bonus of students being able to collaborate on building the same file simultaneously, then give Google Presentation a try.If you want to "spice things up" create your presentation in Google Presentation OR a traditional presentation software, such as PowerPoint, Keynote, or Notebook, simply export slides as jpgs, and have fun representing - or should I say, re-presenting - them in less linear and/or less teacher-pace-controlled formats, such as Animoto (above), a picture cloud (remember this one from the photo-sharing sites post?), a Glogster poster, a Vuvox slideshow or other engaging online presentation tool. Roy Tanck's Flickr Widget requires Flash Player 9 or better.Get this widget at roytanck.com
  http://janetbell1.blogspot.com/2010/11/notebook-express-and-google.html

• Presentations - Moving Beyond PowerPoint
  Nov 7, 2010 11:47 AM

  Presentation Tools have had somewhat of a bad rap over the past few years, and perhaps justifiably so, although, as is often the case in the integration of educational technologies, this may be more a question of pedagogically sound integration than of mere use of the tool.  In the mid-nineties’ PowerPoint revolution, presenters swayed by the whiz-up bang-splash of PowerPoint seized their podiums and joined the revolution, creating generally poorly-designed presentations, template after Microsoft template, complete with content that ranged from the excellent to the mediocre.  The audiences, from thousands attending conferences to a handful in interior workplace conference room, either were lulled into pleasant observation or were challenged to copy down notes really fast.The work of Dr. Cathy Adams, at the University of Alberta, beautifully brings home this point, along with the poignant realization that we are what we watch, despite the dogged continuance of people to present in this way. Wikipedia records Adams’ comment, "’to a lecturer with PowerPoint, everything looks like a bullet.’ PowerPoint, she says, modifies subtly the thinking processes of student and teacher alike.”  And this is NOT a good thing.Have I fallen for this trap as a presenter?  You bet.  Purposely? Absolutely not - more as a result of rarely having the time to create the presentations I’d like to create.  I have sat in so many PowerPoint presentations over the years that have disengaged me rather than engaged me through the visuals, and I hate to do the same to others.  To me, the final image of the double-edged death-by-PowerPoint sword is when people in the audience start to take photos of the slides as the  presenter presents.  The message here?  You could have just posted the PowerPoint and stayed home?   This is a badly composed, tinted photo of me presenting from the podium in what at first appears to be a traditional delivery scenario.  The PowerPoint (excerpted below) was not visually that good, but the content and even overall presentation format was probably pretty good for the times - the presentation was a BYOL presentation, so users were able to click along and explore the various sites we visited alongside the discourse, thus allowing the liminal textuality of the presentation to make as much impact on the audience as what I was actually saying.  What went on invisibly as participants engaged in the exploration was what counted the most.  I was presenting on the theme “Timely Tools for Meaningful, Memorable Projects”, and when reviewing the presentation this week a couple of screens that resonate from it now are:You can see the image below enlarged to full size here.My style is really usually more like this (looking more relaxed), too tied up in telling a story to get past the Notebook Welcome screen, perhaps:Now, there is more to this story/inquiry, and this is where this whole blog focus on presentation and multimedia tools comes into question (just a little).  In our Web CT online discussions, Jennifer Branch introduced us to George Siemens’ November 2, 2010 posting on his Elearnspace blog here, wherein he writes:I’m firmly convinced of the following:1. Learners should be in control of their own learning. Autonomy is key. Educators can initiate, curate, and guide. But meaningful learning requires learner-driven activity2. Learners need to experience confusion and chaos in the learning process. Clarifying this chaos is the heart of learning.3. Openness of content and interaction increases the prospect of the random connections that drive innovation4. Learning requires time, depth of focus, critical thinking, and reflection. Ingesting new information requires time for digestion. Too many people digitally gorge without digestion time.5. Learning is network formation. Knowledge is distributed.6. Creation is vital. Learners have to create artifacts to share with others and to aid in re-centering exploration beyond the artifacts the educator has provided.7. Making sense of complexity requires social and technological systems. We do the former better than the latter.In our responses to his posting within our own forum, we are predictably in agreement with him, knowing that to actualize the vision he purports demands some serious shift on our part as educators.Considering the structure of traditional PowerPoint presentations, I cannot imagine a learning milieu LESS conducive to learning, if learning is defined through Siemens’ process identified above.  Mining the web further into the pedagogy of PowerPoint, I ran across Cathy Adams’ article, “PowerPoint’s Pedagogy”, in Phenomenology & Practice, Volume 2 (2008), No. 1, pp. 63 – 79, retrieved from http://www.phandpr.org/index.php/pandp/article/viewPDFInterstitial/21/78 .  Again, she reinforces this notion.  In her article, told much through anecdote and analysis, she warns against the lure of the lit screen to capture attention, the trapped progression through a predetermined course of ideas that disallows for the serendipity of real teaching through conversation.  In her conclusion, she even goes so far as to suggest that PowerPoint use can “impose on the ambience of the class a certain dispositional style that may determine in a favourable or unfavourable manner how knowledge is internalized, understood, and how it is constitutive of the formative growth of the student.”  This is scary stuff, but when you consider the best kind of learning experiences that we remember, and Siemens’ list above, one can certainly see her point.  How limiting a world we would live in if PowerPoint linearity imposed predetermined lines of discourse into all of our educational dialogue!  Perhaps the same holds true for SMART Notebook, when it is used as a teacher-driven top-down "lesson delivery" presentation tool? Perhaps the very technologies thousands of dollars are being spent on to create more engaging learning experiences for our students are somehow having the opposite effect by their very nature of separating teacher and learner.  I know I have found it hard to have to stand by my SMART Board when I would rather be moving around the room, yet until SMART Boards come with SMART Slates (used to be Airliners), those of us with SMART Boards have chained ourselves to our boards and projectors, rather than by our students, whether or not we were didactic stand-at-the-front teachers in the first place.  (By the way, I actually LOVE having access to SMART Boards, but for other reasons.)Let’s take this one step further - let’s, for a moment, consider EVERY popular kind of linear presentation format, no matter how pretty it appears, that exists as an online tool.  My hunch is that you can have equally bad presentations in all of these formats, as they are inherently limited by their linearity.  Here goes...Notebook Express and Google Presentation - see next posting.Animoto and Vuvox - I make reference throughout the blog about Animoto and Vuvox, although do not devote specific pages to their exploration.AnimotoVuvoxIn drawing conclusions regarding the educational use of online presentation tools, let’s keep in mind Siemens’ vision and Adams’ cautions, and keep the bar high when determing how we and our colleagues might maximize effective use of these tools.  
  http://janetbell1.blogspot.com/2010/11/beyond-powerpoint.html

• Poll Everywhere
  Nov 7, 2010 7:23 AM

  Don’t bother buying clickers!  Poll Everywhere provides real-time polling results as students text in their responses.  You can respond from a mobile phone or from a laptop, to a slide within a presentation or from a webpage, depending how you set it up.  With the reasonably priced education version, you can even monitor people’s responses (when texting words) to ensure legitimacy.Although not exactly presentation or multimedia tools, integrating a web poll into a presentation is a fabulous thing to do.  I have set up and managed PollEverywhere polls before, a couple of years ago (November, 2008) in a large-group (>400 people in 6 locations simultaneously), but most recently when planning to add some cellphone polling into our initial assembly presentation (after the library movie) this year.  Unfortunately, time constraints prevented this year's actual polling from taking place, but I will instead integrate the polls onto Keynote slides when I eventually give our much belated Library orientation presentations. My favorite part of PollEverywhere is watching the graphs of results build, ebbing and flowing as responses are received.  Very cool.An advantage of PollEverywhere is that some polling is free, and educator pricing is not too bad (an individual teacher is $50/year).  I am hoping that once teachers see this in operation they will jump on board, too.Below, I've embedded the web version of one of the questions (re: learning styles) that students will be responding to when we look at resources to meet needs of all learners in the library and online. Please give it a try by responding to it! HINT - Type the response EXACTLY - UPPER CASE for the word CAST, followed by the numerals.This chart (below) is the one that updates in real time. If you text in your response via text messaging, Twitter, or just input it on the web at Poll4.com, you should see the result appear here:Polling enables us to engage students through formative assessment activities, and also provides a way for us to gather data (such as here, re: learning styles or in my other polls, re: access to laptops, etc.) that can help us inform practise and other decisions (e.g. purchasing decisions). It provides a wonderful way to get past the "death by PowerPoint" (and other presentation tools, frankly) attitudinal veil that can so quickly descend once the lights dim.OK, just for fun, here's another one - we thought this would be an interesting question to ask our students, but we can try it out first!Please be warned - I have (for now) disabled the profanity filter, so whatever is written goes in here. If I were working with students, I would be monitoring the poll, keeping it on for only a minute at a time. IF you prefer voting online instead of through your phone, click here.It will be interesting to see how "worldly" we are.
  http://janetbell1.blogspot.com/2010/11/poll-everywhere.html

• Inquiry into little web tools - Purpose-oriented timely tools for use in senior high schools?
  Nov 7, 2010 4:07 AM

  Try PicLits! Using photos from the small PicLit database, students can either drag and drop parts of speech, or write their own short composition that is superimposed on the photo.  Take a look at a little haiku I wrote in a couple of minutes - just click on the image: See the full PicLit at PicLits.comUpside:  How would I use this in high school?  With two types of students:the lower-end students, those who are not yet able to work with images and with Google Docs. with our English Language Learners, who, similarly, need immediate reinforcement of language use in a non-babyish way.As in journal writing, the photos provide nice little starting points for writing, and the result looks professional with very little input.  I will be recommending this tool to our Special Needs teacher and our ELL support teacher.Downside: There is no way to upload your own photos, although I suppose if you wanted to do that you could use Picasa's online tools instead! Conclusion: Great resource for students building their vocabulary skills and for students to work well in activities that don't take long to complete!Next steps...building sustained use:  One way to develop our use of PicLits would be to develop a page on the ELL class website that includes a slideshow of everyone's creations - one student could create that slideshow by pasting Jing screen shots of each of the PicLits into a Google Presentation slide.  The resulting slideshow could be imported right to the front of our school website, library site, etc.What does the 'Net have to say to recommend PicLit?  "this to me is the essence of Web 2.0 – free, simple to use tools that amplify student creativity and self-expression." Wordle and the Roytank picture cloud -> and the wonderful Wordsift!After exploring Wordle, I have been reminded of the quick'n'ready potential of building a word or picture cloud, to raise the holistic impact of your students' work by using tools such as Wordle or the Roytank picture cloud widgit.  Wordle enables you to combine collaborative student responses (or those of a single student) in one document that visually (by size) represents most frequent word choices, whereas the picture cloud widgit enables you to share collaborative compilations as one unified non-linear whole.  Either way, viewing the representation in a visual way allows for discussion of  impact - from prevalence of particular choice of diction, or from the impact of various aspects of color and design, etc.  1. Wordle - Wordle has evolved over the past year or so - you can now enter the URL of a blog or of any site that has an RSS feed.  When I inputted the URL for the LearnAllWays blog, the following Wordle appeared.  Visually, you can see where my heart lies here:http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2705057/Learn_All_Ways 2. Roytank picture cloud widgitRoy Tanck's Flickr Widget requires Flash Player 9 or better.Get this widget at roytanck.com3.  Wordsift...Or - and this would work as well with English speakers as well as ELL learners - take your conversation to the next level by pasting the same text you might have used with Wordle into WordSift, Stanford University's little tool developed for ELL learners. Your words are presented back to you hyperlinked to Visual Thesaurus, as well as linked to a related picture gallery, so you can explore the meaning and connotations through an intuitive visual interface - available in several languages other than English as well as English:BlockpostersThis little tool does big things.  My son used it once to create a huge Cancer Bats poster from a website image.  The image below is a sample taken from the Blockposters.com site, along with its annotation.  All you do is upload your image, slice it, and then download the pages of your giant poster - a useful little tool for teachers and students alike, whether you are creating posters for your classroom walls, taking photos of student work on your phone and then enlarging them via Blockposters to display on your bulletin board, or using them within a larger artistic display mashup, as in the image below.WallwisherEarly in the inquiry process, Wallwisher can come in handy to assist in collaborative brainstorming.  As we add electronic stickies to the "wall", we mimic the process of adding actual stickies to a piece of paper.  Although fascinating how quickly we gravitate to doing new things in old ways (still must look like a stickie even though it isn't really one?  - is this for the same reason that I hear a supposed mechanical click when I unlock my iPhone by moving the little bar on the touch screen?), I'm not sure whether this little tools really is worth it.  If you could use cool fonts on the stickies, linking them easily to websites, which highlight as your cursor moves over them, or else otherwise annotate on them, linking similar ideas, for example, as you can with the stickies in Glogster, that would help, but, really, the couple of times that I've used Wallwisher I have felt a bit "undersold".  In playing with Wallwisher just now, I've included links to two YouTube videos, identical except for the soundtrack - the links here would enable students to compare the two videos, from home as well as from school.http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/janetbellThat is one advantage for sure - having the video links right there streamline access to the videos, but again, if the purpose of working with this tool is not the actual moving around of the stickies, maybe it is best to maintain the video links in a site such as Only2clicks.com instead.  Perhaps students would like Wallwisher? My predication is that students might find it easier to collaboratively brainstorm their ideas another way, such as in Google Presentation or Google Docs, or even Elluminate's E-Live.Big Huge LabsThis site enthralls me.  It is like a candy store of little webby tools, and when browsing I see tools that fit the personalities of other teachers I know.  For example, one of our teachers has a collection of Lolcat posters in her room - on Big Huge Labs, you can make your own Lolcats with its Lolcat generator:Sample from the Big Huge Labs siteOn Big Huge Labs, you can create all kinds of things that would be useful at school, such ascharacter trading cards (language arts and social studies)captions (such as "comic book-style" speech and thought bubbles) added to photographsa magazine cover (on a topic of your choice)a motivational poster maker - which could be used in a variety of ways!A poster made "on demand" for two of my students last year!What makes tools such as those in Big Huge Labs stand out is that they are fun little, easy processes - a minimal learning curve means that the student can stay focused upon what you would like them to be focused upon - learning in your subject area.  Rather than learn an entire process to use a tool that won't exist in five years, better learn a little process that can be picked up and used intuitively. Why make Web 2.0 difficult?  Keep it simple!  Low time investment + high impact return = an invitation to increase student engagement.DipityIn one word, Dipity is a delight.  I can't wait to share this tool with our social studies and English teachers.  Dipity is a timeline maker. You can add photos and videos that zoom and play upon clicking them.  The interface is easy to learn - and makes more sense to use than Vuvox.  Dipity is a good example of where a tool is developed to do one thing - and to do it well.When you sign up, you can "follow" others (reminiscent of Twitter) - and timelines are immediately suggested to you.  As our World Literature students are delving deeper into the world of Mulisch's The Assault these days, it made sense for me to look at a timeline someone made looking at another character's life over the course of WWII and later on.  The Assault unfolds over a period of about thirty years - a timeline review of the novel, contextualizing the novel's events within the larger framework of the history of the time would provide students with an excellent way to grasp some of the subtleties of the protagonist, Anton.Here is the timeline I viewed, which inspired me to share this tool with others, and to work on one with my own students, focusing on the life of Anton, in The Assault: on Dipity.On the Dipity website, you can expand the timeline to full-screen size, moving about and zooming in with ease. This would be a fabulous tool to use to collaboratively represent the timeline of a novel, delving into events, fictional or actual, and to display on the SMART Board even as students are building it - a living representation of work-in-progress - engaging for all.OK - taking this one step further... I am delighted to share that I have made a timeline...in just about no time at all! This tool definitely wins the smart and streamlined process award! I began a new timeline, and slipped in references to one of my Picasa accounts, our library blog, and my other blogs...and lo and behold, every entry was inputted on the timeline. Entries can be customized (or deleted) at will. You don't need to add them to the timeline - dates are inputted along with any other material, or, if you add an event manually, it just adds it to the timeline for you.  Thinking back to our initial assignment, describing our autobiography of a computer user, wow, if a picture is worth 1000 words, a timeline of pictures is worth tens of thousands of words - this timeline shares at a glance much of the more public work we have been doing in this course over the past few weeks!Implications for education - tomorrow! - are:  Our IB social studies students study current events currently on a Blogger blog - it would be a matter of a couple of clicks for their teacher to report all of their responses out on a timeline. This is very cool.Sample - created by importing my blogs, photos and videos: on Dipity.
  http://janetbell1.blogspot.com/2010/11/inquiry-into-little-web-tools-step-one.html

