K12 Online: The conference is coming

The 2nd annual K12 Online virtual conference is just about a month away. Make sure you attend, or attend the conference archive. The event is completely free. Important thinkers and dreamers and practitioners will present. Connect yourself with their visions of how our schools are evolving, how learning is changing.

Because the presentation list might overwhelm, yesterday the site began posting the workshop presenters’ teasers–short, online videos to give attendees a better idea of what their presentation will address. Four teasers are already up:

• Lisa Durff - “Pushing the Envelope or How to Integrate Web 2.0 Tools on a Shoestring”
• Chris Harbeck - “Release the Hounds”
• Dean Shareski - “Design Matters”
• Silvia Tolisano - “Travel Through Time and Space”

Let’s plan to demonstrate strong library presence at this one! Your attendance will help you help learners learn and help teachers teach.

Here’s the list of strands and presentations:

Classroom 2.0:

• Silvia Tolisano
  “Travel Through Space and Time”
• Drew Murphy
  “Step by Step- Building a Web2.0 Classroom”
• Chris Harbeck
  “Release the Hounds”
• Vance Stevens, Nelba Quintana, Doris Molero, Sasa Sirk, and Rita Zeinstejer
  “Motivating Student Writers by Fostering Collaboration through Tagging and Aggregating”
• Wendy Wolfe
  “If All My Classes Did This”
• Konrad Glogowski
  “Assessment and Evaluation”
• Anne Davis
  “Putting the Pedagogy into the Tools”
• Dean Shareski
  “Design matters”
• Jeff Utecht
  “Sustained Blogging in the Classroom”

New Tools:

• Liz Kolb
  “Cell Phones as Classroom Learning Tools”
• Frank Pirrone
  “Collaborative Concept Mapping - Breaking the Bounds of Location and Time… for $0.00 per Seat”
• Cheryl Oakes, Bob Sprankle, Alice Barr
  “Flat Agents of Change”
• Anne Davis
  “Learn to Blog : Blog to Learn”
• Jason Hando
  “LMS 2.0 - Engaging Learners Using More Advanced Techniques and the Odd Mash-up inside Moodle”
• Sharon Betts
  “Oodles of Googles”
• Kevin Jarrett and Sylvia Martinez
  “Second Life: K-20 Educators Exploring Virtual Worlds - Panel”
• Kurt Paccio and James Gates
  “The Electric Slide! Twenty-First Century Style”
• April Chamberlain
  “Trailfire”

Professional Learning Networks:

• Jen Wagner, Cheryl Oakes, Vicki Davis, Sharon Peters
  “Webcasting for Educators: Expanding the Conversation”
• Brandi Caldwell
  “Creating PLE’s with TLC”
• Kevin Hodgson and Bonnie Kaplan.
  “The Collaborative ABC Project: Using Technology to Tell Stories”
• Lee Baber, Paul Allison, Susan Ettenheim and Thomas Locke
  “Building Online Communities for Youth”
• Jeff Utecht
  “Online Professional Development”
• James Folkestad
  “Changing a System: Network Centric Learning Communities”
• Sharon Peters, Vincent Jansen
  “Building a Yardstick for PD Success: Establishing Key Performance Indicators for Web 2.0 Personal Optimized Learning Environments”
• Vinnie Vrotny
  “Expanding Horizons - Engaging the Adult Members of your Community (Teachers, Administrators, and Parents) through the Use of Personal/Professional Learning Networks”
• Alex Ragone and Arvind Grover
  “EdTechTalk: A Network of Homegrown Webcasters”

Obstacles to Opportunities:

• Patrick Ledesma
  “The Technology Specialist as Teacher Leader: Strategies to Ensure Successful Technology Integration and Student Learning in Schools”
• Ben Wilkoff
  “Starting From Scratch: Framing Change for All Stakeholders”
• Karen Richardson
  “Crossing the Copyright Boundary in the Digital Age”
• Shawn Nutting
  “Creating a Paradigm Shift in Technology”
• Lisa Durff
  “Pushing the Envelope or How to Integrate Web 2.0 Tools on a Shoestring”
• John Pearce
  ”Me blog? No way!!!”
• Sylvia Martinez
  “Web 2.0 Share the Adventure”
• Joseph Bires
  “Acceptable Use and the Web 2.0”
• Sylvia Martinez
  “Challenging Assumptions about Technology Professional Development”

Cool TL videos!

