Mother's Day!

When you have a child, you get all excited about Mother's Day, until you realize that you're not your husband's mother, and a three month old child isn't going to be thanking you for anything any time soon. Of course, it's still all about your mom, so off you go with plant and card to see her. When, you wonder, will Mother's Day be about you?

This Mother's Day, after twenty of them, it was about me. Yay! I have to credit my daughter with choosing a college mere steps from Fenway Park, moving home on the proper weekend, and the Red Sox for opening the park for a Mother's Day Walk around the warning track. And yes, I DID call my mom on Mother's Day - lucky, lucky me!

Arriving on the warning track in the famous triangle area.












The center field wall (looking toward left) where Fred Lynn knocked himself out when he crashed into the concrete while going for a fly ball. It is now padded.










Okay, a plumber's family. Who could resist?













A warm Fenway welcome.













Manny's corner at the 310 marker.













On the third base line where greats Wade Boggs, Bill Mueller and now Mike Lowell patrol the field.












The closest we'll ever get to seats on the field.













Sitting in Terry Francona's seat. He has a great view of the field.












See?!













Faith Rewarded - mom too.

Week 9, Thing 23 - Copyright, Creative Commons and Congrats!

Well - after I stopped laughing, I sent off the YouTube video to a college professor friend, the other librarians in my district and my college student. What a clever way to get the point across. I also visited the Creative Commons web-site and found ccLearn which is dedicated to extending open education resources to the teaching community. I loved the elementary magazine for elementary schools, Beyond Polar Bears and Penguins and will be sharing it with my teachers. Wow - there is SO much out there. I wish, I wish, I wish .... you do too I am sure.

So what were my favorite discoveries? Oh gosh - everything except Technorati. I loved the mashups and still play with them. I WILL work them into the curriculum! In the meantime, I will play with my hamster pictures. (By the way - five of the babies are placed so I have a lovely blue male named Fenway and a teeny-tiny female runt named Lily who will stay with me.)

Zoho Writer and del.icio.us had immediate use to me and my colleagues as we work on developing a K-12 library curriculum. Learning how to use a blog has been wicked fun and

perhaps I will become a library blogger for my students! Wikis were entrancing as well. I'm just going to have to stop there ... though I AM enjoying getting all the Red Sox news delivered to Google Reader.

Ah - life-long learning ... I strive to be open to new experiences and this course has been the swift kick in the pants that I needed to find the good and useful on-line. I didn't expect to like so much of what we did. It all sounded so dry when I read the CSLA introduction and 23 things seemed beyond my ability. I dragged my allegedly life-long learning feet to sign up. I am so glad that Kathy dinged me and signed me up by the skin of my teeth.

I don't know that I'd do anything differently ... I liked the freedom and the format ... but a real live meet the colleagues might be nice. Would I participate again - oh my, what a question! How many ways can you say absolutely, positively, without a doubt, YES!!!!

One word for this course ... empowering ... and isn't taking charge of our knowledge what it's all about?

Finally at the end. Yay and rats at the same time. A program like this forces me to look at new technologies and consider how they can make my job easier and be of help to my students. It also introduces me to cyber-colleagues who make my wheels turn. As I once said, we all have a lonely profession in that we are generally the only people in our buildings who do our jobs. No grade level meetings and common planning time for us. This becomes our common planning time. So thanks to all of you for sharing your thoughts and ideas. I have been enriched. Should you care to stay in touch, here's my e-mail: bookwoman7@comcast.net

Week 9, Thing 22 - eBooks

Wow - I feel like I have been away from this community for a very long time! Blame a heavy rehearsal schedule for a performance, kid home from college fighting for on-line time, a cold and a loooong book fair. I am terrified to look at my Google Reader as I suspect all of you have been busy at finishing and posting. I will have LOTS to read. Today, my tongue is no longer dragging on the tarmac so I think I can finish this course. YAY!

Hmmm ... eBooks. I first entered the realm of "not a book" when my husband gifted me with an audio book of Pride and Prejudice. That experiment went well so I tried some contemporary titles. Then a student's parent pulled up next to me at a red light on a warm spring day. Windows wide open, I was enjoying Billy Straight. The, shall we say expressive, language caused said parent to take a long measuring look at me and that was the end of that. Talk about caving to censorship!

I next encountered "not a book" at rehearsal where a fellow soprano was reading on what looked to me like a PDA. It was an eBook reader and while it look rather cool, the screen was gray and the letters black so the contrast wasn't all that tempting. What's more, as a person who suffers from astigmatism, the movement of the words as they scrolled caused (as my daughter says) "the worms in my stomach to start partying." Let's face it, I love my old fashioned, tree-killing, and generally ecologically unfriendly blocks of paper and text.

While waiting in a doctor's office, I had the chance to read a very long article on Amazon's new Kindle ... or maybe it was new at the time because all the periodicals were suffering from advanced age ... as was I as I waited. I was impressed by the thought behind the product - and the fact that it addressed the issue of contrast - was shaped like a book to add some tactile pleasure to the experience, stuff like that. The article also addressed issues of storage - where do bibliophiles (is that the right word) store all their treasures? Cost was also considered - for those who purchase books, an eBook is significantly cheaper. It was certainly something to mull over.