• Exploring Glogster
  Nov 6, 2010 6:01 PM

  Glogster is new to me - I've heard good things about it, so have been looking forward to taking it for a spin.  This is pretty basic, my first time on the Glogster road...I hope you see how my opinions have shifted as I have worked more with the tool:My Glogster review and process is recorded within a Glog itself - take a look - and a listen:Be sure to run your cursor over the Glog to discover the links, end then jump in! To view the Glog on a full page, click here.  Despite the fact this Glogster posting is quite short compared to those on other tools, it is actually the posting I spent the longest time completing, building the Glog, creating the video and audio tracks, etc.  Please spend some time exploring the glog, especially listening to the Mahler YouTube video.Here is a little play-by-play to whet your appetite:Move around the poster in a clock-wise direction. What I'm trying to do is create a kind of template that a teacher could pull up on a SMART Board and use as a template for a lesson. The lesson could be one that students ALSO access at the same time on laptops, perhaps the start of an inquiry that students will depart from as they explore related resources, online and in print, in the library.Click on every link, because from there you will actually see our students at work, and hear Mahler's Resurrection Symphony - specifically chosen because my World Literature students are currently studying The Assault and this piece is referred to in the novel. Watch my video, reviewing my own thoughts wrestling with the tool for the first time, and finally, listen to my audio conclusions. Your tactile interactions with Glogster comprise this section of my blog posting - via multimedia, about multimedia. Happy poking around :)Here is one more vision of Glogster.Imagine students creating an abstract image that represents the theme of the book - or even a more concrete image the setting of the book (e.g. the island in Lord of the Flies or the town in To Kill a Mockingbird). Then challenge them to find key scenes that connect well to the theme, and position a notation of those scenes directly on top the image (photo, collage, or drawn image (scanned or photographed).Then have each member of the group assume a character in the novel and have them record their rendition of and reaction to one of the key scenes on the book, using a webcam. Upload the videos to YouTube.Place the large image as the background image on a Glogster poster.Insert the Youtube videos on the poster by the key scenes.Voila - a living representation of students' understanding of character, of voice, of setting and of theme.   ~ I would really like to try this.... ~...and one more twist on the same idea - not just mashing up media but mashing up the students - imagine the same assignment, with a younger grade, where the older students help the younger students with their videos, doing the scanning, etc. An elementary class could team up with senior high IB students (who need to track their hours in CAS - Creativity and Service - activities), who could help them with scanning their drawings, setting up their Glogster pages, etc. - then, both classes could showcase their work with their own peers. Any interested takers out there?
  http://janetbell1.blogspot.com/2010/11/exploring-glogster.html

• Are we home yet? A Timely Tools Backgrounder
  Oct 30, 2010 7:15 AM

  Life is such a recursive thing...we start projects, set them aside as others come up, come back to them later.  In the early eighties I remember starting a macrame project, a blanket, setting it aside, and coming back to it years later -- even the colors coming back into style -- but realizing it wasn't worth trying to relearn how to make those little squares...they smelt a little mildewy and didn't really fit "me" anymore.  Perhaps they never did -- perhaps they were just one of those indicators of how we as adolescents try on various roles until we find out who we really are and then run with that...until again, things are placed on the backburner, to crop up again years later.  Such is the journey of life.So, I presented at NECC a couple of years ago on the topic of Timely Tools for Meaningful, Memorable Projects, desperately hoping I'd have the chance to continue working in this area, but as way leads onto way, that was just not the course for me...yet today, beginning to explore today's emergent little tools, to see how well they can slip into the whats and hows of our teaching, it struck me that it might be nice to revisit the gist of that presentation from today's perspective of what are the ground-level takeaways -- not of the tools, themselves -- they have all evolved even over two and a half short years -- but of the mindset behind the use of the tools (beyond the obvious curricular connection statement).Here are some of my thoughts gleaned from that initial presentation. These are my starting points for today's departure - I figure this is my first important lesson - "note to self" - that in an age of quick-fix knee-jerk learning, what appears to be lost in the loss of sequence might not actually be lost at all -- but instead, be planted into a kind of overall cerebral incubator, to revisit us when next we tackle the topic, be it next class, or in two years' time.Ha -- unless it has turned into mildewy macrame, in which case it may be better to leave it in the bag -- and then dispose of the bag. Not that I am meaning to write in metaphors!  But I digress...I've ripped some key thoughts from the 2008 presentation to help inform today's inquiry. The one that resonates most strongly with me today is the comment regarding "free" - especially "no energy/learning curve investment in terms of content or process". This is the kicker, the one that will make or break buyin from colleagues at school when we suggest they use these new tools:You can see the image below enlarged to full size here.
  http://janetbell1.blogspot.com/2010/10/are-we-home-yet.html

• Timely Tools for Meaningful, Memorable Projects - the beginning...
  Oct 30, 2010 7:04 AM

  This post on presentation and multimedia tools is challenging me to explore several presentation and multimedia tools not yet covered in previous postings on this blog. It provides me with the chance to delve into a number of tools I've barely or never used before!To shape this inquiry to keep it as meaningful as possible, I'm going to create it on another blog - Timely Tools for Meaningful, Memorable Projects - and then sum up my conclusions from those explorations back here. I'm hoping that this structure will keep things a little better organized!Here goes...
  http://learnallways.blogspot.com/2010/10/timely-tools-for-meaningful-memorable.html

• Student drivers: Wikis and other tools facilitating authentic personalization of learning
  Oct 24, 2010 8:31 AM

  When reflecting on Wikis in education, what struck me the most was that really the question isn’t about wikis at all - it is really about what kinds of frameworks best streamline teachers’ and/or students’ collaborative knowledge construction.  Whichever Web 2.0 platforms we choose to use will, in part, determine how we teach.  As well, what we want to achieve using whichever tool we use may or may not make use of every aspect of that tool.  So, in looking at wikis, lets see how we can best use them - for what purposes - and then compare those uses with similar or supplementary uses through other tools, to get the best sense of which tool is best for which purpose.  This approach to wikis - and other tools facilitating authentic personalization of learning - ties in nicely with my guiding “litmus test” questions underpinning this whole blog - those questions from Dr. Judi Harris that wonder how this use of the tool allows us to do things that we either couldn’t do before, but can now, and how this use of the tool allows us to do things we could do before but can do better now.  e.g. If a wiki is better than a Ning, then use it; if a Ning is better than a wiki for part of the educational process, then use it - when most appropriate.When reading through one of Joanne de Groot’s Wiki trailfire links, I found comments as thought-provoking to read as articles, particularly the one below, which ties in with my initial thoughts creating this blog posting:In response to “Dispelling 8 Common Myths for Educators Considering Launching a School Wiki”, Jon Orech wrote:You are so right...fear and trepidation often get in the way of innovation. What some people miss is that they think it should be "business as usual" with a new tool. What you have offered is that the new tool allows for a paradigm shift in the way we do business. THAT's what people miss and often overlook. We don't NEED the previously essential meetings if we can collaborate virtually. We don't need mass emails if information is centally located.What also is important is if the wiki is where information can be found, it must be the ONLY place to find it. It's kind of like the teacher who can't figure out why kids won't look on Blackboard, Moodle, Ning, etc, when they are giving kids paper handouts on the same stuff.As always, it's about shifting thought, and then applying the tools.My questions, then, are about when to use a wiki or a Ning or Google Docs?This response triggered a number of personal and professional responses from myself, to the point that I see it is a springboard to my own wiki inquiry.  For me, it provides a backbone to my own next steps as designer of ed-tech (and even simply tech!) PD at our school, as it brings together a number of challenges I am currently dealing with, streamlining them into a single solution - well, not quite single, but a simpler solution.  Read on and you’ll understand this ongoing tension.One huge thing that I already know has been brought home to me big time this past week:Traditional one-shot PD workshops are destined to fail when teachers are time-strapped and/or (like our students) increasingly gravitating towards -- and perhaps everyone in our society -- customized learning experiences that meet immediate PD needs, rather than pre-arranged mass-consumed experiences where they need to separate the meaningful part (what they actually “need to know”) from the rest.   As we used to say at 2Learn, as initially heard said by Laval University’s Dr. Thérèse Laferrière many years ago at a CMEC/APEC workshop (1999), “[In the field of Ed-Tech,] ‘just in time’ is better than ‘just in case’.”  My most recent realization in this regard (over a decade later) was this past week at school, where attendance at our “just in time” weekly PD, delivered (sic) for about 20 minutes before school start, has increasingly dwindled -- yet accompanied by sincere apologies from those with the best of intentions, and who we would have expected to show up, speckling the rest of the day.  “Just in time” in an age of “moving at the speed of creativity” (to quote the title of Wes Fryer’s blog) really means in the moment -- and implies a rich, purposeful focus on the exact piece of learning that puzzles the learner at the exact “teachable moment” of intervention.  Like espresso coffee, learning today is the filtered, intense drip of “Ah-ha! Now I get it!” that gives us the “fix” accompanied by a provocative “aroma” that moves us each ahead with renewed intention, right now!Add into this an after-school conversation I had the other day with individuals who are familiar with this area, and with the whole environment of change theory, and what emerged was the sense that we need to create a PD learning environment for our teachers that keeps us connected throughout the day, wherever we are, whatever we are doing.  Of course, given our course focus this week on wikis, the notion of a school PD wiki came to mind as the obvious solution, and I became inspired (had the “fix” myself at that  moment!) to write a blog posting dedicated to articulating the whys and hows of creating a PD wiki for our staff.Here’s the first challenge - as participants in Edmonton Public Schools’ portal project, embedding Google Apps processes in as many of our school processes as we can (with risk at times of being run out of the building by sensible, logical colleagues who assume that Google Apps should also consistently behave logically), we feel pressure to stay focused on our implementation of Web 2.0 through Google Apps rather than toss other Web 2.0 processes, such as Wikispaces, into the mix for everyone, given our current range of attitudes and abilities towards technology integration in general.  If I am to create resources or processes within Wikispaces, it will have to be “worth it” within this broader context.  The use of different technology tools needs to be as transparent as possible.Here’s the second challenge - I loved Orech’s comments above about the teacher who wonders why students don’t access the online materials when they have them in paper handout format already.  He is calling the bluff on those of us (myself included) who stress multiple modes of instruction and multiple ways of representation, yet maybe facetiously so, as perhaps in reality material presented in a handout, then pasted into Moodle, a Ning, a Wiki, etc. is really all the same teacher-delivered verbal-linguistic support.  What a Moodle, a Ning, a Wiki -- or a Google Doc -- needs to do to be effective in a learner-centred, multi-modal environment is to provide spaces for learner-constructed demonstration of new knowledge in whatever modes (text, aural, visual, video, etc.) of communication best work for the learner and/or the focus of the learning.  And, of course, the beauty of all these tools is that they CAN be learner driven, built through the contributions of everyone.Here is the flip-side of Orech’s depiction:  Some of my students last year would check at the start of class whether our emergent class-constructed brainstormings and notes (compiled on the SMART Board and then saved to PDF) would be posted online for them.  If they were, they were less likely to take notes, saying they didn’t need to take them because the material was online -- thus denying themselves the kind of consolidation process that takes place when one takes notes from comments from multiple sources.  I wonder whether those same students (not verbal-linguistic types) would do better if they spoke what they heard, reiterating it into their voice recorders on their phones, or into a class discussion recording faciliated by the teacher through our FM system microphone, to have at hand when they download the written notes later that evening?  i.e. Audio “notes” in the voices of auditory learners posted online in a Google doc, or Wiki, or Ning, or Moodle...to assist auditory learners in consolidating information.Here is the third challenge - How can I structure a learning framework through a Wiki AND/OR Ning AND/OR Google Doc AND/OR Google Site that best meets the emergent needs of teachers (PD) OR students (in my online World Literature course)?  Personalized learning is something that our staff feels strongly about, and it makes sense that whether we are thinking about teachers learning or students learning, we keep in mind the underlying question of how we might best personalize learning -- which echos the second challenge above, as well.  I very much want to use the best tool(s) for the job!I would like to be able to move colleagues and students alike from this juggling scenario to the enlivened one that follows in the images below:*From a state of being overwhelmed by all the potential ways of doing things that inundate our attention - to the point where focus on the tools distracts us from the larger challenges at hand...*...to a state of enlivenment as learning propels us ahead in our overall life journey.[images retrieved through Google images search]To meet these very real challenges facing me this week (meeting PLC needs of teachers and students alike), my steps are:to get a sense of how wikis are currently being used by teachers and/or students and to reflect upon whether the form of the wiki today really does best meet the functions that we would like wikis to provide, to compare the relative merits of Wikis, Nings, and Google Apps for achieving enlivened learners - whether teachers involved in forming an online school-wide PLC, or students involved in demonstrating lessons learned in an online novel study (in their World Literature class), andto strengthen my decision in terms of which platform(s) to use for our (already started) student interactions in World Literature AND our not yet begun staff shared learning space.First, then, this chart shows a wide variety of ways wikis are currently being used by and/or for and/or with teachers and/or students! The chart represents this better than lengthy paragraphs would!  Does form follow function or does form in any way limit function?People involved (author(s) and audience), purposes of wiki, and examplesBy teachers, with teachers, for teachers (and/or wider educational stakeholder community - parents, other teachers elsewhere)Purposes and examples:resource directories (whether lists of teachers or other contacts, or lists of websites or other resources, e.g. pathfinders)http://twitter4teachers.pbworks.com/ - a huge list of Twitter usernames of educators on Twitterhttps://educators.pbworks.com/w/page/Examples%C2%A0 (I do find it disconcerting when the pages are so associative that there lacks an overarching “home” page.)http://libraryorientationinquiry.wikispaces.com - a single page inquiry and pathfinder I created last summer as part of an EDES 542 project organizing conferences or other large eventsISTE Wikispaces (international educational organization’s wiki)using a wiki to create an online community for like-minded people (such as those of us in this course!)TLDL Wiki http://tldl.pbworks.com/w/page/FrontPageSMARTBoard Resources http://smartboard-resources.wikispaces.com/ (a favorite of elementary teachers in presentations I give - excellent SMARTBoard resources here)
  http://learnallways.blogspot.com/2010/10/student-drivers-wikis-and-other-tools.html