Elementary librarian Doug Valentine, a.k.a. Dr. Loopy, a member of our TeacherLibrarianNing, recently posted three very clever, tongue-in-cheek videos about our profession.  I later discovered that these are but three of his many funny efforts posted on TeacherTube.

He’s given me (us all?) some great ideas for new productions this fall and some cool material for inservices.

• Agent Codee Books fights an evil Lexile character who prevents children from reading books they themselves choose
• Blind Date explores classroom teacher/librarian collaboration in reality television, pop-up video format.
• Bionic Librarian shares the updated librarian image, as well as the potential super powers of collaboration.

Great fun. Thanks, Doug!

Note:  After writing this post I explored a little more of how school librarians and teacher librarians are represented in the world of teacher and student-produced video. Check out the longer post at my SLJ Blog.

Video Toolbox: More tools than you can shake a lens at

The fabulous Judy O’Connell shared this cool list in her Hey Jude blog and I want to make sure word spreads.

Mashable recently gathered a Video Toolbox: 150+ Online Video Tools and Resources.
Names of tools like Zamzar and YouTube are already familiar parts of our lives, but many of these other tools look truly worthy of exploration.

Sure, my head is already swimming with new tools.  But because I suspect that this coming school year will be even more video-rich, and because I have been so amazed by what we are now able to create at a basic level, I am going to play with a quite a few of these before September swings around.

The categories are: Live Video Communications, Online Video How-to, Online Video Editors, Video Sharing, Video Hosting, Video Organization and Management, Vidcasts and Vlogging, Video Mashups, Mobile Video Apps, Video Search, Online Video Downloading Services, and Miscellaneous Tools.

iTunesU and other university resources: A whole lot of sharing going on

It’s been around for a bit, but I just discovered it.  Apple now offers iTunesU, podcast lectures and course materials from some of our finest institutions of higher learner. (They should work nicely in our high schools and on our ipods too.) Among the participating institutions are MIT, Arizona State University, Duke, Penn State, and UC Berkeley.

From the Apple page:

iTunes U has arrived, giving higher education institutions an ingenious way to get audio and video content out to their students. Presentations, performances, lectures, demonstrations, debates, tours, archival footage — school is about to become even more inspiring.

Just like the iTunes Store, the popularity of iTunes U has exploded. Already, more than half of the nation’s top 500 schools use it to distribute their digital content to students — or to the world. Any school can open all or part of its site to the public, from alumni to parents to anyone with a love of learning. iTunes U is transforming the way people learn on campus, off campus, and where there’s no campus at all.

Don’t forget The Research Channel, a portal more than 3000 shared educational videos, and the wonderful OER Commons, which provides shared curricular materials in multiple formats for K-16.

Sharing student work

I thought I’d share some of the media we’ve posted in the past couple of days.

George’s class got truly engaged in their Voice of Vocab podcasts. Much effort went into making these very short podcasts.

Interviews with these sometimes less-than-motivated students revealed that this assignment truly motivated them. They learned the technology and some of them emerged and functioned as clear leaders.  They wanted to be proud of the products they posted.  And, the students reported, they LEARNED those words!

It occurred to me that if others of you out there were also creating vocab podcasts, we could put them together as one big audio dictionary and study tool!

I also just posted the latest batch of our grammar learning objects. This semester’s student work includes:

• Prepositionitis
• Active vs. Passive Voice
• Run-ons and Fragments
• Verb Tense
• Expletive Expressions
• Participial Phrases

These videos join a group of other media lessons I’ve been planning with the media production class and the Language Arts Department. I will share these new additions at the faculty inservices next week and promote their use as tools for all our teachers.