Because life is serendipitous, along came this assignment. Despite my forays into the world of Web 2.0, I found the World eBook Fair to be somewhat intimidating. Strange coming from the keyboard of a person who just spent five days trapped in the world of Scholastic! I seemed to get a huge number of hits for my searches, despite trying to tailor them and that turned me off. I liked much better, the sub-catalogs on the site like the Alex Catalogue, Author's Community Collection and Childrens eBook Collection - though you'd be better off doing research on children's literature rather than trying to find something to read that's much more current than the turn of the century.

I found LibriVox to be rather neat and enjoyed Aesop's Fox and Grapes which was read by a volunteer with a smooth and expressive voice. Such short and well done audios would be of great use in a classroom, not only for sight-impaired students or those who do best when reading along, but could be used as demonstrations for teaching children to read with expression to engage an audience. (It's in the Frameworks, I swear!)

I checked out the Best Places to get Free Books site and found two amusing sites. Book Crossing reminded me of the elementary school practice of leaving a teddy bear in an airport and seeing where he ends up as travelers pick him up and send postcards from his various destinations. It was interesting to see that the site tracks real old-fashioned books vs. eBooks. LibraryElf is a disorganized person's dream by keeping track of an entire family's worth of books from various libraries. I have solved that problem by putting my due dates on the kitchen calendar and keeping the books on top of my dresser, but we can't all be anal-retentive.

Week 9, Thing 21 - Podcasts

My first thought upon looking at podcasts was "Help!" I fished around a bit for the tutorial which was a bit too techy, though I am not, and never have been, a "Flashing 12." I found a better description with less distractions on the page at the NPR Podcast Directory Help. What was most confusing to me was whether or not one needed podcast software like iTunes and the discovery exercise direction to subscribe to a podcast using an RSS feed. I've still not found that little orange RSS button anywhere on the podcast pages I saw. However, I was successful with the assignment.

A bit defeated by my inability to locate an RSS button, I decided to look at using iTunes for my podcast of Wait, Wait ... Don't Tell Me! from NPR. I clicked the iTunes button, the iTunes store appeared, I clicked on the free "purchase" and voila, there it was in iTunes. It was quite simple and I began to wonder why I had thought this would be difficult.

Not willing to give up on using an RSS feed and Google Reader, I decided thatI would pit my talents against this challenge and figure it out. I prowled among the entries of my classmates for clues and hit upon purpleglassesclub who has been a wonderful inspiration throughout this course. You can blame her for helping me understand the hyperlink tool and my hyperactivity in using it. "Hmmm," thought I, "if she can embed this link in her blog, perhaps I can embed the link in Google Reader." So I tried it ... and it worked! What link did I cheerfully steal? Why that of Children's Literature with Daniel Pinkwater. I then went back and did the same with "Wait, Wait" and am now free of iTunes (which is incredibly slow on my computer) and I will see all the new entries when I log into Google Reader. I suppose one benefit of using iTunes over Google Reader is that my husband can listen to the "Wait" podcasts without having to go into Google Reader. We'll have to wait a bit to see how the new week downloads to iTunes. An interesting note, when subscribing through iTunes, I got only the latest broadcast, but when subscribing through Google Reader, I got everything back to December, 2007.

Did I find anything useful? My main thrust was figuring out the tool and I was so busy doing that, thoughts of my students went into suspended animation. I think using podcasts for research could be very interesting especially for very current topics where books are not available. NPR frequently covers a topic over a number of days giving very complete and balanced coverage. Subscribing to a podcast would alleviate time spent searching for the broadcast and send it to the student's computer. I'm not sure where I would go with this tool in an elementary school. Looking more closely at the Educational Podcast Directory would be a place to start, but for now I know there isn't a computer in my domain that can handle this tool, so I will have plenty of time to think.

Week 9, Thing 20 - YouTube, etc.

I have oft wondered what was going on upstairs when my husband disappeared for hours. One day, I discovered his YouTube addiction. He is a fan of Chad Vader and several others and I have been forced to watch whatever his latest fascination is, though sometimes it is hamsters so that's okay. Needless to say, I did not bring a terribly open mind to this discovery exercise. Imagine my surprise to find that there might be something useful about this tool.

Hmmm ... what did I dislike about YouTube? I found the sound in many of the videos to be of poor quality and the camera work often jerky which is anathema to someone who gets motion sick in a rocking chair (aka "me") A good number of the library videos contained language that I was not comfortable with. Call me a censor, or even a hypocrite, but I can't upload something with inappropriate language or situations. (Is my "elementary" status showing?)

What I did like, was the immensity of YouTube's collection - meaning I could find things that were funny or informative without being offensive. Yahoo Video pales by comparison as does Google Video, but they had many, many more than poor Yahoo. I really liked YouTube's Video Toolbox with advice from the pros on correcting those sound and shake issues I had.