• Lillian Osborne Library on iTunes!
  Oct 21, 2010 8:36 PM

  We're on iTunes!  Are you a Lillian Osborne student interested in sharing your ideas about books, music, topics of the day, clubs, or?  Are you interested in helping others improve their reading and reviewing skills through listening to audio recordings of their readings?  If so, get involved creating podcasts for our new iTunes channel.  Go to the iTunes Store and search Lillian Osborne - you'll find our library podcast in the education section of the podcasts.  Looking forward to making some history together!
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/eAWXBy5C8HM/lillian-osborne-library-on-itunes.html

• Jane's Learning
  Oct 19, 2010 12:14 AM

  Jane's Learning Jane's Learning From: janetebell Views: 7 0 ratings Time: 04:42 More in Howto & Style
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHDJv_6G88k&feature=youtube_gdata

• Book Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
  Oct 17, 2010 9:36 PM

  Book Review: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - audio podcast Reviewed by Sam M and shared on Edmonton Public School's MyLibrary site, this short book review is the first of our book review podcast collection. Go Sam! For more information, view the related page on the EPL site.
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/vRsHEvO7xk8/book-review-extremely-loud-and.html

• From SchoolZone to Google Groups
  Oct 17, 2010 8:54 PM

  From SchoolZone to Google Groups
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/AWgpHitVBQ8/from-schoolzone-to-google-groups.html

• Podcasting - the key to social constructivist learning, one person at a time!
  Oct 17, 2010 1:38 PM

  Podcasting - the key to social constructivist learning, one person at a time!PLEASE NOTE - THIS PAGE PLAYS BEST ON FIREFOX WITH THE "STOP AUTOPLAY" FIREFOX ADD-ON INSTALLED.  IT ONLY TAKES A FEW SECONDS AND CAN BE DOWNLOADED HERE. ALL PODCASTS WILL OPEN IN A SEPARATE TAB - CLICK THE PLAY BUTTON, AND THEN RETURN TO THIS TAB TO KEEP READING.  WITH "STOP AUTOPLAY" INSTALLED YOU WILL WASTE NO TIME SHUTTING OFF DISTURBING INTERRUPTIONS AND INSTEAD WILL BE PLEASED WITH YOUR CUSTOMIZED LISTENING EXPERIENCE! STOP AUTOPLAY NOW! Personal BackgroundAlthough I have been listening to audio my whole life - “Listen With Mother” on BBC radio as a toddler, snuggling late-night (so you could hear CFUN in rural Alberta!) with my transistor radio in elementary school, making long personal cassette tapes about teenage angst when on family vacations in grade 8...all of this was set aside once I had to record my voice in French class - no more listening to my own voice until a year or two ago, when I made a couple of videocasts for the 2Learn.ca site (no longer accessible, as they were tours of sections that have been revised since then).  Two more personal favorite relatively recent audio projects were integrating various music sources and sound effects into a video created for my mother’s 70th birthday a few years ago   (e.g. swishing oars when a photo of my nephew appears on the page - just watched it again online, but since it is 20 minutes long and very personal I’ve decided not to post the URL) and - very special to me - a digital rendition of a friend’s (late) mother, Marguerite Worden, a concert pianist in the 1940s, if I remember correctly, playing Debussy’s Clair de Lune, transferred from a 78rpm record to cassette tape some years ago, and then to a digital file by me about three years ago, and posted here: http://janetbell.ca/images/Debussy.mp3 (opens in a new window, so you can listen to it as you continue reading).  Really, though, despite working with audio somewhat, thinking about creating audio as a step in the learning process has not been a strong focus of mine, pedagogically at least, until these past few days - and now I look forward to really taking off in the use and production of audio with by, for and with teachers and students.Podcasts and the Professional Development JourneyToday, podcasts and vodcasts go hand in hand.  My personal PD through CBC Spark podcasts, TED Talk podcasts (well, vodcasts, but I listen to then on my iPod, as the video is not usually as critical), and Photoshop User TV vodcasts (where the demonstrations of tools are more visually-oriented, although the audio track can also be excellent to listen to when driving), over the past three or four years has been phenomenal.  Also, I am hopeless at knowing when to either listen to the radio or watch TV, so the “on demand” nature of podcasting fits my profile well!  Free audio books (please listen to the attached audio “fireside chat” file) accessible through iTunes have also been ideal to listen to on long drives. Generally, as a consumer of podcasts, I am loathe to listen to the amateurish ones, where quality can greatly vary from one episode to the next - I used to listen to the SMART Boards podcast by the PD2Go folk, for example, when I was on the road immersed in sessions myself, but eventually gave up as pertinent tips gave way to casual banter - not a knock against their amazing resources, as I know these things all ebb and flow and evolve over time, and I have been involved in other activities myself for over a year now.  We have used various kinds of podcasts regularly at our school last year; in most, but not all, instances we were consumers, rather than producers of podcasts:Podcasts at Lillian Osborne SchoolAudio Podcasts gleaned from the ‘Net have been used with grade tens in English classes last year at Lillian Osborne to:extend class discussion of a short story by mining others’ thoughtsprovide audio to accompany reading of a Shakespearean play (while also reading it and annotating it in our texts and viewing it simultaneously online through projection of the No Fear Shakespeare original text/modern translation on the SMART Board) - very multimodal! (... and yes, we did reenact key scenes, too, of course :) )provide us with with free audiobooks (free on iTunes) - students downloaded these to their iPods and iPhones to assist them in reading their novels in their novel study unit.Vodcasts (well, videos) have also been used at Lillian Osborne for a variety of activities, which are covered in my video-sharing post.  This podcast blog posting, to enable me to delve deeper into the relationship between student creation of podcasts and the inquiry process, is going to focus on audio podcasts.As you know, we must “walk the talk”, so just as I have “talked the walk” of our podcast experiences by creating a podcast that describes them, hopefully somewhat humorously, I invite you to “walk the talk” of listening to the “fireside chat”, where specific examples of our activities and consequential learning for students (and teacher) within each are provided.  Please don’t miss this!   (It is about 10 minutes long, but if you are a multitasker you can keep reading this while listening to it. Also, the track is full of "ums" - I do know how to scrub through the audio track in iTunes, removing this distraction, as well as finetuning the audio quality, but did not have time to complete this.  I loved the versatility of recording on my phone, but feel that the computer might have produced a cleaner recording. My next test here will be to try recording on the phone while wearing earbuds and mic, thus eliminating the surrounding white noise as much as possible.)Please note:  Podcast experiences with students, discussed (among other things) in the “fireside chat”, include, “Penny in the Dust” discussion, Frankenstein, Romeo and Juliet, and To Kill a Mockingbird.Grade 10 pre-IB English students joined me and other members of ARPDC presenting at a Regional Elluminati Conference in Calgary last October.  We presented from our classroom here in Edmonton, and are now able to access to screencast of the session here.  Although not a vodcast per se, this archiving of a collaboratively created virtual experience centered in a city miles away is worth mentioning here as another form of a podcast-type thing.  Our presentation starts at about 6:20 into the vodcast, and if you would like to see my students in class they are "live" around about 33 or 34 minutes into it.Producing audio media at Lillian OsborneYesterday...As explored in more depth in the “fireside chat”, it was a real breakthrough for one pre-IB student last year to discover that she was able to better approach her analytic writing (e.g. textual analysis of quotations from Merchant of Venice) by talking out her responses ahead of time.  This realization for us both has continued to intrigue since last Spring, and so I took the time to experiment with the same technique when creating this posting.  More on that later, but suffice it to say for now, that this production of media as part of the learning process  comprises a new way (at least, new when considered in a widespread way) is one that I expect can open doors for many students.Podcasts were also created by a couple of groups of students in response to a creative “Identity Project” where they repositioned characters from works studied into different times and locations and situations, and then recorded their musings (in character).  This was not really any different than a traditional taped assignment.  It wasn’t shared beyond the classroom.Students in a second language class use Audacity to record their speech, and then compare their waveforms with that of a proficient speaker of that language. Lillian Osborne’s French and Spanish students did exactly this last year, inspired by their languages teacher.  They would be seen sprawled across furniture in various parts of the school, recording on laptops.  Again, listening to their pronunciation AND viewing the waveforms is something they could not have done before (passes the Harris test).Our Teacher-Librarian last year assisted one of our students in creating a podcast book review, shared through MyLibrary.epsb.ca a district library website. I’ve now added it to our podcasts, so everyone can access it through iTunes and we can grow this resource of readings, tech help, and book reviews - in audio and video (book trailers) - over time.  I am pleased to have had the chance this week to bring these ambitions to fruition!  We have definitely moved into having a more modern and ubiquitous online presence by being accessible through iTunes! This is a milestone.Today...well, that is the fab iTunes story, coming up below!and continuing into the future...Putting the “record” button in the hands of the students (and considering this in light of Dr. Judi Harris’s questions about whether this use of technology can enable us to do things we either couldn’t do before, or could do before, but can do better now):Using their iPods or phones, sharing files over the network through Google Docs or email, students create their own readings or oral interpretations of literature in English or in drama or social studies - or second language class.  Practise reading aloud and co-create podcasts of longer texts to share with peers. (authentic publication - helps us do something we couldn’t have done so easily before (passes the Harris test))Students in English can create podcast interviews of characters in stories they are studying, posting them on a class website or distributing them over Twitter for feedback from others, also through audio.Students in English class or library club create book trailers or reviews and post them on our Lillian Osborne Library iTunes feed.
  http://learnallways.blogspot.com/2010/10/podcasting-comments.html

• Notebook pens, the video
  Oct 16, 2010 11:30 PM

  Notebook pens, the video
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/PlbHRR72Ee0/notebook-pens-video.html

• Notebook Pens
  Oct 16, 2010 10:23 PM

  Notebook Pens Have you downloaded Notebook software to read your teacher's Notebook files, but are now curious to know how you might use some of the features of Notebook software in your own presentations? Listen to this audio podcast (click on the link above) OR watch the video.
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/fqPj_HhAU1Q/notebook-pens.html