Please feel free to give us feedback or use these yourselves!

New video resources–Shambles rocks!

Chris Smith has long maintained Shambles, the wonderful resource pages for all things Web and Web 2.0.   He’s now putting together video blogs libraries to help us learn and teach.  Take a look at his Web 2.0 films (great for inservices!), his collection on learning the alphabet (of many languages!) and his library of viral ads (for media study and for fun).

THANK YOU, Chris.

Zamzar and more (geek love)

This week I discovered Zamzar. It was love at first conversion. This lovely Web-based app will convert files from one format to another and email ‘em back to you. For a bi-platform girl like me, this is an especially amazing discovery. My Apple prefers .mov files. My PC prefers .wmv. Now I can move ‘em back and forth with no problem. This week I’ve played with my audio and image files as well. It works like a dream. (The software applications I bought and downloaded never worked as well.)

And to top it off, Zamzar’s new url page will convert online videos, from such sites as Google Video or YouTube, to any video file format you like. I just downloaded The Web is Us/ing us for a faculty workshop. This may solve a number of school filtering issues, allowing students and teachers to bring videos they really need into their classrooms and presentations.

From the Zamzar site:

Ever been on a video sharing website and thought “If only I could convert that video into a format I could keep” ? Well look no further - We’ve just launched a whole host of new features to allow you to convert files from URLs, including all your favourite video websites. Zamzar now lets you:

• Convert files from a URL on the Internet
• Integrate Zamzar into your web browser using the Zamzar browser button
• Convert videos directly from sites such as YouTube, Google Video, Revver and many more.

(Of course we all need to pay attention to any copyright restrictions as we download and save video.)

And that’s not all folks . . .

For more cool and geeky 2.0 apps, take a look at this list from the office 2.0 conference!

“Open the door. Let ‘em in.”

Someone’s knocking at the door
Somebody’s ringing the bell
Someone’s knocking at the door
Somebody’s ringing the bell
Do me a favor, open the door and let ‘em in

Paul McCartney

After ten years of maintaining a website I was pretty proud of, it struck me that it was time to rethink ownership.

What I know: Teens who create or collaborate on online spaces, are more likely to feel welcome living on them. So what happens when you open the door, even just a crack, and let them in?

It’s clearly time to open the door. Opportunites are ripe. Galleries of student art/ work can be easily constructed using tools like Flickr. I assigned several student curators for our clipart gallery. Right now, curator Steve is getting our yearbook photographers to contribute their shots. We have yet to attribute credit and assign labels, but Steve tells me he’s on top of it. Chris, our Art Gallery curator, plans to add many more examples of student work and encourage artist reflection as time nears for the art show.

You can view a steadily growing archive of videos in our new SpringfieldVideo Blog. Our students contribute to the learning culture by creating their own learning objects through streamed video or podcasts. Teachers are using them. I use them regularly. And I am always happy to see students viewing our student-produced book trailers here in the library. Some pull them up just to show their friends. It’s getting like that with our grammar and information literacy series.

Students (mostly dear, Ben) recently prepared our new orientation video. The library site also now regularly hosts our latest Springfield broadcast news production. Last month’s was particularly filled with honesty and humor.

Much more video is coming. The students are working on seven films more for our grammar series. And I am learning how to convert them to Flash. They’ll open far more quickly once I get that straight.

Podcasts are coming too. Martin posted one on Open Source, that we need to tighten a bit. He is also helping me get my own podcasts together for the site.

We are moving our senior seminar projects to blogs on our site to encourage reflection and more transparent peer and faculty comments and interventions. I am beginning to move our pathfinders from html to wiki form to encourage student participation. I want to include student discoveries and suggestions for resources.

