First Week of Classes at SSIS Library

Today marks the first day of scheduled classes at SSIS. Students checked out books last week. Of course, the two series flying off the shelves the quickest were Harry Potter and the Series of Unfortunate Events. The students were eager to get back into the swing of reading. And the summer book checkout program was very successful.

Week 9 Thing 23 Summarize Thoughts

Thank you so much for giving us from out of state the opportunity to work through the SLL 2.0 program. Although we all "wish that we could be California girls", you provided us with the chance to gain a lot of experience and knowledge by sharing the activities and experiences this program provided.

I described my experience in a previous post but here it is again:

"Although not a web native, I do now feel like I am a naturalized citizen no longer an alien."

Previous to this experience I could email, shop, buy and sell on ebay,bank (but not bill pay) word process, search (boolean or not) and do basic stuff. As far as my school was concerned I was one of the knowledgeable ones. I was the tech contact at the local level. Boy was I just taking baby steps.

This program made me proficient in areas I did not even know existed. The photos and images, the rss feeds, the wikis, the tagging--all will be of great use.

I am four years from retirement and will then have 35 years experience. I am so thankful I haven't remained static but am still learning and doing. One of my young teachers who is tech saavy told me this week how impressed she was that I had done all this and had done it on my own. (You all gave great directions and helpful feedback)

I plan to continue my blog as an extension of the school library. I will definitely add the blog address to my signature. I have created a district wiki that we are using for collaboration. The district technology "main guy" heard that I had done that, gave me a thumbs up and asked for the web address.

Thanks so much for providing the information for participating in SLL 2.0 on the LM_NET. Otherwise, I would not have know such a great program was available.
Please do provide information should other such professional development become available.

Thank you again so much for the program.

Week 9 Thing 22 Completed

Following my son's directions for using writeable CDs rather than rewriteable ones, I am now listening to Peter Pan on the cd player in my car. Another task completed. Its really frustrating to finish an audio book and not be able to get another because I can't get to the public library. Now I will always have a source handy with LibriVox. Use for school---many teachers that use novel sets in their classes look for the audio book as well. This way I will have a source for them if it is an older book that we can't find commercially.

Fashion Show

A comment on another blog about an Avatar fashion show caught my interest. I am only about 1/3 of the way through but I thought I would post the results so far. These are all avatars from our School Library Learning 2.0 blogs.



We are now up to fifty or so avatars. If yours is missing and you would like it in the show make a comment and tell me your blog name and I will put it in. This was a long process. Bitmaps (that the avatars were) would not upload to Picassa and Flickr would not let me post as many pictures as I ended up with. An trial and error process. But the lesson is don't give up. I probably can put music with it but not tody.

I decided in the night that although I am not a web native I am really close to getting my naturalized citizenship! I don't feel like an alien anymore.

Week 9 Thing 22 Continued

On the way to school this morning (yes, today August 9 was the first day for our students), I popped the disk in the CD player all ready to listen to Peter Pan --(read yesterday's entry if you are lost). Nothing, nada, not at all! When I got to school and took the CDs inside and put one in my computer--yes, there was my story.

Enter said 20 something year old son.
"yes, Mother, you should be able to hear the book in your car. But wait, did you buy the rewriteable cds?"
"Yes, I did. That way when I finish one book I can erase it and record another."
"You cannot use those kind in your car. Go buy you some regular cheap CDs, Save the book back to your hard drive and then re-record on the cheap ones. When you are done with that book, just throw them away and buy some more for your next one."

The whole time on the phone my husband is saying--"I will just buy you the book!" (See yesterday's post.) "But if you are going to do it, do it at school, not at home"

So although not exactly a web native (yesterday I heard the term digital native used in place of web native), my son who was born in 1980 came through for me again.

Will post outcome soon. I still hope I get to hear Peter Pan!

Week 9 Thing 22

Explore ebooks and audio books. I went to the World's Ebook Fair Site several times and just browsed around. From what I saw you have to join to get the books.(I just missed the month of July when there were free books.) I really am not interested in reading a book through the computer. But I really enjoy audio books and am always checking them out from our public library. I saw on http://librivox.org/ LibriVox that Peter Pan was one that could be downloaded then burned to a CD so I could listen in the car. (I have about a 30 minute commute twice a day) The original Peter Pan is in my school library, I remember Mary Martin playing Peter in the 50's and watching the movie on black and white tv, and Peter Pan the play is coming to the Shakespeare Festival in Montgomery, Alabama, in November and I am considering going----so I thought maybe I should refresh my memory with the original. This has been some project. First I downloaded to my computer a 2 or so hour process that ended sometimes in the night last night. Then I had to so purchase some rewritable CDs because for sure I would be downloading more books and would just use the same ones. That being taken care of today, tonight after supper I started burning the 5 plus hours of book. Time to do this has been about 3 hours. The funny thing is that this has made my husband extremely nervous. He has told me several times during this process that he will just buy me the tape or I should just go check it out instead of all I have been doing.
I will start listening tomorrow in the car and report back on quality etc. However, it really was time consuming. So the jury is still out on whether I see this as worthwhile or not. Just glad I had a cable modem and not dialup!

Week 9 Thing 21

I searched around on the podcast directories given in the SLL 2.0 list. I was more comfortable in the Educational podcast directory. I found an interesting podcast on Teachers and Technology in Brainwave. There were only 3 posts on it though and the last was Feb. 2006, but the comments on use of technology by today's teachers--how it first started with Apples and dot matrix printers and banner makers--to where it is today with blogs and webpages was right on topic. I put a feed for this in my Bloglines account. Here is the URL for the feed if anyone else is interested
http://brainwave.bibliotech.us/?feed=rss2

Speaking with my mid 20s son last night I told him I was working this week with podcasts. He said he'd never "fooled around with that" because you needed itunes. I was able to tell him that was not necessary for some podcasts. Nice to still be able to tell them things they don't know!

Week 9 Thing 20

Explore Youtube. Initially I searched youtube for Upper Peninsula, Michigan. My husband was stationed there when we first married and we spent almost a year in the area. I found several videos and viewed them. It is still as beautiful as it was 35 years ago.

I then searched for children reading and found this wonderful video from Reading Rainbow. As a former reading teacher turned media specialist this video says it all!



I would love to use this in the library this year on the first library visit of say my 4th graders as a kick off for the year.