• Podcast on Podcasts = Podcasts squared
  Oct 16, 2010 9:41 PM

  Podcast on Podcasts = Podcasts squared I've been spending some time reflecting on how podcasts might be useful and have compiled my first thoughts in a podcast itself. Interested in keeping track our move into the podcast arena? We have submitted our Lillian Osborne Library podcast to the iTunes Store and are waiting to hear back as to whether they'll approve our posting within their interface. In the interim, you can register for our podcasts within iTunes by going into iTunes, clicking on the Advanced tab in the menu, then Subscribe to Podcast, then paste in the URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/lillianosbornelibrary/ - our growing page of links should appear in your iTunes.
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/TAfhOk6_2Y0/podcast-on-podcasts-podcasts-squared.html

• Ed Kleiman's "North End Faust"
  Oct 16, 2010 2:58 PM

  Ed Kleiman's "North End Faust"
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/AL2eJox2ap4/reading-ed-kleimans-north-end-faust.html

• Looking out for the environment at Lillian Osborne
  Oct 16, 2010 10:30 AM

  Thanks to Enviromatters at Edmonton Public Schools for the content of the following slideshow. We thought we'd repackage it as a Smilebox show, to stream in the library all through next week and post online for our larger community. This ecard customized with Smilebox
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/-xiQ3SKa9mo/looking-out-for-environment-at-lillian.html

• Social Bookmarking - Sifting and sorting, going with the flow, or strategically sculpting my onli...
  Oct 13, 2010 1:42 PM

  Let’s start with Harris’s two guiding questions - to what extent do these social bookmarking processes enable me to do things that either I couldn’t do before, or that I could do before, but can do better now?  I’ll refer back to these questions in my comments below.The case against bookmarking.Here’s the thing: Personally, I don’t bookmark too much anymore. I work on too many computers and browsers, and have had too many profile losses over the years to trust them.  When I worked at 2Learn, I bookmarked a great deal in the early days when creating online resources to share with others...but even in those days, as time went on, it was not just safer, but also quicker for me to make annotated notes in Word documents before sending the links online in a ‘NetSteps page or section of the site (e.g. some of the Gateways 2Learning pages, which bridge subject areas and age levels through thematic units - e.g. Water Watch). Not just quicker, but much more useful to me was the fact I could either annotate or copy/paste information from the site right into my document, to be sorted and sifted around after the fact when writing up documentation. Today, when compiling a document -- such as this blog posting! -- now that I have been burned by the automatic save in Blogger last weekend, I now create these postings in a similar way, but using Google Docs instead of Word, so that I can access my work from whichever computer I’m on at the time when some writing time presents itself.Stepping back a bit you can see the process - my own growth from a harvester of ideas and information from elsewhere to a producer of my own ideas, supported by those from elsewhere, much gathered at the moment I need them, as memory provides me the clues to find data that I have encountered before.  It is as if I have my own general bookmarks in memory, as I know HOW to search for things “at point of need” rather than organizing a whole lot of resources just in case I might need them.  For my own research and growth, this works, but of course, as teacher and as person in the library, whose function is to assist students in honing their own research skills, things are a little different. Let me share more of my journey, from a more professional/mentor point of view.Here’s how I ended up where I am now re: social bookmarking, and where I see myself going next:Social bookmarking makes complete sense for teachers looking to isolate online resources to jump-start an inquiry or shape efficient time use by students using resources preselected by their teacher (or you). They provide pathfinders.  In 1998, my colleagues and I at 2Learn.ca invented the 2Learn.ca 'NetSteps pages, wherein (in the first days simply using an html mail-in template, and in later days using an interactive online database) teachers could identify resources related to specific topics in Alberta curriculum.  Within the database, you can quickly search - thus all of us being able to benefit from everyone else's work, sharing resources together.  One of our team members would check resources as they came in, more for safety and commercialism than anything else, so that teachers can rest assured that resources will not be inappropriate.  These resources are still accessible through the student portals on 2Learn.ca http://www.2Learn.ca , and can still be built using the My Desktop toolset. Teachers and preservice teachers at the U of A over the years have collaborated in building these resources as a practical and useful way of practising emergent online research skills and strategies -- making PD about using the 'Net especially valuable as it resulted in resource compilations that could be used and shared just about immediately.  In fact, use of  'NetSteps within the My Desktop toolset was explored and assessed four years ago by David Geelan at the University of Alberta as a substantial part of his work supported by a Carnegie Scholarship (final report here).  Today, I view our ‘NetSteps pages as being like a bit of a cross between a Diigo resource list and a Trailfire list.  For myself, the ease of creating a Trailfire is very appealing, as I am always in a rush.  I actually do hope to create numerous Trailfires and/or ‘NetSteps pages myself and with colleagues over the next year as we begin to grow our virtual library presence.My next experiences evolved a few years later when I ran across Delicious, followed relatively soon after by my discovery at NECC 2008 of another web-based tool that operated very much like Delicious - Edtags.org , supported at that time by Harvard professor Chris Dede, who, looking for more information about this online now, now seems to be more encouraged using Delicious.  In 2009, Dede informs us (in an eSchool News article providing a summary of his FETC 2009 presentation) that “much can be learned about a student by what he or she tags. Social bookmarking, he said, may add transparency to the process by which students are gathering and integrating information, allowing teachers to guide students in evaluating sources of information.”  As usual, his insight challenges us to reframe things quite beautifully:  how we look at social bookmarking sites as educators should, like everything else, be about how useful are these for us as teachers of students -- it is one thing to create a selection of sites to guide students (pathfinder); it is another to give them a selection and have them evaluate them; it is yet another to challenge them to create their own resource landscape, to be assessed.  Now, relating back to Harris’s questions, we are doing something that couldn’t be done before -- challenging students as inquirers to gather their online resources, upon which we can provide feedback to help them sift and otherwise evaluate sources for authenticity, quality and usefulness before they move forward in their work.  Think of all the Alberta ICT outcomes covered off in that one activity alone.After that NECC experience, focused then on other job responsibilities, I moved away from social bookmarking altogether, amassing most of my links-to-share on other websites, such as the ARPDC SMARTBoard Ning site, which assists teachers around the province in integrating SMART Boards.  The point here is that my link gathering, whether on a 2Learn.ca Gateways to Learning project site, or a Ning, was becoming increasingly thematic in nature.  This past summer, in our Guided Inquiry course, I was challenged to juggle much reading and synthesizing, both online and offline, and welcomed both Evernote and Diigo to my online management repertoire.  Unlike many others in these courses, I am more used to online resources than offline - textbooks are pretty new to me having been out of that loop for many years.  Simply finding good ways to highlight and organize written text was a challenge.  Jumping right into using both tools, however, for me, was a chaotic but welcome way to keep organized!  My first impressions were pro-Evernote.  It is highly spoken of, and in a blog posting, “The verdict is in: Media 21 students love Evernote”, the “unquiet librarian” Buffy Hamilton waxes on about its versatility.  After also hearing her speak highly of Diigo (I think I remember this correctly) on a Classroom 2.0 Elluminate session, I responded to her article (above), posting the question of which she uses herself, but I guess she hasn’t seen my question yet.  Evernote and Diigo are so similar, yet also so different, that it is intriguing to see where people settle.  I expect it comes down to a learning style preference.  What I like best about Evernote is how easily one can aggregate offline material with online material.  Another thing I really like is that you can take a screenshot of some text, and then run an OCR (optical character recognition) on it, to make it work as text again.  It think that if you are not already using other information management tools, that Evernote provides a useful way to let your information sources converge within one program.What makes all of this confusing for me is that I already have iDisk, Dropbox, and Google Docs access set up from my laptop and from my phone, so it becomes hard to manage when I have some notes in Google Docs, where I like the freeform of a more word-processor interface, and others in Evernote.  It is also disappointing to see how quickly my allotted space in Evernote can fill up – two picture uploads took up up half the space for me when doing my summer work, and when the pictures were deleted, the space didn’t become free.  Months later, my space is back, but I don’t like feeling that my work can be compromised by the size of my last upload.  The bottom line for me? Evernote is a good tool, among several other tools. Yes, it allows me to do things I couldn’t do before, in terms of integrating online and offline sources, but maybe I don’t really need to do these things this way -- Google Docs works well for me and is better integrated into all of my other daily processes on all my computers.This summer, consumed by Infoglut, feeling particularly disorganized when reviewing a list of notes all of which were titled, “Untitled Note”, I turned to Diigo.  What happened then was I slipped into a more familiar way of thinking, settling in to the logic of Diigo with ease--hence my comment above re: learning style.  Similar to 2Learn.ca’s ‘NetSteps pages (which completely fit the way I think...), where links are drawn to your list from a database pull where they are tagged in a way you have predetermined through your choice of topic, the logic of Diigo makes sense to me.  Diigo is much more dynamic and intuitive to use, however, than ‘NetSteps (different function, really, as it is a tool for all purposes, not limited to teaching using Alberta curriculum), Diigo also extends its reach far beyond making a collection of links (where I started, before venturing into other its other capabilities).  Highlighting and stickies that perpetuate one’s visits to pages hold potential for working with students – on a SMART Board, to bring up a webpage, then to have students briefly annotate their thoughts or questions on that page (on their laptops), letting the results be added to the initial page synchronously, could be a powerful tool, for example.  Another favorite feature of Diigo is the web presentation tool, enabling one to show a slideshow of links visited, which is actually a web tour of preselected and organized links, created with one click.  What I liked the best, however, is the screen capture feature in the Diigo Bookmark drop-down menu, because this screen capture (unlike the other draw-a-capture tool on the toolbar) creates a cached version of the page you are visiting: now, any pages accessed in password-protected databases can be cached for later viewing within your profile. I would suggest making sure these links remain private, for personal use, on a computer that is able to access the material legitimately, with respect for copyright compliance.  Students who are not sophisticated enough searchers to mine four separate databases for resources, even with guidance, can now access those resources within a single Diigo page of cached link created within their profiles.  Access to content is streamlined—a student can now pull up cached pages from multiple online databases, if they have been compiled by their teacher or teacher-librarian beforehand.  Finally, Diigo helps you to capitalize on the traffic patterns on the web through social bookmarking: by opening the Diigo sidebar, you can see how often a site has been bookmarked by someone else and by whom. You can tell if you are on the well-travelled path or that less taken, another useful information piece when working with students, assessing the wisdom of groups, effectiveness of page marketing, amount of activity on a particular site, etc.  You can also click to the bookmarks of those who have bookmarked a site you like to see if their other bookmarks link you to resources you also would like.  This alignment of interest through points of “like-mindedness” connection is another effective way to serendipitously discover resources, similar to viewing what else an author wrote, or what else is categorized under a Dewey call number or LOC subject heading.This table, which I created in August, provides an overview of the type of functionality I would like to see in a resources management tool, and sets up Diigo as the “winner”:Desired FunctionalityEvernoteDiigoGather information in one placeyesyesWeb LinksyesyesAggregate and post PDFs that I have downloaded and annotatedYes, but uploads take a lot of server spaceAnnotate right on a web document with stickies; collaborate with others; be sure to check privacy settingsLinks to sites within licensed password-protected databases – Proquest, Gale, etc.from U of A librariesEPSB’s My Library, from EPL librariesand from Gale library iPhone appsScreenshots:Evernote can conduct an OCR on the screenshot, enabling you then to read text as text rather than as an imageCan take snapshots and annotate right on them;Diigo snapshot persists in cache even after library access has timed out—excellent feature Folders of links, gathering resources under topics (for my research but also as a tool for teachers to use in the outcome of my research)Yes, in a format that looks like a mailbox tree structureYes, in a smooth viewable format of easily identifiable and shareable folders.Display options?Can play as web slides – fabulous for presentation purposes by teacher or student; choice of other display views, lots of ability to customize what is seen and not seen.(This might be one reason to prefer Diigo over Trailfire.)Be able to annotate on the document or beside itYou can annotate a note; the note is not an actual webpage seen in a browser, although a page can be integrated into the note within the Evernote interface.Stickies – perpetuate over time as you revisit a webpageLink to RefWorksNot tried.Yes, via RefGrab-It:  Export Diigo list as a report, then export that report to RefGrab-It; log in to RefWorks for your list to then be automatically imported into RefWorksLink to PDFs of articles found in Proquest, etc.PDFs can be uploaded to Evernote, but space is limited.Yes, via screen shot function in bookmark menu (only).iPhone compatibilityRe: Evernote on my iPhone ... first, I took a photo of a document, then uploaded it to Evernote, then synched it.  Once it appeared on my computer, I opened it up and ran the text OCR. Evernote worked like a text scanner on my document photo.  (I also have Scanner Pro installed, which enables the same functionality without using Evernote.)I have downloaded the Diigo application, but have not yet used it.Upload files from my computer to the toolNotes can be created locally and then synched online. Not an available function.Privacy notes
  http://learnallways.blogspot.com/2010/10/social-bookmarking-sifting-and-sorting.html

• Video-sharing sites - so much potential...but too much to say!
  Oct 11, 2010 3:13 PM

