Techno Librarian

I’m a pretty avid user of delicious and looking for ways to use the service beyond just storing my bookmarks.  Just the other day as I finally returned to thinking about this blog, I made the mental connection between the sites that I bookmark and the purpose of this blog.  That is, many, or most of the sites I bookmark are teaching-related.  As i looked into it, what I found was the ability to post my delicious links to this blog as a post, which you should be seeing around this post.  I found the instructions by searching the edublogs forum (thank you to the questioner and answerer that provided this info!).  Basically it involves using the experimental features in delicious by going to Settings- Blogging-Blog Posting (as pic’d below)

You then have to enter all your settings, which takes a little know-how, which takes some digging and patience.  Hopefully, this will fill in the gaps between my quite infrequent postings.  An unfortunate side to this (and perhaps someone knows a work-around) is that sites I mark for personal use will also be listed.  There won’t be anything that off-key, though.

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.

Came across this in a post at the Information Literacies Blog, http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/2007/02/new-literacies-sampler.html

You 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.”

index

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!

Just discovered, by way of Lifehacker, that Wikipedia has a page of resources for public domain images.  Good to have these resources for student projects, as they sometimes tend to pull images from whatever website they find.  As part of our duty to instruct students in evaluating and utilizing appropriate resources, here’s a good example we can use to instruct students in understanding copyright.  Even within the websites provided on the page, copyrighted images may stil be contained.

Find some images for the research students are doing, both public domain and copyrighted, and use it to instruct students on how to see the difference, where to look to find out, etc.

Wikipedia:Public domain image resources – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

technorati tags:wikipedia, public domain, images, lifehacker

Not “Can I?”, but “I Can!”

Google Maps Mania: 50 Things to do with Google Maps Mashups

If you like to play with Google Maps, here’s 50 things you can do!

Here’s an idea:

For social studies research, have students do a mashup of event or people locations.  For example, if they’re researching biographies for Black History month, create a mashup to show locations of: where inventions were created, famous African-Americans were born, events in Black history took place, etc..

Use the maps to find distance between events in history.

If you’ve seen somethign like this already done, please let me know.  If I find an easy explanation of creating a mashup, I’l let you know.

technorati tags:google_maps

I just began adding items to my Amazon Wish List, which for me is my To-Read list.

Create a list for your library. Then here’s some ideas:

• Have students add books they’ve read after writing a review for it there on Amazon. Collaborate with your L.A./ Reading teacher.
• Have students add books they would like to see in the library, then you’ll have a list for your annual book order.
• Add items you would like to have bought for the library and put the link in the school newsletter and you library website. (There’s code to embed a small window showing your recent additions). These could be books parents could purchase for birthday books, memorial books, books in honor of, etc. You can add that designation in the comment box.

Have an idea? Share it!

technorati tags:amazon.com, library

Here’s an idea for the science class that’s studying sea life.  (But before you get too many ideas going, check to see if Flickr is blocked at school) 

What if you have students view these amazing underwater photos at the This Is Why We Dive Flickr group, and as an assignment have students identify a creature? where it’s from or can be found?  or some other aspect of sea life you’re studying.  Combine the images in Flickr with your subscription databases so that students can verify their information.

I see that some photos are tagged for their location and a satellite map comes up pointing to the location.  Get with your social studies teacher to collaborate on this, having students search for sea life in a particular region, using tags.  Use the tags to search for images taken in a particular city/state/country.  I think it’s an exciting way to approach research on this topic.

Play around with Flickr and see what you can come up with.  Post a comment if you get an idea.

Next up is to figure out a way to access these images when the Flickr site is blocked.  On my google homepage, the Flickr widget worked (showing most recent posts), although Flickr itself is blocked, so maybe there’s something.  Any ideas, let me know!

technorati tags:flickr, science, social_studies

Check out the blog post dated Friday, October 27, 2006, at The Amplified Library

Links to an Interesting video of a teen panel with Guy Kawasaki and asks questions about technology use. Says there’s a What Teens Want conference(?) for marketers.

technorati tags:teens, what_teens_want, technology