Can't believe I missed this....

I know class is over, but this is a good place for me to keep track of "stuff" - and Diigo, of course.

I really am behind in reading my School Library Journals, and have vowed to catch up when class was over. So far, I'm not doing too well. In the process of putting together a book order, I went to the December issue of SLJ for the Best Books 2009, and low and behold, the magazine opens to the article, Please to Tweet You: Making a Case for Twitter in the Classroom." I got so excited about finding this that I haven't even read all of it yet, but what a great start about a 7th grade class in a twitter conversation with an author, publisher, and others.

Is anyone out there??

Updated posters

Wow. What a great blog to follow. Apparently suggestions were made, and these fine folks of the neverendingsearch blog have updated the Kid's Search Poster (now posters, 3 of them) they created - and provided the embed code!



and....



and....


(okay, need to investigate this one more, not coming through)

Digital Sharing Project: MCBA Prezi

The Massachusetts Children's Book Award (MCBA) Program is a reading program in which the three elementary schools in Sharon participate. Every year 25 books are nominated. If students read at least 5 of those titles they are eligible to vote for their favorite, having a voice in what they like to read. I will use this presentation to help introduce the program to next year's fourth and fifth graders.

Nuturing the 21st Century History Teacher: Research and Examples

Why I picked this video presentation to view, I'm not sure. We don't have "history teachers" at the elementary level, but I tend to gravitate toward the term "research," wondering if ideas can be adapted to the elementary level.

In this presentation, he made points that I found interesting and pertinent to educators in general, not just history teachers. Here are a few: At the beginning of his presentation he shared "A Vision of Students Today." One student shared that she will read 8 books this year, 2300 web pages, and 1281 facebook profiles. Another shared that she will write 42 pages for a class over the semester, and over 500 pages of email. Something for us to think about. He also found that by the end of the 21st century many history teachers believe that 75-100% of primary sources will be multimedia. Again, something to think about. Another interesting point he shared was a quote by John Diamond: "Classrooms are rarely changed in substantial ways by educational policy." In today's NCLB era, I thought that was pretty remarkable. Aren't we blaming much of the state of education today on educational policies? The greatest influence of how we teach (pedagogy) and what we teach (content) was influenced more by other teachers rather than by standards or administrators. Hmm, interesting.

Thanks Joyce

This is from the Blog, Neverendingsearch by Joyce Valenza, that I follow. She ever so kindly included the information for others to embed the poster below. I'm putting it here instead of my library website for the time being as my legs are still a little wobbly with the new blog I've begun. I need a little time to figure out just how I want to use this fabulous information.

Decisions, decisons

I've been familiar with Shelfari for awhile now. It's one of those book-ish sites that lets you keep track of what you've read, what you'd like to read, what you are reading, and in the 21st century way, you can communicate with others about your reading life. The other day I was exploring Goodreads with a classmate in more depth and found that I quite liked it. Maybe even more than Shelfari (sorry, Shelfari. You are still on my website and blog, though). Goodreads has a cool montage feature/gadget/widget thing that I like. However, any comfort I've gained in the above realization and acceptance process has been dashed because I've just seen something new on one of the blogs I'm following. It appears to be called Library Thing. Maybe this one's better than the other two. Do I explore this or leave well enough alone?