  OVERARCHING QUESTIONS - all are addressed at some point...To what extent does this tool enable us to do something we weren't able to do before?  To what extent does this tool enable us to do something we could do before, but can do better now? (Dr. Judi Harris, Wetware: Why Use Activity Structures?) (e.g. more authentically, more efficiently, deeper exploration, better meeting student learning styles)To what extent is this tool accessible (re: network access) by those we'd like to use them (teachers? students? at school? home? mobile users?--keeping in mind potential network challenges)To what extent is this tool accessible (re: learner ability to use it) to all learners, and/or forward the work of teachers embracing universal design for learning/inclusive education principles with all learners, and/or support inclusion? Lastly, and of most importance...how does learning about these tools change my practise right away?PART ONE: HOW THINGS WERE AND AREI had started my original blog posting on video sharing sites (the one I accidentally deleted last Sunday evening by overwriting it with the embed code of “Wavin’ Flag” as I was excitedly deconstructing it) by telling stories demonstrating the process of compiling slide-tape presentations two generations ago; I actually got quite tied up in the descriptions of my parents late at night, dad placing slides in carousels, mum writing scripts, and their bringing in a neighbor who taught singing lessons to read the script, taped on the reel to reel, timed perfectly so the slides would advance on cue... In my second version writing this, I’m providing this image briefly rather than as a complete vignette (complete with soft focus edges and sepia tint).  The purpose of their collaboration? Not journalistic, not family narrative, but a sharing of work they were involved in overseas that they would present back to the community, raising global awareness and social action locally through multimedia.  Our community was inspired forty years ago through their and others’ similar visions to act, to help others elsewhere, to reap the intrinsic rewards of active global citizenship.  The purpose of my using this to jump-start this posting? To assert that literacy, yesterday and today, reaches far beyond reading and writing, to include media construction for the purpose of effecting change.  It is definitely something we could do before, but also something we can do better now.Our class reading and various blogs we follow reiterate the point that media creation is now in everyone’s hands - media production has moved from “professional” to “personal”;  media consumption has become even more personal.  To me, this is a little incomplete, too “that was then, this is now”.  Instead, I believe that we each have some kind of awareness of HOW we’d like to use media (i.e. benefit), and depending upon what we invest into making that happen (i.e. time, cost, learning curve), given our interest and awareness of the urgency of that particular action, we then decide to do it and get on with actually doing it. We all see this when we sketch ideas on napkins in coffee shops:  we like to represent things visually.  My parents forty years ago saw that even though they were amateurs (and would remain so) in media creation, it made complete sense for them to do this because it made an impact that led to social action, PLUS there was an enormous “fun” aspect to it, for them, simply to do it.  Today, nothing has changed in this regard.  It is the same thing for those of us who create videos and share them:Purposeful + fun + {(LearningCurve + TimeInvestment + $cost) < prohibitive} + (it effects change in knowledge/skill/attitude/behavior)2 = Great rationale for exploring use of this technologyThis explains why, despite Prensky’s “digital natives” label, so many students today love being online, but are not very literate consuming one resource or another, let alone having the ability to produce resources themselves.  Just as I would love to be an artist or musician but don’t choose to spend time learning right now, students today know who the students are who have an aptitude in this area and gravitate to working with those students in their group assignments.  How wonderful is that? Why not let students work to their ability in the areas that best interest them, collaborating to make best use of each other’s talents? I took the question of whether it is a good idea for students to work from their best modality to my teenage son, and his response was just very sensible - you can see I am a little speechless, as I was hoping for a different response (length = 35 seconds):When considering how conservative his response was, I reconsidered it light of his own experiences of YouTube at school, as today’s teens are themselves products of a system that doesn’t promote creative video-sharing, even when videos are produced.Do teachers use YouTube in school? (1 minute 14 seconds)http://www.youtube.com/janetebell#p/u/1/UNrCut4BGIAUpon further questioning, he admitted that he had posted videos years ago of his guitar playing.  What he didn’t mention was that he worked last year with a group of students in Physics compiling an excellent video about distance/time/velocity and life at school when a UFO appears; he also didn’t mention a French video his group produced a couple of years ago accompanied by Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing.  Neither of these videos made it to YouTube - they sit on DVDs in someone’s basement.  It is so ironic that even the best projects can be out of sight, out of mind for today’s students once the year ends.  One of our jobs as Teacher-Librarians and educators in general should be to help inspire more students to open up their YouTube or Google Video connections to share and archive their work, as their original “takes” on dramatically recreating lessons learned in school certainly meets the TPCK criteria (fitting [Alberta, in our case] curriculum, then pedagogy, then technology) for integrating back into our lessons again, while also enriching a multimedia culture by celebrating collaborative learning constructs!  We need to nudge this shift along for it to happen - the videos are already there, just invisible beyond the one handed-in copy.Literacy itself is about purpose and subsequent action, even when that action is reconsidering the ideas presented, as they relate to ourselves -- or, as Wesch puts it, quoting McLuhan, moving from “cognition” to “recognition”.  So, now let’s look at how video-sharing can assist us in even more successfully achieving that aim of “recognition”, of seeing ourselves.  Mike Wesch in his excellent “Anthropological Introduction to YouTube” touches on several purposes of video-sharing.  He reminds us of how a visual text pulls us in so we identify with the character as ourselves.  How well this notion aligns with a pre-performance lecture our “Citadel Club” attended this past Wednesday evening, wherein the Citadel’s sound engineer described to us the careful attention paid by the whole set team designing a play to every second of use of sound, use of light, use of props, etc. to sculpt how the audience’s eyes travel around the stage moment by moment when watching a play.  The face-to-face performance is the limousine version of the YouTube video, where in the hands of us all, from students alone in their rooms to professional videographers, we share our “moments of being” (Virginia Woolf) -- from many aspects of our lives -- with the world, or with those we choose to share them with.  What a powerful medium is YouTube to “make a difference”, to incite change.  What it has potentially sacrificed in terms of artistic merit (aka Citadel-level production techniques) and sculpting of a shared public experience, it makes up for in its ability to permit and facilitate everyone’s voice to be heard - anywhere, and creation of incredibly widely broadcast raw (not-so-sculpted) private experiences.  The result? A medium that appears to be “video” but really is about “unbridled and democratic yet incredibly private, even intimate, broadcast communication” (my words). Period.  A note on the concept of “intimate” here -- inspired by Wesch’s video (noted above), I see the examples he provides of his students speaking alone to the webcam -- exploring their somewhat voyeuristic behavior watching themselves form their online personae -- as intimate.  It is pretty big of them to have allowed him to share this footage with the rest of us.In the same video, Wesch also talks about the deep kind of connecting that can connect via video on YouTube, forging new forms of community and new forms of self-understanding. He values how YouTube enables such easy asynchronous collaborations even across large areas, although, really, this has been the appeal for many of us in using the web itself.  He is intrigued with the culture of YouTube - with what makes a video go viral, for example, and refers to videos such as the ones offering free hugs.   He entertains us with the reality/fantasy blurring in YouTube drama and the subsequent irony when “real” people feel cheated when they discover that  this “seriously playful participatory culture” (Wesch) pulled one over their eyes.  His ideas are fun, and, to me, remind me of a modern-day equivalent of the first days of the graphical web, when people would start playing around in this “brave new world”.  Our next step should be to reflect on his comments to generate idea of how these same techniques can be used in education, perhaps to create ongoing sequentially created global social action projects, or dramatic simulations parallelling works studied in English/language arts, for example, One last note on posting, gleaned from Wesch’s work...Wesch speaks in more than one of his own videos about marketing YouTube videos, being drawn on by the elusive pull of wanting to have as many people see your video as possible. He even speaks of how YouTube automatically identifies your video’s middle frame as the poster frame for that video, and shows how this feature can be used to market videos on subjects quite removed from what the middle/poster frame may insinuate. Here’s the thing:  Wesch’s videos, a couple of years old now, were created before YouTube’s evolution to where you can choose any frame in your video to be the poster frame - so today, if your poster frame is not related to the subject of your video, it appears somewhat amateurish - hence, a nice little piece of evolution that shows YouTube growing to appeal to one’s intellect more than one’s potentially baser instincts.  It concerns me, however, that there are still so many wishing to have millions of viewers view their work.  Surely in a world shifting from the sense of the individual to the sense of the collective we should be relying less on numbers of hits and more on the impact of learning on behavior?  I love Wesch’s videos - always watch them from beginning to end - like watching videos on TED (which he has also appeared on) or listening to podcasts on CBC Spark, they challenge you to see the particular in what you thought was the obvious, and the details in the fabric of things now and things to come - intriguing stuff.  Yet when viewing his work again this past week, I kept revisiting a comment on the page that implied that people don’t watch videos the whole way through. If one’s stats are indicating that a million viewers are watching your video, that could mean that your marketing fanout through other social media sites is working well, but no-one who clicks there actually stays...much better, in my mind to stay apart, by the quiet pond in the gentle rain, and when one’s ideas are to be heard, they will filter out when the time is right.  Just a thought - I just find the marketing game to be something of a red herring, but maybe my mind will shift on this as time goes on.What’s next? Clearly, things spiral along upward.  Next is the video angle of “mass customization”, as seen in PVRs and Apple TV. We are inherently social creatures, so as nice as curling up with one’s laptop to watch a video might be, how much better to have the option to share it with others on a big TV screen - so back to where we started - TV - but with video of all types (professional and amateur) available on demand. Great for teaching and learning - in the classroom (projecting videos created professionally or by ourselves, or by our students - or by students down the hall in a colleague’s class - anyone at all!) and at home (where our teenagers put on wireless headphones and play bass guitar along with the greats on YouTube, fine-tuning their skills alongside the best in the world). Does this help us to “work smarter”? Absolutely... extra help and enrichment are available at the click of a button as we consume and rethink and enact and reenact.  PART TWO: THE NEXT STEP - FACILITATING TEACHING AND LEARNING VIA VIDEO-SHARING IN THE CLASSROOM AND PD SPACEBenefits of video sharingDrawbacks of video sharingwatching videos fits visual learner stylespotential for greater differentiation of resource to fit particular student needsgreat for demonstrating a how-to processeffective tool for students of all agesin hands of students, can scaffold engagementin hands of students, can reinforce notion of multiple perspectivesvideos can be created anytime/anywhere using mobile technologiesYouTube videos can be downloaded through browser plugins, RealPlayer, or http://kiss.___mashupsgreat way for students to learn film-making techniques, by viewing them in action (as demonstrated by other students), and then incorporating them into their own videos.practically, virtual field trips - whether on YouTube, or on Google Earth “trips”, saved as .kmz files in Google Earth, so the trip plays just as a video.
  http://learnallways.blogspot.com/2010/10/video-sharing-sites-so-much.html

• Happy Thanksgiving!
  Oct 10, 2010 8:16 AM

  Our library is truly growing into the learning hub of our school! Athena has spent countless hours integrating the books from the movable chairs into the permanent shelves around the room, not just opening up our space into a grand learning "cube" that can be reconfigured with chairs and tables into a myriad of learning spaces, but also adding colour to the back of the room, from the books in the lower shelves. Applied Graphic Arts students have added student self-portraits around the whole perimeter of the room, above the bookshelves, reminding us that this is a room for us all, where are minds meet. Music students are continuing their popular and inspiring weekly Friday lunchtime performances. More classes are dropping by to work, and on several occasions this past week there were two classes in there stretched across the furniture, cozied up on the floor and working at tables, focused on English and Chemistry assignments, laptops in hand. Teachers have also now completed a survey, part of which taps into their comfort levels using the technologies in their classrooms (e.g. wireless FM systems).  One of my next steps is to contact them individually to provide informal at-hand support in integrating these technologies into teaching and learning processes. Other teachers are ready to self-identify as go-to people in tech-support areas; next week we hope to communicate those names to the whole staff, to provide a stronger web of tech support, which can be as close as from the room next door.  We're hoping that that, coupled with our emergent student "geek squad", should lessen some of the potential extra pressures that might impact our colleagues in integrating several new technologies, sometimes simultaneously, at least from the operational point of view, in our growing school. Our Friday "Just-in-time Tech PD" continues - but we look forward to moving it to Tuesdays in a week's time.  Our last session focused on laptop cart protocols. Those protocols will be revisited as a checklist to be laminated and attached inside the cart doors. Gaining awareness of the kinds of items that cross my desk, I am now firmly setting in place processes to keep me from drowning in information.  Binders to facilitate laptop signout records within the library and in the satellite laptop carts kept around the school, library administration notes, invoices, etc. are being built and kept at hand.  Haley has stapled together something like 100 packages of laptop signout sheets to replace weekly on the carts about the school.  This management-of-processes-setup will continue as I develop more of daily/weekly scheduling of my tasks, to keep me from being overwhelmed and also to formalize what I do, to help in reporting out down the road. Just in time for Thanksgiving weekend, it feels as if things are finally settling in, so much so that I was able to leave for a couple of days to participate in a Student-Owned Devices project and present a couple of presentations (one on SMART Boards and one on integrating technology into the inquiry process in English language arts) at a couple of other district high schools.  While away, two amazing ladies filed away all of our to-be-shelved books, which have been collecting.  Maybe next week I will finally be able to begin to address the post-it reminder notes collecting on edge of my counter.  Once those are dealt with, I will definitely be pretty much ready to more consistently move forward with my other responsibilities (e.g. teaching). We can finally grow our fiction section, now that our space is ready to be grown!  I look forward to learning how to process fiction books...and then getting to work processing our donations, purchasing student requests, and mining a local second-hand bookstore that I discovered this weekend, which sells gently used books, many of which are top-notch recommended reads, at 20% off their already discounted prices. Time for our school book club to kick into gear! How thankful are we this Thanksgiving weekend?
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/9nMdAWAj4NY/happy-thanksgiving.html

• video sharing 2
  Oct 4, 2010 10:06 PM

  video sharing 2 New Project 1 From: janetebell Views: 8 0 ratings Time: 00:35 More in Education
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETAzq0H3Jog&feature=youtube_gdata

• New Project 1
  Oct 4, 2010 9:55 PM

  New Project 1 New Project 1 From: janetebell Views: 19 0 ratings Time: 01:14 More in Education
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNrCut4BGIA&feature=youtube_gdata

• Lillian Osborne Students Volunteer!
  Oct 2, 2010 11:10 AM

  See the two news stories, linked to from our school website:  http://lillianosborne.epsb.ca .
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/SWRl1uI-kMY/lillian-osborne-students-volunteer.html

