Archives: tools

The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) has identified 25 websites deemed “Best for Teaching and Learning.”
AASL provides a description of each of these free, user-friendly web-based resources, teaching tips for using them in the classroom, and alignment of each to Standards for 21st Century Learners. The Top 25 include tools and resources in:

• Organizing and Managing
• Content Collaboration
• Curriculum Sharing
• Media Sharing
• Virtual Environments
• Social Networking and Communication

The Top 25 Web sites for Teaching and Learning were named so because they foster the qualities of innovation, creativity, active participation and collaboration. The Web sites honored include: Animoto; Classroom 2.0; Curriki; Diigo; Edublogs; Facebook; Good Reads; Google Reader; Mindmeister; Ning; Our Story; Partnership for 21st Century Skills; Polleverywhere; Primary Access; RezED; Second Life; Simply Box; Skype; SOS for Information Literacy; Teacher Tube; Twitter; VoiceThread; Wikispaces; Wordle; and Zoho.

NPR aired a segment clickers (student response systems) on March 2. Click here to listen to the 7:45 piece.

Although this story focuses on college-level use, clickers can an engaging way to gather formative data in K12 classrooms.

Opera has made available a tool called MAMA that anyone can use to mine their research on the structure of web pages… so if you want to know what the web actually looks like underneath (it ain’t pretty):

http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama/

I don’t know that this has any practical value for us, but I found it interesting that the average web page still has tables nested three-deep.

As we start using more audio on the website and in online courses, this article from Boxes and Arrows might be of some help. It addresses the issue of information architecture in audio design and how to improve the user’s experience of the audio.

This was a letter to the editor we submitted to the News & Observer a couple weeks ago in response to an article about a parent who objected to her kid using the internet in class. The letter didn’t get picked up, but I think it’s important for staff to remember that while what we do seems obviously beneficial to us, there are still a lot of people who aren’t very keen on using the interweb in schools.

The letter:

Regarding the article, “Parents, schools at odds over Internet,” I certainly respect parents’ rights to decide what’s best for their children. However, making blanket objections to Internet use in today’s classroom is equal to objecting to textbooks.

Part of a teacher’s job is finding the best means of achieving instructional goals, whether that entails using a website or a chalk board. Teachers don’t choose online tools merely because they can, but because the information and the manner of presentation offer something uniquely valuable. Online applications such as Google Docs, NC WiseOwl, and Web-based educational resources from NASA offer levels of content, collaboration, and accessibility that simply cannot be replicated offline.

Further, the ability to use online technology is a vital skill in and of itself. Yes, you can find inappropriate material on the Web. But rather than hide the Internet from children, teachers must instruct students how to use it safely. Information literacy — the ability to find the good info and discard the bad — is a critical 21st Century skill. Shielding children may protect them in the short term, but it robs them of the ability to make intelligent informational decisions in the long run.

Melissa Thibault
Executive Director
LEARN NC

We had a productive meeting with Angela Bardeen and Chad Haefele from the UNC libraries. So many of the periodicals we would like to read are already part of the Libraries’ subscription services. Besides, with our work loads it is increasingly unlikely that we’ll keep up with reading our journals, so it seems even more foolish to subscribe to print editions.

Setting up an RSS feed from brings the most current articles to your desktop and offers an opportunity to stay current with a small investment of time and no investment of money. We spent about an hour working to get feeds in three RSS environments: Pageflakes, iGoogle and Google Reader.

Pageflakes and iGoogle provide a dashboard-type widget-intensive option that many of us find useful. If you need help with Pageflakes, Bobby and I are using that pretty extensively. Gail was working in iGoogle. Google Reader is easier to set up, I think, but requires you to actually go to another place to read your feeds… unless you cheat and use a web page widget in your Pageflakes to display your Google Reader feeds, like I do!

Bottom line, it was pretty easy to get the subscription content from some of the vendors, namely EBSCOhost, CSA, Gale and ISI, working in our various readers of choice. RSS feeds are still “experimental” in these products, so there is no guarantee that it will always work (as we experienced ourselves Tuesday morning!). Our library guides reassured us that if we persevere, we will get the feeds working just as we need them to, and if we get stuck, they are just an email or phone call away.