I found a very cute School Library Media Specialist video on YouTube that runs just about a minute and a half. I was drawn to the Sam Spade-like aspect of the film - done in black and white, a solemn voice-over, and 40's type music. Very cool.



My favorite tool was TeacherTube (how predictable!) where I found a spiffy video on information resources that spoofs "American Idol." I can see linking this video to any library web-page where I think it would be really appealing to our young patrons. This video is just over six minutes long, but was funny, informative and very worth it.



TeacherTube is what got some ideas running around in my head. Could we record and upload "Reading Rainbow" type book reviews done by our students? Could we link to short videos that cover a curricular concept for a "Homework Help" page? What about a video that gave a "tour" of the library web-page? I have found the videos that have been included in our discovery resources have been the thing that I have gone to first in learning about something new. Surely our students - who are even more tuned in to this media - would find this an exciting way to learn - without knowing they are learning.

Finally, I love the help feature on Blogger which gave me simple directions on embedding these videos and now that I have finally discovered it - I love the spell check. Yep, it took me 'til tonight to find it.

Week 8, Thing 19 - LibraryThing

This assignment was pretty easy for me. I had already taken a good look at LibraryThing several assignments back and I really liked it. I have mentioned before, that I do not own very many books. I'm my local library's best buddy because I am a constant borrower. Therefore, I really don't have any personal books to catalog, but I have recently purchased some exceptional picture books for our school system's "Reach Out and Read" (ROAR) program, so I cataloged those. My colleague and I choose picture books to be read to our fourth and fifth grade classes by community readers. (The K-3 classes are read to in the fall) This year, we tied into the ALA theme of "Read Around the Circle of Knowledge - so we changed it to "Reach Out and Read Around ..." and we concentrated on circle of life, circle of family and circle of friendship. I was really pleased with what we found especially because not only are they substantive and well-suited for reading aloud, but fit the curriculum (yay!) quite well.

Most of these books are not terribly well known - at least on LibraryThing so there was little in the way of review or discussion, but what was there was very positive about these titles. "Henry's Freedom Box" was the most popular title of my "library" because it was a Caldecott Honor Book - it was included in 114 collections.

Week 8, Thing 18 - On-Line Productivity Tools

I am taking the plunge and attempting to publish this entry to my blog from Zoho Writer. Wish me luck!

I thought I would try some of the tools within the tool and see how they work. Brave of me. If you have read my blog, you know I have Campbell's Russian Dwarf hamsters. We had a litter on February 14th Miss Lucy gave us ... seven dwarves. I'm using the Insert/Modify Image tool to show you a pig pile of tiny bodies.

Okay - enough playing. One of the things that immediately struck me when looking at and reading about Zoho Writer was the ability to edit from anywhere. We have four librarians in our district and we are responsible for maintaining a Program Profile that must be updated yearly. We all work very well together so we share the editing. Just last month we had a flurry of e-mails and attachments back and forth to make the necessary changes. I only have two schools where I can open a Word attachment so had to wait to make comments until I was in the "right" place. Zoho Writer eliminates that barrier as well as allows editing to the original document while tracking changes. As you can imagine, the first thing I did in Zoho Writer was to share the discovery with my colleagues.

We will also be working on a five-year plan as well as a comprehensive curriculum. One of the biggest downsides to working on those projects (besides lack of time) was who would get "stuck" typing it up and distributing it to her colleagues. This might help get us motivated because we can share the load. We've also just completed revisions to our selection policy. With a district in financial crisis, we can save paper by sharing the document with the superintendent and school committee and invite comments via Zoho Writer. This is certainly something to think about to streamline our administrative responsibilities. And - thinking entirely selfishly at this point - administrators may see the librarians as successful users of technology and include our libraries in the next technology bond. (I wish)

On the education side of things, the fact that Zoho Writer so closely resembles Word, will make it easy for students to "hit the ground running." You know those group projects that parents absolutely hate? Zoho Writer allows each member of the group to access the document as needed, enter his/her information, edit when needed, etc. Will this necessarily improve the quality of the output? Maybe not. But teachers will be able to see who has been doing the work via the tracking changes. And - (dream on) if a student is on vacation ... they need not miss out on working with the group. You can all stop laughing now. Let's put it this way - a student who is home recovering or able to handle limited days in school, can still be part of the group. (Much more likely I'm sure.)

I haven't found the tool to be "perfect." I'm still getting that "thunk" in my stomach when I try pressing a button to see what happens. Though the "thunk" would not be as desperate were I mucking around in a play document instead of what I hope to be my blog I still can't figure out how to use a template and I nearly lost my mind over switching to "page view" and figuring out how to get back to my happy editing page - but time and practice will certainly turn me into a successful user. No doubt the students will become successful a lot faster than me.

p.s. When the document posted to my blog, the picture was initially in place, but when I edited for a typo, it did not come back. I added it through Blogger. None of my smiley faces came over either. Interesting.