Wordles---everyone loves them!

I just created a wordle with the names of my family and significant info. What fun!
What use in education?

How Far I've Come...How Far I Have to Go!

A recap of the "Things" I've done:
Thing 1. What Are You Talking About?
Understanding Information Literacy.
This is a continuing challenge! The basics can be defined, but the specifics keep changing as the technology morphs and expands, changes and reforms into new iterations. This term,"information literacy" and all its cousins and shirttail relatives...technological literacy, visual literacy, etc; catch my eye in my professional reading and is something that Diane and I will again grapple with today as we craft interview questions to pose to interviewees for the media positions that will be open in the district.

Thing 2. Create Your Blog & Post About It
Blogging is valuable as a place to put ideas into words, but it also is "another thing to do" and requires a commitment to making it a habit. It has to rise to a higher level of importance than it has at this time in my life. I wish I could blog more and email less. A goal: find out how to master email and morph it into a more useful kind of communication within our department. Maybe Google Docs in discussion lines or a Wiki in Moodle. (Three years ago, if someone suggested I make a wiki in moodle, I'd probably have slapped their face--or asked them to stop talking baby talk!)

Thing 3. RSS & Newsreaders
My understanding of RSS is still tentative and I have not yet found it highly applicable for the work I do on a regular basis. I haven't tackled the time management needed to have time to read all the updated postings as they come.

Thing 4. Get to Know Your Public Library
I can't wait until the summer when I plan to make use of the museum access. I'm going to devote a day or two to visiting my favorite libraries and digging into things I haven't explored yet, although I do borrow books, audiobooks, videos and dvds, I search, reserve, renew on line, I buy used books , read reviews, sit and read magazines, and on and on...there are features I'm not using or letting people know about.

Thing 5. Create and Maintain a Teacher Web Page
Friday Diane and I are meeting with one of our webpage developers and the district graphic designer to work on a new interface for the media website. We want to have something that looks like the Springfield High School media site.
I've been doing webpage training this year. I really enjoy working with teachers on learning this...I learn a lot too!

Thing 6. Use the Teacher Guide to the Research Project Calculator (RPC) AND

Thing 7. Get to Know the Research Project Calculator (RPC)

I like this a lot, but I haven't had a chance to use it with students. It would be a good idea for me to take one of the upcoming projects we have around the office and run it through this system and see if it also works for other kinds of things that require research and planning. Yes, Jean, that's a good idea!!!!

I've already talked about these things in previous posts, but review is a good thing!

I get a Kick out of KIC!

I am attending a monthly KIC (Key Instructional Contact) meeting at the TIES building in Roseville. Today's topic is student response systems. We have heard about Activotes from Promethean, Quizdom, Senteo from SmartBoard and Interwrite.
Here is another learning curve issue for the teachers, but something that we can consider as a technology that will be here to stay and will become integral to instruction. It seems to have acquired enough momentum because of how well it ties in with effective instructional strategies, supports assessment goals, and also how it can become another source of income for technology manufacturers, textbook producers and others who serve the education market. They are part of a movement towards technology aided interactive instruction and the amount of content that is becoming available for teachers to use, should make them more palatable and accessible for larger numbers of teachers. They also have the potential to save teacher time and give them more data that could effectively impact instruction.
I am going to guess that within 5 years these tools will be much more transparently integrated into classrooms, with some painful hills to climb in between.
Will one format rise above the rest, as Blu-Ray has just done over HD-DVD? the interactivity is changing from the IR (infrared) to RF (radio frequency) to highspeed wireless?
I always wonder about the negatives and the things that will be lost when we choose a path to go down.
Robert Frost spoke of the road not taken...I wonder more about the roads that are taken.

I decided to add an RSS feed for School Library Journal today. I am also applying for an exemption from the standard 24 hour day so that I can read all the interesting things that I can find on the Web.

Catching up in the new year

Email may well be the most insidious invention of the recent past. You can become buried in a virtual avalanche of correspondence that can take you away from personal contact and meaningful work. "Didn't you get my email?" "Yes, probably, ..." It's easy to find email, usually, less easy to determine what is significant and what is not. Regardless, it's back to my virtual desk, to clear off the virtual mess!

Blog Bogged-Down in Snowstorm of Work and Ennui

As someone who should be setting a good example, I'm a failure. I have however, been engaged in technology!
Just yesterday, I got to meet with Bob, Terry and Ban Lang from Wellstone to help them work on their building technology plan. They are proving to be real leaders in their school community. Way to go!
Ennui...is that the right word for what I'm feeling and experiencing? I think I'll check it out on this great dictionary source I discovered serendipitously: http://www.visuwords.com. It defines words in a graphic interface that's quite amazing!
Ennui doesn't work...I'm not bored...maybe overwhelmed would be better.
I have done Things 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 21, 23, 24, 27, 29, 35, and 36. And I will write about them, after I paint two rooms, get my floors carpeted and assemble and fill 7 bookcases in my home library. I better go home and get busy!

You've got to try these resources!

Last Wednesday I helped facilitate a full day workshop with middle school social studies teachers on preparing for History Day. In the course of the day I shared information about WorldBook, Destiny, and NetTrekker. We invited JoEllen Haugo from the MPL to share Minneapolis's rich resources. That's a BIG WOW! It could take weeks just to look at everyone of them, without getting in depth. Todd Pierson also shared two excellent research tools that are available online: Think Tank and Note Star. Think Tank allows users to narrow down a topic and create powerful subtopics. NoteStar is as you can imagine, a notetaking program that can be managed by a teacher and allows collaboration between teams of students. Both programs come from the same group, http://4teachers.org, which has also created a rubrics program. Think Tank and Note Star can theoretically work together, but there are problems with the length of subtopics created in Think Tank and a cut and paste method works better. http://thinktank.4teachers.org/ and http://notestar.4teachers.org/

A Spooky Day at the End of October

Know what's really spooky? How many libraries are available at your fingertips. (Maybe not spooky...but cool, isn't it?) I personally have an Anoka County card, but frequently go into Forest Lake and use the Washington Cty library, or stop at the Ramsey Cty library by Har Mar Mall. I'm a member of the Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library and enjoyed the trips I made to the Franklin library and the North Regional library with pre-K students this summer. The ITS staff has made us of the meeting room at No Regional for a quiet work session and I am always reserving books that I come across and want to read.

What next? I know I don't utilize the online resources very much beyond reserving books, but here I go! In my next post I will go into what I learn from the public library.
I will be developing an online resources class that I'm going to deliver through Moodle. That is a new experience for me.