I am inspired by the work I discover as I visit library sites for my doctoral study. Northfield Mount Hermon’s Reading Room Blog is all about student users and reaches way beyond student research needs to celebrate the whole learner, the whole KID. It celebrates and includes its student musicians, its student poets, its workers, its readers, and its lounge lizards.

Greece Athena (New York) Media Center’s website features student book reviews (and ratings) on its supplementary Athena Blogs. Uni High School students participate in a long-running Book Discussion Forum. Uni librarian, Frances Jacobson Harris fills her own Gargoyles Loose in the Library blog with images of and stories about her students. Naples High School (Florida) Media Center also features images of learners as well as student poems, photos, and art. Lawrence (Kansas) High School Library’s site is filled with posters featuring students and photos of student events. The LHS blog posts student reviews.

Quite a while back in this blog, I wrote about a new rubric for district sites developed by SchoolSpan. This rubric values contributions from faculty and students, images of students, the inclusion of student work. The description of an exemplary site concludes with this statement:

The community-at-large feels empowered as active stakeholders. . .the site reflects that ongoing communication objective.

All of this makes great sense in a 2.0 world. All of this puts front and center the kind of learning the recently released NETS draft encourages. Creativity and Innovation; Communication and Collaboration; Research and Information Retrieval; Critical Thinking, Problem Solving Decision Making; Digital Citizenship.

All of this makes great sense in a world where learners are used to creating Web content, as documented by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, Teen Content Creators and Consumers. Way back in 2005, the report concluded:

American teenagers today are utilizing the interactive capabilities of the internet as they create and share their own media creations. Fully half of all teens and 57% of teens who use the internet could be considered Content Creators. They have created a blog or webpage, posted original artwork, photography, stories or videos online or remixed online content into their own new creations.

Should we lock these kids out of the very learning spaces where they spend the largest part of their days? Or should we open our doors and let ‘em in?

(I hope to build this post into my VOYA column. Please write to share other examples of online student/library collaborations.)

PETE & C and the further adventures of D-girl

I attended our state technology conference (PETE&C) week. At one of the Sunday night receptions, I won a laptop cart–minus the laptops. Darn! Nevertheless, you can see Ken, Michael, and I got pretty attached to the cart at the party. More pics on Flickr.

I enjoyed Apple’s Dave Marra’s workshop on podcasting with GarageBand. I can’t wait to get started, but that, my friends, looks like a post-D activity. Jim Gates’ tips were cool and I added several of his ideas to my cool new tools wiki.

If you were not lucky enough to be in lovely Hershey, PA this past snowy week, a wiki, created by Bridget Belardi, captures some of the PETE&C excitement.

At the first morning keynote, Kathy Brautigam, Director of the state’s Bureau for Educational Technology, shared this video, an ad for EDS, a tech company–Building an Airplane While it’s Flying. I absolutely felt that was how I worked last week when LearnerBlogs was experiencing off and on tech issues and I was working with three classes to build research blogs.

Actually, I feel like that a lot. Not a problem when you are working with colleagues who also thrive on risk and moderate chaos (and yes, sometimes, big gains).

And now for the D-update: To continue with the old analogy, I’d say I am at about 2 centimeters right now. In two weeks (this has been a long gestation), I should have a sharable draft.  I’ll let you hold it if you like!

The bad news: my committee is too swamped and I cannot get my paper read, revised, and filed by spring graduation. The good news: I should be able to defend on May 7th and I may be able to enjoy a real summer break. Please send all your positive “D vibes” towards the Philly burbs!

New orientation video!

We’ve just completed our new student-produced library orientation video.

Download
It will help me catch up our new students and I will use it with our new eighth graders in September.

Wonderful Ben wrote and produced the film as part of an independent study! It may be just a little bit rule-focused, and there are a couple of little issues I will explain with students as we watch it together, but I think Ben did a bang-up job. What a talented and generous young man! Around this time of year I really begin to lament losing our seniors.

Let me know what you think!