Thing 8: Collaboration

The District I work in uses Google Apps for everything. Not all teachers are on board, but those who use them, love them. I shared a Google form I made as a survey regarding eReaders on the collaborative doc. I am planning a lesson, during which I will be observed by an administrator, where the students will be sharing their Works Cited pages with me from their Google Drive. The great part about it is the program we will be using is EasyBib.com and the students have the option to save their Works Cited pages directly to their Google accounts, and then share them with me and their teacher. What a paper saver! I looked at TitanPad which looks alot like Google Docs. I could see this being used as a note taking program much like our English teachers now have a Google scribe for each class. In another class, I signed up for a Dropbox account and plan on compiling all my library resources in one place. Our district uses Google Calendar for computer lab sign up. We have four computer labs in the high school that teachers are able to sign up for 60 days in advance. An administrator designed the form and shared it with all faculty in the beginning of the school year, and it has been working well. There have been some instances of teachers getting "bumped" by other teachers, but of course the administrator can go to the revision history to see where it took place. The other great thing about this system, is when we have a snow day, the calendar automatically moves forward a day so nobody loses out on computer time! I thought about setting up something like this for the library too, but as it is now, when they come into the library to schedule their classes, I have the opportunity to collaborate with the teachers. I am afraid this would be lost if I switched the library schedule to an online calendar. I was interested in how join.me works. We used to have SmartSync in our computer labs and the library so I could see what each computer was doing, I could push out documents to the students, or I could take over their screens. Last year, our district switched to a virtual desktop computer system, and I have been told there is no way for SmartSync to work with that. I wonder of join.me would work on the virtual network? And finally, I plan on looking deeper into Collaborative Classroom. It looks much like Edmodo in that assignments can be posted and graded within the program, discussions can take place, and programs like this open the opportunity for a flipped classroom. I browsed the topic lists and the grade content areas. I plan to share this with teachers looking for lesson ideas. I enjoyed this module. I am all for collaboration, as I think most media specialists are, and these resources are only the tip of the iceberg!

Thing 7: Podcasts and Screencasts

I do not have a microphone on my computer nor do I own a SmartPhone or Tablet that can have a microphone App. This topic really made me realize how I need to update! I read and listened to the article "Student-Created Sequoyah Book Reports, AudioBoo, iPads and QR Codes" and was very impressed about how 21st Century this library and the students are. My school library does have newer computers for students to use but the webcam/microphone has been disabled. Our IT department is able to re-enable it for classes working on assignments requiring audio/video.Listening to the "Isinglass Teen Read Award Nominees Book Talks" gave me ideas of how I could use podcasts in the high school library for book talks and reviews.(Another idea for my book club next year.) I looked at some of the screen cast programs mentioned in the article "Screencasts Turn Students into Digital Teachers", and I am going to mention this to the math and Science teachers. I think it would be helpful to students to have a screencast made for difficult Algebraic problems as well as demonstrations of how Physics formulas work.It would be kind of like making our own "Khan Academy". I have a digital camera that is able to record short videos, so I tried to make my own screencast using the camera, but the quality was so poor I am not going to post it here. I ended up making a screencast using Screenr, but there is no audio. It was very self explanatory, and I would really like to try it with a microphone! I added this screencast to my library webpage to assist students in searching the library catalog.Here is the link to it: