Thing 13: Media Skills

Lots of great stuff in this module! I downloaded Picasa and made an album of My Family's Christmas Celebration held on Dec 22.  I have used the snipping tool in Windows before. It comes in handy when submitting an IT work order to be able to show the IT staff exactly what error message is on my computer screen. I downloaded Awesome Screen Shot and played around with it. I tried Snag.gy by following the directions on the screen, but nothing happened. I really liked Clipping magic to change the image's background. Pixlr has some extremely interesting editing tools. I read "25 Sites for Creating Interesting Quote Images". I might try this with the next English class that comes to the library. I have used Wordle before, but Tagxedo was fun to play with too. I have made "Fiction" signage for my library shelves using Wordle. I have had classes in the library using Windows Movie Maker to put together presentations. I personally find it not very user friendly and the students (and teachers)get very frustrated with it. Youtube editor is blocked from school, but from home it looks pretty easy to use. I wish I could convince the powers-that-be to unblock Youtube and it's tools. I read "Using Digital Images: An Educator's Guide" because I am always interested in copyright issues. I have made this a link to the article for easy future access. 

Thing 12 Social Learning Management Systems

Edmodo is used by most teachers and students at my high school. I use it for my library book club as a discussion forum between our meetings. Another teacher uses it very much like a college professor for an online class does. I watched the Schoology video and read the article Schoology vs. Edmodo. It seems like Schoology is a better platform if students are using iPads and apps. For our population, Edmodo meets the needs of the teachers and students. After looking at Mrs. Altham's blog regarding a summer reading club, I may attempt that using Edmodo next summer. I read the article "Survey of K12 Educators on Social Networking, Online Communities, and Web 2.0 tools". It does not surprise me that librarians have the highest percent participation in social networks. We seem to thrive by bouncing ideas off each other and sharing experiences. I posted what I am reading on Mightybell.I use Good Reads all the time to follow book series'. I plan to teach my library book club members how to use Good Reads to find other books they may like, read reviews, and post reviews. Facebook is blocked in our school. As an aside, when our students first started using Edmodo, I was constantly reminding students that they were not allowed to be on Facebook in school and if they were getting around the filters, I would need to report them to administration. After a few instances of this, I realized the students were working on assignments on Edmodo! Their discussion platforms looks so much the same, from a distance I really thought these students were on Facebook! Finally, I joined TeacherLibrarian Ning and posted a few comments regarding library fines, and how long to keep magazines in the library.