• The Beauty of Photo-Sharing
  Sep 26, 2010 2:26 PM

  1. To what extent does this tool enable us to do something we weren't able to do before? (Dr. Judi Harris, Wetware: Why Use Activity Structures?)That was then...Being able to access images on the web back in the mid-nineties opened our eyes to the potential for integrating the visual into the classroom.  Back then, at Scona, an introduction to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre would be enhanced by photos of the new Globe, under construction at the time, duplicated onto an overhead transparency, as in the mid-nineties, LCD projectors were not common in schools.  Fast forward to today--and a teacher quickly downloads the Virtual Globe QuickTime, to project onto a SMART Board so students can zoom in and around the theatre as if they were actually there. Yet what both these examples have in common is educationally sound use of materials on the web posted by someone else.Using photo-sharing sites, such as Flickr, Picasa, Shutterfly, or Photobucket, today opens doors to new kinds of collaborations and representations, in and of themselves, and when used in conjunction with other tools, such as Animoto, Smilebox, or other gadgets, or with other mobile technologies.  Now we can really do things we couldn't do before--and with material that we started off creating ourselves.  Here are examples, personal and professional, but all with commentary to, I hope, inspire educational use:Example #1: the beauty of immediately, or almost immediately posting:This photo was taken the other day at school. The student is providing lunch-time entertainment in the library as others have lunch.  Why include this photo? I took it on my iPhone, and uploaded it to Flickr.  From there, I posted it to our library blog. The advantage of posting to Flickr first is that I could upload several photos, before choosing the best one to post. The photo-sharing site was the holding tank; the blog provided the publication forum. Such immediacy of contextual publication could never have happened even ten years ago--when we were manually posting teacher project information online, using html editors.Example #2: Leveraging the interface of the photo-sharing site to facilitate educational interactions.This is a photo uploaded over a year ago now--I'm presenting a SMART Board presentation in Grande Prairie. If you click on the photo, you can link to the actual Picasa page I've copied it from. Here it gets interesting: What if students posted photos to Picasa or Flickr, etc., soliciting responses to them below (note the place for annotations on the Picasa page)? Or...what if students created drawings based on written descriptions provided to them by other students, then posted photos of those drawings on the site, soliciting responses from other students describing those drawings?  The drawings by different students could be combined in an "album" (Picasa) or "set" (Flickr), and student contributions could be from home, or anywhere in the world.  The web and easy photo-sharing applications enable us to do projects that have been around for awhile...but more efficiently, and with far-reaching (geographically) potential.Example #3: Uploading slidesHere's a Picasa sample - These are some random photos of a hike I took with our AP down to Lake Tahoe at the end of June, 2009. A group of teachers and administrators from our school were in Granlibakken for IB training.  Unlike Flikr, you can't grab the embed code so easily, neither do you have previews at the bottom of the page when you view a slideshow, but with Picasa you can create movies and collages simply.  You'll see reading through my reflections below that I cannot see choosing between Picasa and Flickr -- the each have different strengths.Here's a Flickr sample - You might find these Speak Out! photos of our students interesting - many taken in the library, about 10 days ago. I am a little leery of putting them online without permission, so I may remove this link after a couple of weeks. The reason I'm still sharing them are...in Flickr you can quickly grab the slideshow embed code...and it appears immediately in your blog or website - very convenient! Example #4: Manipulating slides through various gadgets and Animoto (and Prezi, Smilebox, etc.)Here are photos of my parents' wedding: http://picasaweb.google.ca/526.2355/BelcherWedding#  You might remember my writing earlier about the slideshow we created for their anniversary. We wanted to create the sense of how those we love are there, forever, like clouds that come and go, drifting.  Then we found this - in the actual presentation, we used Keynote, exporting into Quicktime, but I still found this little gadget works well on the web.Fifty years ago, in a land far away... [Click on a photo to enlarge it, and to access the slideshow link.]Roy Tanck's Flickr Widget requires Flash Player 9 or better.Get this widget at roytanck.comThe point here is that photosharing sites are the place where photos are kept and organized, then gadgets and other sites such as Animoto, Smilebox, and Prezi--and Picasa again, provide the tools by which we can reconstruct those photos into contextual representations on knowledge. In the case of the impact of the slides of my parents' wedding, we were able to create a cloud that worked symbolically as well as being appealing to watch, to communicate our larger theme of connectedness through time through love.Another example of my use of this photocloud gadget is a couple of years ago when I used this gadget in a web portfolio - I copied feedback from people onto Keynote slides and then uploaded them to Picasa, then created the cloud from those images to post on an online portfolio site at the time.  To create similar impact within the classroom, it makes good sense for students to explore ideas sometimes in a less than linear fashion. If they were to post presentation slides to a cloud instead of to a slideshow, they begin to repackage the way we see presentations themselves. For example, these slides were created by our students this time last year, as they were introducing each other to the class partly through quotations they found meaningful. Here is a traditional Flickr slideshow, linked to from a Jing screenshot:Now, to change this to a non-linear format, it has literally taken me less than a minute to grab the RSS feed link of the Photostream, and paste it into the widget input box to get the coding at http://www.roytanck.com/get-my-flickr-widget/ . Now, as with a tool such as Prezi, but simpler here, students have been freed from linearity! They can click at will on the gadget and the quote of the moment will come to the fore.  All this by using a photosharing site for storing the images, then reconstructing the representation to break apart the linearity of the original presentation.Roy Tanck's Flickr Widget requires Flash Player 9 or better.Get this widget at roytanck.comTo continue our theme of exploring how to break out of the mold of linear representations, take a deeper look at Picasa.  My favorite thing about Picasa is that if you don't have photo editing software available to you, you can download Picasa software onto your PC -- and quite recently, now onto your Mac as well -- and be able to access quick image fix tools, upload buttons, and projects. Like a freebie little brother to iPhoto (implying that it is more useful on the PC because Macs have iPhoto built in), Picasa enables you to make slideshows, Quicktime movies of your slideshows, cards and other projects. My favorite is the collage feature, one my students and I have used to create collages of screenshots for newsletters and the school newspaper, collages of photos for friends, and quick splash pages or even headers for web pages. Students could quickly do the same. Here are two examples -- a personal collage...... and a webpage header from our English website.To make each of them, I simply opened the photos from within the Picasa application on my computer and followed simple instructions. You can choose the "look" of your collage, and can enlarge and rotate photos...lots of options. To create the header image for my English website, I used a Jing snapshot to "grab" an image out of a previous collage I'd made of students on the day of our school's opening. It looks as if I'd done some fancy webpage graphics up top, but not at all the case.Below is an example of slides uploaded to Animoto instead of to an actual photosharing site.  I created these slides in Notebook software, exporting them as jpgs, uploading them to Animoto -- the result? a dynamic slideshow promoting the use of SMART Boards at our school:Although this was created for promotional purposes, it makes such sense to place these easy-to-use tools into the hands of students so they can up the ante on their presentations' engagement factor.  The same rationale would be true for challenging students to work with Prezi.  2. To what extent does this tool enable us to do something we could do before, but can do better now? (Harris) (e.g. more authentically, more efficiently, deeper exploration, better meeting student learning styles)In my commentary above, one can see that most of the beauty of photosharing comes from the ease by which we can do things we couldn't have done before. As we build processes into one another, we easily move from simply presenting photos or slides back online in a linear slideshow to creating dynamic, engaging presentations utilizing movement and even music to drive home the content.  Whether a gadget on a webpage, or an Animoto, Prezi, or Smilebox slideshow that can be archived for future reference, the ways in which teachers and students alike can repackage traditional slideshows to lesson linearity or to enhance mood, is exciting. Smilebox takes things a little further. Like Animoto, it includes a choice of music selections to enhance the presentation. One would think that the "cutesiness" of the Smilebox presentations would detract from the effect, but really it is the opposite - with Smilebox, a professional-looking slideshow is easily created - how motivating to some of our high school students who may be working on assignments examining setting, character, or mood.I've only created a couple of Smilebox slideshows over time, the most recent of which was for a close friend who we lost to cancer last Fall.  Rather than share the whole slideshow, as it is personal to his family and ours, I am just including a screenshot, which shows how nicely within Smilebox you can layer your photos with others, integrating Smilebox graphic animations on top to create something that looks sophisticated. In the actual slideshow, soft music accompanies various snapshots of changing seasons, all annotated in a kind of visual poem. 3. To what extent is this tool accessible (re: network access) by those we'd like to use them (teachers? students? at school? home? mobile users?--keeping in mind potential network challenges) An unfortunate but useful question to consider, in today's locked down schools, teachers may well want to confirm with their technical contacts regarding access to sites such as Picasa and Flickr within school firewalls.  Smilebox, too, requires Flash to be enabled in order to work.Certainly, in our school we can access both of these; in fact, this year, in Applied Graphic Arts, our teacher is requiring students to create their own Flickr accounts to archive their course work creations.  We have, right from day one, created a couple of Picasa accounts to archive school photos.  It has been an immense time and frustration saver to be able to access everyone's photos from one event (e.g. last Halloween) on one single Picasa site, to compile into a quick slideshow to share with students.  Teacher and student collaboration on building image banks of all school happenings has also helped streamline work for our Yearbook Club, as images are all in one spot.  As time allows, over the next few weeks, I will be dipping into these archives to create short slideshows to showcase our school's story on our official webpage.  Even the process this evening of reconsidering the costs and benefits of linearity has been useful; it is tempting to create those shows now using the picturecloud widgit as a springboard.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, several pictures in a picture cloud are worth tens of thousands...and a page hosting more than one picture cloud may tell the story in a priceless way.4. To what extent is this tool accessible (re: learner ability to use it) to all learners, and/or forward the work of teachers embracing universal design for learning/inclusive education principles with all learners, and/or support inclusion? (See this article re: incluive education and TPACK.) This is the exciting part...I believe that the more we focus on the literacies of pictures and manipulation of images in various representations, we more we can reach all learners.  In my commentary above, I've focused on photo-sharing and slideshow sites, but there are so many other ways one can draw from the  images posted on these sites to make a visual statement. Whether creating a huge poster from a single file (using Blockposter http://www.blockposters.com/ ) or a collection of files (using Glogster http://glogster.com ), or telling a story through a story-maker or cartoon-creator site, the potential for jump-starting student engagement is growing daily. As teachers and teacher-librarians, we nAeed to keep our own feelers out to see what emerging tools are out there, and be quick again to let go of them when something else comes into view.Where I'll be going next: Explore slideshow and other digital story-telling tools at Cogdogroo: http://cogdogroo.wikispaces.com/StoryTools .5. To what extent is this tool supporting the development of twenty-first century skills/literacies (ISTE)? Absolutely, using any of the tools above would easily meet ISTE's Educational Techology Standards for Students, as they would also meet outcomes within all three sections of Alberata's ICT Program of Studies.  A better question might be, how could they not meet such standards? At each stage of the inquiry process, whether integrating other people's photos into their work (under a creative commons license) or working with their own work or mashups of the two, students are continually challenged to use technology appropriately, making decisions to inform their next moves, working together to create and share new knowledge.Lastly, and of most importance...how does learning about these tools change my practise right away?Our school is getting ready for Read-In week.  I am exploring how we can best promote literacy within our school community as being "more than just the books."  If we can pull together some top-notch slideshows and/or webpage content and/or print materials (Glogster) showcasing our students' work last year and this year to date to showcase with our guests, perhaps we can set a bar in terms of what "representing" looks like that we can continue to meet and raise as the year evolves.  I'm sure to share with you down the road how this actually evolves! 
  http://learnallways.blogspot.com/2010/09/beauty-of-photo-sharing.html

• Celebrating the Arts!
  Sep 26, 2010 11:16 AM

  This has been a week of seeding our ongoing 2010 celebration of the Arts at Lillian Osborne! We are bringing color of all types into our library! Student art work is being posted around the perimeter of our room, and each Friday lunch-time has been reserved for student performances. As we wound up a busy week last week, how nice it was to see a room full of students enjoying our first performance of the year--it felt more like a coffee shop than a library...
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/Kv2EKQ_511I/celebrating-arts.html

• Growing Partnerships
  Sep 26, 2010 11:13 AM

  We look forward to growing partnerships with agencies who can support our work growing our students as digital citizens.  Our meetings began this past week, and we look forward to announcing some excellent sessions and opportunities for students to learn from experts in this field over the next few weeks!  Stay posted as our plans evolve!
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/eGzUtG1H84k/growing-partnerships.html

• Technology + Literacy = Digital Citizenship
  Sep 25, 2010 10:22 AM

  Our Tech Team had its year two inaugural meeting this week.  Set up with the big screen in the library, one of our members took notes directly on the Google Docs agenda, so our meeting records and to-do list appeared before us all in real time.  Another Team member volunteered to take the lead in our Friday before-school tech session with all staff, demonstrating how to create a Google Site.  We are looking forward to another exciting year rolling out our involvement in various school, district and provincial technology/literacy projects--all for the benefit of student learning, and all to be scoped out within the larger challenge of growing a culture of forward-thinking digital citizens. Our next meeting connects us via video conferencing with a consultant downtown, who will help inform some of our decision-making as we continue to make informed choices in determining best available costs for technologies.  Lots to do, but lots of fun!
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/FdQq3716Qu4/digital-citizenship-plan.html

• The Axis of Praxis!
  Sep 25, 2010 1:53 AM

  Photo on 2010-07-17 at 20.33,originally uploaded by janetbell.How surprised am I?I can't believe I forgot to mention the most important question of all -- the raison d'etre of my other five questions below:From my explorations with established and emergent online tools over the next few weeks.....what are my real, actual, demonstrable takeaways-- What will this LOOK LIKE in my/my colleagues' classrooms today, or tomorrow....or even next week - no later!!!!This is where our course musings, research, and constructivist conversations mesh with the "real" world again; this is how our explorations now come to life for us and for our colleagues and students. For such explorations to be truly worth the time, energy and money invested in this course, I must see the immediate results of that impacting my teaching/mentoring practise. I am eager to to see how this all evolves, and look forward to sharing our activities at school here and/or on our library blog
  http://learnallways.blogspot.com/2010/09/axis-of-praxis.html

