Instructional Technology Blog » Libraries

Seattle Schools Librarians using Edublogs to promote their work

Harvey — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:56:58 +0000

On Tuesday November 3, 2009 a group of Seattle Schools librarians met at McClure Middle school to share ideas and work on setting up blogs for their building libraries. Eric Caldwell, Library Services Manager, purchased a campus pack of the popular blogging tool Edublogs based on Wordpress platform in order to provide all district librarians with a web presence. The goal is to allow librarians to take advantage of the always-on nature of the web to promote their services to parents, students, and the Seattle Schools community.

Librarians worked on setting up their blogs and adding content, and had additional support from Eric Caldwell and Angie Martinez from Library Services as well as the Instructional Technology team.

View some examples of Library sites:

Thornton Creek Library

Whitman Library

McClure Library

For more information about blogging and using Edublogs visit the Instructional Technology resource site.

StoryCorps Oral History Project

Harvey — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 04:12:08 +0000

The StoryCorps project is focused on creating connections between Americans by creating the opportunity for them to speak and listen as they talk about the meaningful aspects of their lives. Featured on NPR, and archiving all recorded stories in partnership with the Library of Congress, StoryCorps is the largest oral history project of its kind. Educators can use StoryCorps directly in the classroom via the web, or emulate this oral history project using a DIY guide to capture the important stories of the local community. By using StoryCorps, teachers targeting a standard can ensure academic rigor while increasing relevance and strengthening relationships in student learning.

StoryCorps provides an equipment guide for selecting the necessary tools to create a recording, but Seattle Public Schools teachers creating stories in the classroom can use a standard input mic and a podcast program like Audacity (PC) or Garageband (Mac) to record stories on a classroom computer.

Learn more about StoryCorps and hear how powerful and poignant stories can be:

Social Bookmarking – Made Easy

Gary — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 19:51:53 +0000

Del.icio.us is a practical social bookmarking tool teachers can utilize to make classroom use of the Internet more efficient. By using a Delicious account teachers can easily and simply share internet sites with students at multiple computers. Watch the video below (created by Commoncraft) to learn about Social Bookmarking with Delicious. If you have more questions or want to investigate and think about using a Delicious account contact the Instructional Technology Specialist assigned to your building.

More information about Social Bookmarking on the IT Blog

Delicious Classroom Example

Note: Teachers can create a Delicious account, install the Delicious buttons, and make changes using a teacher login. Student logins can view a Delicious site but not make changes.

To Create a Delicious account

Go to Del.icio.us or delicious.com
Click on the Register button.
Complete the registration form.
When the account registration is completed a new window will appear. In this window, click the Install Button Now link. This program will install the buttons that make using your Delicious account easy.

Media Literacy – The Literacy of the 21st Century and Your Presentation Station

Janice — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 23:18:48 +0000

We’re not in Kansas any more! We live at a time when all sorts of media is at our finger tips. It is constantly bombarding us through computers, TV, radio, podcasts, blogs, music, video, digital games, and movies. Perhaps the most powerful delivery is through our computers via the Web. Students need to learn to screen the images and sounds bombarding them for content and authenticity. According to the Center for Media Literacy, “If our children are to be able to navigate their lives through this multi-media culture, they need to be fluent in reading and writing the language of images and sounds just as we have always taught them to read and write the language of printed communication.” We and our students must learn how to critically interpret the messages in our multimedia culture and to express ourselves through this form because multimedia content has changed the way we learn about our world by bringing sound, pictures, and writing from every culture and every view point to us digitally through our computers.

What does this mean for teaching? First and foremost it means that we must teach our students to ask powerful questions about the media itself. The skill of reading and interpreting information needs to be expanded to all message forms; verbal, visual, auditory, or a combination of all three.

Now that the presentation station is available in almost all classrooms in our schools we have the ability to help students analyze media by guiding them through Web sites teaching them to evaluate the content and intent of the authors, as well as the effectiveness of the use of images and sound.

Our access to information is growing so fast that it is impossible to keep up with it. That is why these skills are so vital for our students. It used to be that people thought teachers taught students all that they needed to know for a lifetime. Now we realize that no one person or source is the seat of all knowledge. Our students must understand how to handle the data that is coming at them because they will never be able to accumulate it all in their own minds.

Here are The 5 Core Concepts and the 5 Key Questions of Media Literacy from the Center for Media Literacy to help you get started thinking about and teaching these skills.

When you are ready, here is a PowerPoint for you to use with your students when you talk to them about evaluating Web sites. web-site-evaluation.ppt

Some resources you might like to look at for more discussion and information on this topic:

David Warlick
Jamie McKenzie
The Question Mark a digital journal about powerful questions and media literacy.
Wikipedia’s definition of Visual Literacy with links to articles.
Kathy Schrock’s age appropriate Web evaluation tools

Protecting Intellectual Property

Eric C. — Tue, 15 May 2007 21:05:56 +0000

Increasingly, students are becoming not just consumers of content but creators as well. This poses interesting challenges for teachers and librarians as we try to navigate the waters of intellectual property rights. What can students and teachers fairly use without permission and how can we protect what we create? Although not always clear, we were in somewhat familiar territory with fair use rules and content in the public domain. This became considerably more murky with the introduction of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Now with an explosion of content on the web and the growing struggle over whether knowledge should be free or constrained for commercial use, it seems almost impossible to keep track of what is ok to use and what is not. For many the traditional bounds of copyright law did not fully address these issues. To help with this problem Lawrence Lessig founded Creative Commons which developed a new class of licensing. Creative Commons licensing is very clear in how content can be used consequently its use for digital content has exploded. Given these new forms of licensing, it is even more important that we understand the use rights for any piece of intellectual property we run across on the web and the implications for our students and teachers when they want to use them.

Fair Use

Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licensed Content

Digital StoryTelling

Janice — Fri, 16 Mar 2007 21:45:49 +0000

Every culture has used storytelling as a powerful tool for imparting tradition, culture, wisdom, mystery and myth. We have all been enthralled by a good story whether told to us by our grandfather, read to us by our mother, or given to us in the movies. While listening, we conjure images and sounds to go with what we hear. While viewing we compare the images on the screen with those we have in our heads of a book or a hero. Digital Storytelling takes the two traditional skills of academic storytelling; writing and reading, and adds music and images to the mix. Students become powerful storytellers of their own ideas and experiences in this process as they use traditional literacy and media literacy skills to weave their tales.

I encourage you to try your hand at constructing digital stories as you work with your students in writing workshops.

Here is a short document that will help you understand the steps and content of digital storytelling.

These resources will fill you with enthusiasm by giving you inspiration and help.

Center for Digital Storytelling
Digital Storytelling a site maintained by Helen Barrettt, Ph.D. with many examples and ideas
The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling from the University of Houston
Adobe Digital Kids Club: Digital Storytelling
The Kenton County School District: Digital Storytelling resources and examples
Scholastic: Dream in Color – Digital Storytelling