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.