• Critical questions to consider when exploring the use of the tools
  Sep 24, 2010 2:58 PM

  Over the next few week, our group is exploring various online tools used for photo-sharing, video-sharing, social bookmarking, podcasting, wikis, presentation and multimedia tools, digital mapping, social networking, and blogging.In terms of my own work in supporting effective technology integration and fostering of twenty-first century literacies, the following five critical questions will be interesting to explore when evaluating these tools in their various manifestations:1. To what extent does this tool enable us to do something we weren't able to do before? (Dr. Judi Harris, Wetware: Why Use Activity Structures?)2. To what extent does this tool enable us to do something we could do before, but can do better now? (Harris) (e.g. more authentically, more efficiently, deeper exploration, better meeting student learning styles)3. To what extent is this tool accessible (re: network access) by those we'd like to use them (teachers? students? at school? home? mobile users?--keeping in mind potential network challenges)4. To what extent is this tool accessible (re: learner ability to use it) to all learners, and/or forward the work of teachers embracing universal design for learning/inclusive education principles with all learners, and/or support inclusion? (See this article re: incluive education and TPACK.)5. To what extent is this tool supporting the development of twenty-first century skills/literacies (ISTE, P21))?http://isteemergingtech.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/ http://www.p21.org/route21/ 
  http://learnallways.blogspot.com/2010/09/critical-questions-to-consider-when.html

• Blogger or not Blogger? That is the question!
  Sep 24, 2010 2:36 PM

  The high-level view:Finally, a lovely Fall day in Edmonton.  Spending a good portion of the day in a district inservice planning for enhancing literacies in the twenty-first century, and another good portion of after-school time in a staff meeting exploring the concept of meaningful professional development, I have been immersed in the landscape of our "brave new world" of mass convergence and mass customization--such exciting times we live in, with so many opportunities literally at our fingertips.  Stepping out into the parking lot at the end of the day, the blazing sun on the horizon and in anticipation of the enormous equinox harvest moon that awed us last night, something in me settles.  This is a big deal, as I tend to be quite driven usually. We rattle around with our technologies, making meaning this way and that...and together, through our shared ideas, we grow culture upon culture of PLCs and other groups of  like-minded people...all, at the end of the day, living, moving, interacting under that blazing sun, that porous milky moon.  How the physical reality can sustain us.John Adams Whipple (American, 1822–1891); James Wallace Black (American, 1825-1896)The Moon, 1857-1860Salted paper print from glass negative; 21.1 x 15.8 cm (8 5/16 x 6 1/4 in.)The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Robert O. Dougan Collection, Gift of Warner Communications Inc., 1978 (1978.649.7)The mid-level view: What does this have to do with blogs?  In the physical world, the natural and man-made facilities provide our schema - I know where and how and when I will drive to get to work in the morning.  These physical things are reliable and predictable for me.  The world will be there, most likely, tomorrow. These physical things affect me; they can inspire me and/or they can move me to tears.  In the virtual world where minds meet, without having to worry about where I am or what I look like at the moment, I also appreciate having a schema - or more than one - to provide me with the mechanisms ("There's an App for that!") by which I can establish my presence in that world.  Over the years, I've been exposed to several such schemas, and, as the web has evolved from the "read" web to the "read-write" web, I, too, have moved from a person making html websites to someone who dips in and out of various web tools as the need for any particular tool seems to arise.  These tools provide  my online schema, and, as in the physical world, I like their reliability and predictability, and am influenced by them on an affective level.  What's different in the online world, is the tools are so much more nothing but channels through which ideas spread.  As I stand before a mountain with my camera, that mountain may move me; through online tools, I may move mountains.The ground-level view:Take blogging, for instance.  Why do I go through phases of my journey when I blog, and yet other times, when I delete everything and leave it alone for ages?  Why, for this coursework blog, have I chosen this blogging platform and not Wordpress or other?  Am I influenced by previous blogging experiences (well, yes, I do expect so, to a point), as I have been off and on Blogger for several years already, and my Wordpress explorations never really jelled for me, despite the professional "look" of a Wordpress blog? Is it because I use Google Apps daily, so Blogger seems a natural extension to that (as it belongs to Google now)?  Is it just the easy road to take?  Or is there more to this story?Well, anyone who knows me knows that, if anything, I am always up for taking "the road not taken" - life seems too short to experience the tour-bus approach to living.  So here is my rationale for choosing Blogger as my platform-of-choice-today:1. Really, unless I feel strongly about purchasing a domain name to link to my blog, and being sure that that domain name persists once one is on that blog, then that advantage of Wordpress is neither here nor there to me.  This is because the function of any blog I have maintained in the past, and even now, is quite specific.  At this point in time, I have ethical concerns about how blithely, how innocently people still read on the web, and I expect that if I were to use a blog platform to market myself, I could cultivate a personae that may not be entirely accurate, as it would be biased toward self-promotion.  If I were to want to market myself through my blog, I expect I would move to Wordpress, and save my blog on janetbell.ca, so that I could integrate it with other materials under my name brand.   This kind of marketing seems not very Canadian to me, although increasing numbers of Canadians are moving into this space.  This is not to say that I am against marketing entities through blogs -- I have just this past week purchased the lillianosborne.com domain to point to our school's landing page of student resources; it is only that my own blogs have usually been more private kinds of spaces whereupon, like my kitchen counter, I scatter various photos, reminders, memories, ah-ha moments, etc., with the understanding that others might run across them.  For me, blogging has not been a cohesive endeavor, probably because although I am reflective (to the point of scaring away family members), I have never been a sustained journaler--more of a journaller recording the highs and lows and must-remember times.2. Interestingly enough, I am also using the Blogger platform for our new school library blog--there, partly because of convenience (accessible through the same Dashboard), and partly because of the Google link, as it will be absorbed with our other two websites as our three online presences converge over the next few months.3.  Back to this blog. I sent a tweet out re: blogging platforms about a week ago, and the response I received was something to the effect of "Blogger or Wordpress? Ford or Chevy?" or something to that effect; really, for purposes of keeping an online web log, without need for much customization, either platform is fine. 4. I've played a little in Wordpress before (see shell at http://janetbell.wordpress.com/ , when considering creating a blog ironically about Web 2.0 tools after a presentation I'd given a couple of years ago, and, to be honest, as slick as the templates are, I find I gravitate to the plainer ones.  That said, Blogger, once you explore the options under Settings, also has a good variety of templates -- I have kept to a plainer one here, but really like the concept of the books without titles or labels (like unwritten novels) that grace one of the Blogger templates (used on our library blog). I think I lean this way as a result of my background in English Language Arts -- why would I choose a beautiful beach scene as the virtual landscape for my reflections on pedagogy and technology? Surely that would better fit a travel diary... and, even then, one of my own photos would make more sense than a stock picture.5. I have just heard that the long awaited news of "when will Blogger be integrated within Google Apps' educational licenses?" is going to be happening any day now -- I am delighted to be able to integrate Blogger within our school Portal site, enabling us to shift privacy settings as best fits our educational situations re: privacy of our postings, and FOIPP issues re: posting student photos, etc. I have been disappointed with the rigidity of Google Sites' Announcement page template, the closest thing there to a blog, so am all the more pleased about the integration of Blogger more tightly within the Google suite of tools.6. Last but not least, it is fair enough to share that the Blogger platform to me seems very intuitive. I love how easily videos, photos, and other web 2.0 gadgets -- animotos, YouTube videos, image and word clouds, audio files, screencasts, etc. --can be  integrated into it. So much more than an online journal, a blog can provide a framework for a multimedia exploration on any particular topic by one person or by a small group of people.I expect as this course evolves my sense of any particular nuances or frustrations associated with this platform will emerge.  For now, though, I am quite content using Blogger.
  http://learnallways.blogspot.com/2010/09/blogger-or-not-blogger-that-is-question.html

• The Lillian Osborne Library
  Sep 21, 2010 7:19 AM

  This is the video introducing our library to students at our opening year assembly -- phase one of orientation: awareness. The soundtrack is from Ocoee Middle School's video, "Gotta Keep Reading" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6D9jiEYxzs . The presentation was created in Keynote, exported as a Quicktime file. The video demonstrates our students practising ISTE's 21st-century literacies, to inspire them for our next phase with a doubled school population!  Next stage of orientation? Investment in the plan - more on that later!
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/suO2FRptUSk/lillian-osborne-library.html

• Our Team!
  Sep 20, 2010 8:53 PM

  The most glorious thing about working in the library is my interactions with students one-on-one. Truly partners in learning, we all help each other out, whether finding materials, figuring out how to change languages in Word, troubleshooting a computer, arranging the furniture (our environment is quite fluid), or processing the stream of books continuing to arrive each day.  I have such respect for them, and honestly don't know how things could possibly get done without their help.  In particular, thanks to Haley, Brianna, Joanna, Athena, Amir, Scott, Alejandra, Jessica...
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/kY9udnS2gQM/our-team.html

