November 2007 Media Center News

Happy November! New GR additions We have received our recent order of books for Guided Reading. These are books that you recommended. They are processed and ready to check out. I have linked the titles to their records in Titlepeek, a cool feature of our new online catalog. You can read a synopsis, reviews, and an excerpt of the book. This feature is available for our entire collection, not just new additions. Check them out! Wolf Brother Michelle Paver This series (Wolf Brother, Spirit Walker, and Soul Eater) is very popular among students. Spirit Walker Michelle Paver Soul Eater Michelle Paver Dark Water Rising Marian Hale Barcode Tattoo Suzanne Weyn Time for Andrew Mary Downing Hahn (no entry in TitlePeek) Milkweed: A Novel Jerry Spinelli Revenge of the Witch Joseph Delaney Ender's Game Orson Scott Card This Side of Paradise Steven L. Layne A Swiftly Tilting Planet Madeleine L'Engle Personal Reading Here are some books that I have been reading or re-reading. What are you reading? A Whole New Mind Daniel Pink Wikinomics Dan Tapscott The world is flat : a brief history of the twenty-first century Thomas Friedman Redefining literacy for the 21st century David Warlick Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms Will Richardson Teaching with Digital Images: Acquire, Analyze, Create, Communicate International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) Web 2.0: New Tools, New Schools International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) National Educational Technology Standards for Students International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) All are available in the Media Center. If you would like me to order a professional resource, please contact me. I am here to help you! United Streaming Videos The school district still has a subscription to United Streaming. This is a great resource. Not only does it have videos that can be downloaded and screened (or streamed as you display), but there are worksheets, quizzes and other resources available. Check out the nice overview that Chris B. has posted on VINCent. I am willing to locate and preview videos for you. many, but not all, videos are captioned, so I am willing and able to help. Let me know how I can help you . Check out TeacherTube . It is just like YouTube only for educational videos. Teachers all around the world are sharing instructional videos that they have created. They can easily be embedded in your wiki for student viewing. Let me know if I can help. From TeacherTube: "TeacherTube officially launched on March 6, 2007. Our goal is to provide an online community for sharing instructional videos. We seek to fill a need for a more educationally focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners. It is a site to provide anytime, anywhere professional development with teachers teaching teachers. As well, it is a site where teachers can post videos designed for students to view in order to learn a concept or skill." The K12 Online Conference occurred Oct. 15-19 and Oct. 22-26, but you can still access all of the materials and presentations. Click on the image above to go to the home page.

October 2007 Media Center News

October 2007 September was a great month! Thank you for your warm words and your "welcome back"s to me. I am very thankful to work with you at DMS and indeed to be alive! I started to write this newsletter in MS Word, and thought "no, I need to use tools that are available that do a better job,"thus this blog was created Please feel free to make comments by clicking on the appropriate link below. I have subscribed to your class wikis and it is exciting to see you use them. Let me know if I can help you in any way. I can hop on and add resource pages for research should you need them. Student accounts have been created using student ID numbers and their PowerSchool passwords. As soon as they have these passwords, which will be distributed by the district office, students can access their accounts. To have them contribute to your wiki, they must first log in and request to join your space. Once you have granted this request, students become members of your space. They can then add and edit. Remember that the History feature time stamps each edit and identifies the editor. Also, you can revert to previous versions of a page if there is a problem. The collaborative possibilities are endless with this tool. Teachers are using wikis to have their students collaborate with students around the world. I look forward to seeing how you will use this resource. Resources The phenomenal trumpet player, Wynton Marsalis, in a radio interview, once said that we can learn something from everyone - or something to that effect. With that statement in mind, I want to share some resources with you. I have learned a lot from the people that I work with and many others. What you do with these resources is strictly your choice.....Please don't be afraid to tell me what you think. I have found that an aggregator is quite helpful. What does it do for me? It gathers into one place the new blog entries of those writers whose blogs I have chosen to subscribe. This gives me a "front page" that I can scan and see who has written something new. Then, if I am interested, I can click on that blog listing and read the new entry. I rarely go to the blogs to read them. I just use Bloglines! This tool allows me to read the entries of those whom I consider to have something to offer. You can add as many feeds (links to blogs) as you like. I use bloglines, but you may find that you want to use another tool. There are many available for use. Let me know if you are interested and would like help setting up an aggregator. Flickr is a neat photo sharing tool. You can set up an account, upload photos, and share them with anyone. I like that you can choose whether to share photos or not. I have used this to share photos with family on the west coast. I know that some of you use digital images in your classes. This may be a storage solution that you want to explore. There is even a Yahoo widget that will play a slideshow of your photos in a window on your desktop. This is a cool way to check out conferences that you are unable to attend. Hitchhikr allows attendees to post their blog entries about the conference they are attending. So, you can follow what is happening at a conference even though you are not there! I am currently checking out the Scottish learning Festival and the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai, China. It's neat to see what others are doing/learning. If you are now using Firefox, you may want to explore the many add-ons that are available. I am experimenting with a research organizer called Zotero and another add-on called Snap Shots. Snap Shots brings up a box that gives you a preview of a web page when you place your mouse over a link. This is potential time saver. I added code to this blog and our DMS Media Center pages that will make this happen automatically. Check it out here and let me know what you think. ? Wondering how I got all of the little snapshots of the various logos that I included? I used a free program called Screenhunter by Wisdomsoft. It's a handy little program that lets you grab an image of anything on your screen saves it to your desktop. You can then use the image however you wish. You may want to use this to prepare your lessons.

September 2007 Media Center News

W

elcome back! I hope that you had an enjoyable summer. I am looking forward to working with you this year. I have some new ideas and things I would like to try. Stop by and let me know what’s new.

Collaboration

Please consider allowing me to assist you in assignments and projects. (research skills, locating web resources, technology lessons, etc.). I would love to plan and deliver a lesson or unit with you. . I will visit with each team this Fall to discuss this with you. Let me know how I can help.

New Materials

Doreen and I are continuing the long process of updating our collection. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for additions to the collection which will help support our reading goals or your specific curriculum. I will continue to notify you when new materials arrive.

New Technology

Many of you have gotten projectors mounted in your room.Let me Know if I can assist you in using them.

Guided Reading

As we begin another year with Guided Reading, I would like to remind you that because Doreen and I have GR groups, we will be unable to check out books to you during GR class time. Please plan ahead.

Media Center Goals

• Continue to develop and update our collection of Materials

• Promote reading through various avenues

We have a new Online Catalog! Destiny is available online at http://mediacenters.ccsd1.k12.wy.us/

This program has some neat capabilities and resources including WebPath Express. WebPath Express is a tool that

· allows simplified searching of thousands of educator-reviewed web sites.

· Aligns web sites to curriculum with content differentiated by grade level.

· Promotes student achievement by guiding students to relevant resources.

· Gives students the confidence to conduct self-directed research and

· complete assignments in a safe environment,24/7.(from the brochure)

We can create bibliographies and book lists for you. Stop by and talk to us about this. Two years ago we created a list of novels that were suited to the 6^th grade “Culture” reading assignment. We would be happy to help you too!

NetTrekker is a new resource available through WedGate this year. This is a neat search engine that you will want to have your students use. They must create an account before they can use it.

Online Databases

· We have a number of excellent resources available online. The school district has again subscribed to United Streaming Video, a very useful source for videos.

· DMS has a subscription to CultureGrams^tm. You can read the description here: http://online.culturegrams.com/ This is an excellent resource for Social Studies teachers.

· The Wyoming State Library has subscribed to numerous databases that are available to Wyoming citizens: http://www.gowyld.net/dbases/