Contact Angela or Chad if you have any questions or need further assistance:
bardeen at email.unc.edu
chaefele at email.unc.edu
or by phone 919-962-1151

As is evident to anyone reading, I have struggled with blogging. My “fits and starts” are a result of my uncertainty of purpose and lack of time to allocate to this process. Who am I writing for? What is important enough to require my chiming in to the discussions in the blogosphere? How can I find the time to actually process issues of import? For me, Blogging has been more of a thing to be observed than a thing that comes naturally.

For others, however, it is a very different story. I have enjoyed the work of avid bloggers who write to think, and the product of their effort really contributes to the conversations about teaching and learning. This inspires me to keep at it, and brings up another important point — just because I am not driven to blog doesn’t mean blogs are useful as tools for learning. (Hear Homer Simpson here… “D’oh!”)

Two interesting ideas that seem right on to me. The first, Blogging the Research Process. In a September 2007 blog entry, Joyce Valenza recommends this practice as a way to facilitate transparency and constructivism, noting that through blogging, students can reflect on the process, get organized, and involve others in the process, ultimately contributing to the larger body of knowledge. The second, also from School Library Journal, is another simple yet powerful way to use blogging tools to enhance learning… a Book Blog. Like a book club, the Guerrilla Season Book Blog provides a place for students to engage their classmates and the rest of the world a project in which the “… diverse group exchanged thoughtful impressions about the book and pondered some provocative questions, adding a whole new dimension to the reading experience.” (Langhorst, 2006)

Simple, logical, powerful tools for learning. I get it. You can too! Pick up The Guerrilla Season and join Eric Langhorst’s book blog project between MARCH 3 and APRIL 4, 2008. See you there!

As an economics major, I know widgets. I have considered the elasticity of demand for widgets, the consumer surplus when widgets are priced competitively, and the change in price when the component materials for making widgets are suddenly more scarce. Always, my professors discussed economic concepts in terms of widgets.

Now, today, I am actually using widgets! Thanks to Widgetbox, I can easily create a way to keep up with ever-changing content like the LEARN NC features and the latest Instructify articles. I’ve even created one for this blog.

Just this morning, Bobby and I were discussing how we really need something to pull together the fiftyleven things we need to update, read, check, and generally pay attention to. How can we keep up with it all?

Pageflakes might just help me, as they promise in their byline, Get it Together. Using this tool, I can pull together the news, online tools, blogs and more that I am trying to keep up with. I can even create widgets and with one click, put them on my Pageflakes page. Pretty cool, eh?

I happened upon the New Media Consortium this week (and signed up as UNC TLT is a member organization!) and a report that may be of interest. The 2007 Horizon Report identifies key trends that and projects the adoption of various technologies in classrooms. The trends identified include increased importance (and unfounded assumptions) about information literacy skills, increasing globalization in the way we work and communicate, the interdisciplinary and collaborative aspects of digital scholarship (and the slow adoption of this in academia), the evolution of the read-write web (called collective intelligence and mass amateurization in this report) as an important contribution to scholarship … these validate the work we are doing at LEARN NC. The report also projects the top emerging technologies that will effect education in the next 5 years. This year’s report includes user-created content, social networking, mobile phones, and virtual worlds as the technologies to watch first. For more info, check out the attached report.

I search the web for information but for me that’s only half of it. I want to find the stuff from the sites I like… Edutopia, ERIC, Annenberg’s learner.org, and LEARN, of course… and so I either use the Google advanced search and limit my search to each site… one at a time, OR I can use OmniFind. I first read about this in an American Libraries article about enterprise searching. The focus of this article was more “how can we find our emails and documents on the intranet” and I suppose that is a desirable outcome as well, but for me it is more about searching my favorite education sites.

So when Walbert asks “How do 8th graders understand history?” I want to find some articles and resources to help me to answer this question. Using OmniFind I search the collection of resources the program’s web crawler has found… and I get America’s History in the Making which looks like a teacher’s guide to teaching history. Sure enough, the first part of this “… six-hour workshop focuses first on the Historical Thinking Skills developed by the National Center for History in the Schools.”

OmniFind, like Google Desktop, probably can be set to crawl my hard drive and who knows where they store the info that is scanned… so those of you (db) who are anxious about privacy might want to look into that more closely. I guess it depends upon what you have on your computer… as State employees our documents are public records so I am careful to keep personal stuff separate. I think the tool has potential so I’m taking my chances!