• A long and winding road...biography of a computer user
  Sep 16, 2010 3:19 PM

  I have worked with computers in various ways for a long time, and from day one have marveled when I see a new tool, while simultaneously feeling my mind race ahead with potential uses for that tool. I think that is what differentiates me from the “boys with the toys” mentality (apart from the fact I am not a boy); when others show off their tech gadgets with no real purpose in mind, I tend to make nice comments, because I like it that they show me, but think, “So what?” e.g. “Nice iPad, ______; what do you do with it?”This story begins when I took my first computing course in 1979. Computing Science 261 with Dr. Wayne Davis. We were told that one day there would be such things as microcomputers, which some people might even have in their homes, to control their lights and things, like in science fiction. My favorite part of the course was hanging out late at night in the General Services Building, printing off Spirograph-looking images on the plotter and ASCII art on big pieces of paper from some giant dot-matrix printer. These then graced my apartment walls next to tacked-up prints of Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Millais’ The Gleaners. Fast-forward to 1983. I’d just graduated with an honors English degree and had a summer job working for the Faculty of Library Science, writing a manual. On my suggestion, they let me type it up using FMT processing on our MTS network, and I got the job done in less than half the allotted time. I am sure now that the reason I later took so quickly to writing HTML is because of my experience with FMT, a very similar language.One year later, in 1984, I received my teaching certificate. I loved the whole subject of computers in education, and was disappointed there was not yet a minor available in it, and had a tough time deciding at that point whether I should continue at university and pursue a Master’s in this area (through Industrial Education, actually), or apply to the EPSB sub list and teach. With $12,000 of student loans to pay off, the choice was a non-choice, so off I went to be a secondary English substitute teacher. One of my first jobs, a three-week stint, was teaching Logo to grades 2-6 students at Patricia Heights Elementary. What fun! I also taught BASIC to high school students, and lots and lots of English language arts to students of all ages. Once I had my own classroom, I was quick to print off long banners of quotations, such as, “To Thine Own Self Be True” from my own dot-matix printer connected to my Commodore 64. As MTV had just launched at the time, I’d assign students projects, such as “If YOU could make a video of one of these poems, what would it look like?” Of course, today, they not only go ahead and make the video but also publish and share it on YouTube.Once I received my continuous contract, I settled into life as an English teacher, but always simmering on the backburner was my intrigue with effective use of technology in education. And then, in 1995, or maybe 1996, out of nowhere, a transformative event: my dad got on the Internet! Feeling a little “creeped” that such a noble Englishman would spend time in this place of evil inclination, I had him show me everything he liked about it, which came down to the statement: “I can read tomorrow’s Telegraph today.” What a thrill! The Internet literally as well as figuratively had made him ahead of his time by fast-forwarding his life to life at home in England, where he could read the morning newspaper in the English morning before going to bed the night before, here. I immediately set up my own Internet account; splurging to access an actual graphical interface rather than signing up with Freenet, I downloaded Mosaic and Netscape 1.0 and have never looked back.In these same years, I also became a mom, using computers for/with her children. Even with my daughter, computers were always at hand. We had bought our first Mac when she was born in 1988, so I spent much time reading the ClarisWorks manual while snuggling with her in the middle of the night in a kitchen chair in front of the screen on a rickety desk. She shone on Playroom, Millie’s Math House, (and what was the reading one called?), Rodney’s Fun Screen, Oregon Trail, etc. My two favorite memories, though, have to do with her younger brother. Dealing with PDD, he potty-trained late. Solution? One day, after making a stack of an iron-on Thomas-Annie-Clarabel T-shirts as birthday party “treats” for our guests, by reversing the images downloaded from the Thomas the Tank Engine site (1996), it dawned on me that having the engine James (No. 5?) ironed onto his potty-training pants might (and did) finally secure them as an item of interest. David also had a severe language delay. One summer week in 1998, he and I cuddled up to create an Angelfire site on Thomas the Tank Engine, whereon we posted photos of Thomas trains in various poses that we set up together (no digital camera yet!) to illustrate his semi-coherent stories and jokes about them, scribed word for word. A year later, I had my own website, “The Bell’s site of family and education links”, and a year after that I was hired to the 2Learn.ca provincial team. My original website, years later, was trashed by a malicious virus, but some remnants of it can be seen on the Wayback Machine. 1996 was a huge year in terms of my growth as a computer user, because I mined the ‘Net for resources for topics within English and special needs education. I also was a strong participant in the NCTE-talk listserv and participated in professional projects though there (e.g. Hypertext Haiku), and created curriuclar projects for my own students, which were posted and/or facilitated through my own website (e.g. Romanticism project, Romeo and Juliet project). I also started wanting to create websites for others, so built one for our daycare. So excited about it all, I also joined an ENG forum on SchoolNet, much to the other users’ chagrin, as they were engineers.After I joined the TELUS Learning Connection provincial team in 1997, most of my own pursuits stopped completely until I started picking things up in my last couple of years there. Much of my energy went into building sections of the 2Learn.ca website—sections about research, plagiarism, building telecollaborative projects, constructing knowledge, and little webtools, all of which were simply forms that reformatted inputs in different ways—e.g. a n online rubric maker, a ‘NetCheck sheet, that helps students evaluate resources, a little self-test on how collaborative your classroom is, etc. Most of the materials I created are no longer online, to my knowledge, although some are still there (e.g. ‘Net Know-How and some of the Gateways 2Learning projects). From the computer user perspective, I had great opportunity to play working in HTML, javascripting, ASP, CorelPaint, web development programs, and Painter to create educational resources from webpages to downloadable printable greeting cards for students, PDFs for teachers, etc. Also, of course, for presentations, I’ve created lots of PowerPoints and Word documents—even worth mentioning? To sum up, how lucky was I to be able to play around in such a way and actually have that as my job?A couple of years before leaving 2Learn, I bought myself a high-end Mac (there had been another Mac and another PC somewhere in here after the Commodore 64 and first Mac), and entered the next phase of my computer-life. I entered a video frenzy, as did my daughter. DVDs became our trademark. DVDs for birthdays and Christmas and baptisms, you name it—every event a DVD opportunity. In fact, I became so enthralled I started creating DVDs for complete strangers and considered starting an actual business (but didn’t, as I have no substantial business background and as a single parent, the risk of compromising income is one I must not take). I bought a second VCR and hooked it up to my computer alongside an audio cassette-player so that I could work with analog (converting and integrating it) as well as digital material. I learned how to use Final Cut to color-correct 8mm movie film that I transferred to videotape by projecting on a wall and filming it – way cheaper than paying for a transfer and every bit as good, in my view. I added sound effects to audio and video, and created soundtrack mash-ups for different video chapters.  Still gripped by the slideshow bug, I eventually took a Flash course over Spring Break. By then, I even uploaded a few of my own videos to the ‘Net, mostly within a private site. My first YouTube video was of a quiet pond in the rain. After I left 2Learn to work for the Alberta Regional PD Consortia, my computer use expanded again—helping colleagues with Elluminate E-live and SMART Boards, in particular, even sometimes concurrently. I also did lots of work with video conferencing, and was fortunate to be able to VC through H.323 VC from home; as well, I worked with wikis, Google Calendar and a Plone all in that one short year; my most significant achievement was setting up the technology side of a massive across-the-province video conference inservice supported before and during through a social networking site and online polls to generate significant input. Fun fun fun. While all of this was going on, my parents celebrated their 50th anniversary, so I collaborated with them in creating a really super Keynote slideshow celebrating their lives together, and then surprised them by Skyping in my very sleepy uncle and aunt from England just in time for supper at the anniversary party! Twenty-four hours later, I’d already driven to Peace River and given a SMART Board session. Things don’t ever stop. By the end of that year (almost done!), my slideshow bug still bubbling away on the backburner, I had also played around in Animoto, exporting a SMART Notebook file into Animoto to showcase at Lillian Osborne’s first Open House—an open house for a not-yet-built and not-yet-staffed school. Last year, I returned to the classroom, teaching English full-time at Lillian Osborne after such a long time away from it. Of course, throughout the year, my students were immersed in activities that integrated many of the processes I’ve mentioned in this document. Using SmartBoards every day is only the start of it. We are part of Edmonton Public’s Portal project, so our Tech Team (myself and five other teachers) have been busy building curricular-focused sites that have been assimilated under our Lillian Osborne Landing page (created in Google Sites) and we have been busy attempting to implement and support appropriate student laptop use.Today, I love my already-outdated iPhone, my Christmas present to myself last year, and am fascinated with exploring its potential in the classroom through another Edmonton Public project on Student–Owned Devices. I’ve just started our library blog, which will grow with me on a daily basis. I am a strong believer in “walking the talk” and do not want to be someone who knows things but can’t do them, so am up to jump in with whatever challenges emerge in this course (e.g. ramping up my rather quiet Twitter account the other day)! If you check our library blog, you’ll see some my slideshows as they begin to be posted—the first one I’ve posted is built in Keynote, exported to Google Video. As I write this document now, a slideshow of Lillian Osborne’s Speak Out! Conference the other day is rendering in the background, to be played throughout the day tomorrow in the library on our big screens (not online, as it is too long). I’ve also been creating Camtasia how-tos for teachers, posting them in the private area of our Lillian Osborne Landing site (how to schedule book sign-out, how to do an erase-and-reveal in Notebook software, for starters).I expect I’ve missed lots—this is a challenging assignment for me, because judicious educational use of technology is what makes me breathe, and has been that way for me pretty much since 1979 when I discovered FMT formatting and ASCII art (neither of which move me now!). That said, I did find a little web 2.0 tool that can take any photo and create ASCII art from it at http://www.glassgiant.com/ Next chapter….I think that one is going to unfold right here over the next few weeks, so I guess we’ll just have to live it to learn it. Looking forward to those next steps!Janet
  http://learnallways.blogspot.com/2010/09/long-and-winding-roadbiography-of.html

• If walls had ears...
  Sep 15, 2010 9:29 PM

  A week into life in the library, it strikes me that although we are so fortunate to be surrounded by huge projection screens, how interesting it must be to be a fly on the wall witnessing all that occurs in that room.  Here is a typical day, now that textbooks are pretty much distributed.  I deal with emergent issues from students, staff and administration.  Within moments that seem to flow in a continual present, I need to...fix a Smart Board (well, 2 this morning), redo a slideshow where I've accidentally overwritten the main section with a shorter file, fine-tune a World Literature course outline, find a missing 50-ft VGA cable, set up 2 projectors to display on big screens, sign out books to students before their silent reading time in class, touch bases with our principal about some emails, troubleshoot at least three people's wireless connections (different solutions), find books about various topics, confirm computer cart reservations on our Google calendars, look into why a plugin is missing (oops, I had it connected to my own machine), run out to my car to retrieve my mac battery pack...in the rain...um...send out emails to teachers and announcements to students about joining the Citadel club, help several students who can't get logins to work, or who have forgotten their passwords, troubleshoot Google calendar and Google group sharing issues (still working on those two!), submit Questia account information to Questia, find 3 classes-worth of missing novels that we definitely do have...somewhere (found them!), connect with the U of A re: IB library orientation processes...the list just goes on and on.  After after-school and evening World Literature introductory sessions, where I've introduced students to a blended learning-structured course, I am finally back at home and ready to work on my course.  A productive day!  Today's high point was presenting the slideshow of photos from last Wednesday's Speak Out! session, photos taken primarily by a parent volunteer telling the story of that morning's process.  Approximately 100 slides dropped into a Smart Build in Keynote and set to K'naan's "Wavin' Flag" (Coca-Cola version) kept students transfixed, leading into the CTV news story and then the presentation of results from the Alberta Education team.  After the session, back in class, students reflected more on the results, to provide additional input to the school's directions in light of the views of the whole group.  Lots of fun.
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/ewILdJZC6n4/if-walls-had-ears.html

• Find us on Twitter!
  Sep 11, 2010 8:53 AM

  Our library is launching on Twitter - and inviting all students, parents, community members and others to get involved in building our online space! #lillianosborne
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/-fAK-rRBRkA/find-us-on-twitter.html

• Speak Out at Lillian Osborne
  Sep 9, 2010 8:22 PM

  A grand day, to be sure. See coverage on CTV News here! We filled up both gym and library -- and teachers completed the same input process in an adjoining classroom. More photos tomorrow -- after we prepare a slideshow of the event to project and loop on the library wall, as you can now envision, after seeing how the facilitators projected their DVD, in the photo below.  Yes! This is our library, transformed into a classroom for about 250 of our students just for this morning!
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/3j8BnlRZ6dU/speak-out-at-lillian-osborne.html

• Getting set for Speak Out!
  Sep 8, 2010 8:52 PM

  After lots more signing out of textbooks, and some trouble-shooting of Google Calendar issues, I helped a group of incredible students set up enough tables and chairs in the library and gym to accommodate all 650+ of us for the Speak Out! conference tomorrow morning. Students will go through an externally facilitated process to provide substantial input to the future directions of our school. We are looking forward to an exciting morning! My highpoints today...my techie highpoint was mastering the "correct keystoning" feature on our high lumen projector, which is projecting on a screen a full storey above the projector itself, and my intellectual highpoint was chatting with two architects who were interested in how the physical features of the library will assist in providing the means through which we can actualize the vision of what that room can be. One of my favorite topics. :) Any disappointments today? Not being able to spend time with one of our special needs students, who had stopped by to visit at a time I was focused on attempting to address an emergent technical issue in a separate classroom; another time will arise, but it would have been nice to have connected today. Tomorrow I'll post some pics of the library in action at Speak Out!
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/Xcb7vlyW4VU/getting-set-for-speak-out.html

• Textbooks, Laptops and the Speak Out conference!
  Sep 8, 2010 6:30 AM

  What a busy day yesterday - a nice way to meet every student in the school, scanning ID card, then book, over and over...2 times over 600 students for at least 3 texts apiece is over 4000 scans. Students are participating in an exciting Speak Out conference tomorrow - more on that later today! Table leaders trained at lunchtime. I learned to quickly set up the space to accommodate 80 table leaders at 10 students per table. Love those tables and chairs on wheels! Left to learn? I was challenged by the keystone feature on the high-lumen projector, projecting on our fab high large screen gracing the perimeter of the room...oh dear, so will figure that out today. Other tasks today? After school, laptop carts were equipped with signout sheets. One fave point of the day -- helping new students log in to SchoolZone for the first time -- talk about "just in time" learning as they learn to access their homework online just in time for the first evening of homework. Nice.
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/pnj3qqWI2jA/textbooks-laptops-and-speak-out.html

• (Untitled)
  Sep 6, 2010 12:52 PM

  From: janetebell Views: 11 0 ratings Time: 01:32 More in Howto & Style
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOodDqENpSU&feature=youtube_gdata

• Help Us Build Our Fiction Collection
  Sep 6, 2010 12:37 PM

  All are welcome to add good book suggestions to our growing list of books here. You can get to this page through the Lillian Osborne Landing library page, here.
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/Y19gpy9hJqc/help-us-build-our-fiction-collection.html

• Amazing Volunteers!
  Sep 6, 2010 11:54 AM

  There is absolutely no way we'd be ready to start the year promptly without the help of parents and students who have so generously given of their time to help process thousands of textbooks, set up laptop carts, shelve books, and even design and set up the furniture in the library itself. Wow! This school is so much more than the sum of its parts. Thank you so much for all of your help!
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/FBt_tRbIZLs/amazing-volunteers.html

• Getting ramped up for Year Two of our school!
  Sep 6, 2010 11:51 AM

  BTY - this is already officially week two, although a fabulous group of volunteers helped me get all the textbooks for our influx of over 300 more students ready for signout (taking place this week) two weeks ago.  Last week, we registered students -- my jobs included a day of fee collection, organizing of laptop carts (reconfiguring plugins to circumvent power issues, and formalizing a signout process by putting envelopes to house student ID cards on each shelf of each laptop cart), finishing up the textbook signout calendar (in Google Calendar) and distributing it with a support handout and video to staff via our Lillian Osborne Landing website (also under construction for official launch right away), and a quickie presentation about our library to students at our exciting opening assembly.  Here is that presentation, minus the New Spice | Study Like a Scholar, Scholar video section:
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/vkTjMQtt4to/getting-ramped-up-for-year-two-of-our.html

• Welcome to the Lillian Osborne Library Blog
  Sep 6, 2010 11:42 AM

  This page provides a candid day-to-day detailing of life @ the Lillian Osborne library.  If you have ever wondered what exactly I do, this could be a place to go to find out!  Anyone is welcome to help me figure this out myself.  The larger purpose of this blog is to provide a quick way for me to track the journey of someone new to the job, in a school that has an almost-brand-new (one-year-old) library, from day one onwards.  I hope it will help me inform my own practise.  I expect it will end up being more of a glorified to-do list and list of links that I like, than a reflective composition, however -- I suppose that whether it becomes the former or the latter also has to do with how much time I am able to devote to this, as opposed to that. I feel honored to have been selected to assist in moving our school forward as a high school for the twenty-first century.  That's why I'm doing this -- how fortunate am I?
  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/LillianOsborneLibrary/~3/W1VJTs6rmA8/welcome-to-lillian-osborne-library-blog.html

• Learn All Ways
  Sep 6, 2010 2:58 AM

  This blog is looking at web 2.0 tools for a course, but really, it is bigger than that, as what it is really about is an inquiry into that lovely middle section of the TPACK venn construct -- where technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge come together to synergistically ignite learning.http://www.tpck.org/
  http://learnallways.blogspot.com/2010/09/learn-all-ways.html

• From SchoolZone to Google Groups
  Sep 5, 2010 10:13 PM

  From SchoolZone to Google Groups From SchoolZone to Google Groups From: janetebell Views: 14 0 ratings Time: 00:43 More in Howto & Style
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p71rXkrzUzw&feature=youtube_gdata

• The Lillian Osborne Library
  Sep 4, 2010 11:46 PM

  The Lillian Osborne Library Launching a 21st-century library at Lillian Osborne School in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada From: janetebell Views: 77 0 ratings Time: 02:20 More in Education
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6HHyna7Ne4&feature=youtube_gdata