Just discovered docstoc.com, a repositry of professional documents in a social networking environment. There’s a category of “educational” for documents that may prove useful. Here’s an interesting find, a 228 page document (book) 55 ways to have fun with google:
55 Ways to Have Fun with Google - Get more documents
I enjoy reading a blog entitled The Book Design Review. In this post, Graphic Design: The New Basics there’s two images of alphabets (below). I like the idea of a student project where you take a theme or a subject and create an alphabet. You could use the idea of having each letter begin a word about the subject, or take items/concepts related to the subject and make the letters out of that. These two examples aren’t exactly demonstrative of this idea; however, the toy soldiers are burned and warped, a good symbology of war.
Another NPR article; this one about writers turning to comics:
My favorite mash-up: technology and books
Article from NPR: Web Sites Let Bibliophiles Share Books Virtually
Mighty Quiz is an online quiz with user-generated questions. Sign up is free and the site utilizes several of the web 2.0 conventions we’ve come to know and love. Earn points for creating questions as well as your score from answering others’ questions.
I can see here a neat little alternative student assesment tool where you have them all create questions from your topic of study (they could print the screen before submitting the question) and then answer each others’ questions (although I’m not certain how well that can actually be done; isolating those questions, that is) . I don’t see how you might consolidate certain questions into one quiz. It appears the questions are all lumped together. You can search for certain tags and it then seems to give you questions based on that tag. What you might do is have students add a specific tag to their question.
I also discovered playing is quickly addictive.
I’m informed via American Libraries Direct that, Simply Audiobooks has a handful of free, now public domain, audiobook downloads. This is the link from the AL Direct: http://www.simplyaudiobooks.com/Free_Audiobooks/dp/202/
I downloaded Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka. It’s in wma format, so I’m trying to figure out how to convert it to pull it into iTunes, which doesn’t appear to support that file type.
Well, a moment on the Internet and I have the solution. Switch file conversion software. A free version is available. I downloaded, installed and converted the wma to mp3. I then added to my iTunes Library.
There’s a new magazine for the blogger and podcaster (thus the name). The digital version is free and it’s “magazine-esque” viewer is pretty cool. It’s like the Zinio reader, if you’re familiar with that.
School Library Journal has a series of podcasts right now for National Poetry Month. There’s a 2 part podcast that has Walter Dean Myers reading from his book of poetry, Jazz. You can subscribe to their podcasts or listen to them on their website.
Came across this in a post at the Information Literacies Blog, http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/2007/02/new-literacies-sampler.htmlYou can download the book in pdf format. Here’s the link to the Table of Contents, available as a separate one page download. The book text is 263 pages. The cover and links are here-
http://www.soe.jcu.edu.au/sampler/From chapter 1:
“This book “samples” work in the broad area of new literacies research on two levels. First, it samples some typical examples of new literacies. These are video gaming, fan fiction writing, weblogging, using websites to participate in affinity practices, and social practices involving mobile computing. The question of what it is about these practices that makes us think of them as “new” and as “literacies” will occupy much of this introductory chapter.
Second, it samples from among the wide range of approaches potentially available for researching and studying new literacies. The studies assembled in this collection are all examples of what is referred to as research undertaken from a sociocultural perspective on literacy. New literacies can be studied from a range of research and theoretical orientations (cf. Leu et al. forthcoming). For reasons that will become apparent from our account of “new literacies,” however, a sociocultural perspective is especially appropriate and valuable for researching new literacies.”
technorati tags:new_literacies_sampler
I’m in week 3 of this fabulous online course, Five Weeks to a Social Library, where we are learning to use/integrate/leverage many social software tools such as blogging, social bookmarking and rss feeds, wikis, Flickr, etc. I’m learning a lot and developing a better understanding of how these tools work. Best of all, I’m learning and conversing with other librarians while doing it! At some point you’ll want to check it out as there are some wonderful resources to learn from. There’s a Social Library Lurkers wiki for those following along, if you’d like to lurk yourself.
In the sidebar you’ll notice a Grazr widget, where I have put feeds from some of the blogs of the course organizers. Something new I learned how to do in the course and successfully implemented today!
