Still More Great Links

Grading again on back porch with dog and cat napping nearby. Birds are in full voice right now. Here are some great links that I picked up today from students' explorations and reports thereof:

• Five Minute Videos: http://www.5min.com/This site is self descriptive...There are some nifty iPhone things I want to view later. You would need to supervise students or download because some may be not so great, such as "How to Spy on Your Neighbor." Still, I really like this site
• Twitter Fan Wiki: http://twitter.pbwiki.com/ Gotta love this one! It is a wiki where you can learn more about Twitter. Some pages grouped by subjects are linked here. I will return to this one also.
• Edfucational Wikis: http://educationalwikis.wikispaces.com/Examples+of+educational+wikis Yep, an educational wiki about educational wikis. Great links here!
• Hip Librarians Book Blog: http://hiplibrariansbookblog.blog-city.com/ This one sounds familiar but I did not have it tagged already, and some of you may not have seen it. It is current and active and looks very promising to me.
• Hey Jude: http://heyjude.wordpress.com/ Students of mine, take a look here. She talks about a lot of the things WE talk about in classes! Lots of musings about Web 2.0 tools.

I would like to add kudos to my MLS students at Sam Houston State University who keep coming up with new links to me. I love to collect and share resources and hope that some of these will be useful to readers.

More Goodies from Students

Here I am grading again and enjoying a lovely Mother's Day all by myself. My daughter is at home in Portland, OR, but we talked and she is planning a visit in early June. In my honor (so she said) she paid off her library fine today. How much? I ask...$80.00. Ah well, she is using the library. I took a ride on my new toy, an electric bike that I named PeeWee. Here is the link to the distributor: http://www.rmartinbikes.com/
Mine is the E500 at the bottom of the page only mine is red, and yes, it does look like the bike in "PeeWee's Big Adventure." It is getting me up the steep hills in my neighborhood, and I plan to use it to run errands and go to work. Take that Big Oil!

Anyway, as always, I picked up some good links from students today:

• Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day, which I had seen before but not visited in a while: http://janeknight.typepad.com/pick/
• Wes Fryer's Wiki, Teach Digital: http://teachdigital.pbwiki.com/ I follow his blog but somehow had missed this great site.
• Board Games with Scott: http://www.boardgameswithscott.com/
• Donalyn Miller's Blog, The Book Whisperer: http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/book_whisperer/
• Paul Allison's Vlog: http://paulrallison.livejournal.com/
• Here is a good list of royalty free image sites that I just found at Wes Fryer's wiki: http://www.macworld.com/article/57935/2007/05/2407workingmacextra.html
  

Learning from Students Again--Web 2.0 School Sites

My MLS students had to explore a number of Web 2.0 sites in order to do an assigment somewhat similar to 23 Things. Here are some good sites I picked up from their submissions:

• Educational Podcast Network/EPN: I already had this one tagged but was glad of the reminder: http://epnweb.org/
• Wiki from a school in Redondo Beach, CA: http://adamsnews.wikispaces.com/
• How to make all sorts of cool things: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/make_podcast/
• Great podcasts: Sarah Anne Long's Longshots: http://www.sarahlong.org/podcast/
• School-wide wiki: http://villagewiki.pbwiki.com/
  
• Houston school librarian blog: http://alibraryisalibrary.blogspot.com/
• Tech teacher wiki with lots of good links: http://computerkiddoswiki.pbwiki.com/

I think it is great to visit these and a growing number of school sites that show creative ideas for using Web 2.0 resources. Further, I hope that people who are currently blocked by filters will take note of these and similar sites. Show them to the powers that be in your schools and districts. Ask them why so many other educators and students have access, while yours are being blocked. Maybe this is one tool that can help others gain access.

MySpace Musings

I am again happily staying at home and grading work from my MLS students. As always, I learn from them as I go through submissions. I am going to make a few comments and also share sites as I progress. One thing students were required to do was explore MySpace. Comments below are my musings on their findings.

• One student just shared that, in the process of looking at MySpace for an assignment, she found some pages that belonged to her own 4th & 5th grade students, who were obviously lying about their ages and also were giving out private information. So she presented a general lesson on netiquette and online safety and, without singling out students, discussed safety and privacy. She got positive feedback from both students and parents. Now here is where I want to rant...naturally due to filters she had to do this search at home. What on earth is the sense of blocking librarians, counselors, principals and other professionals from getting to any site immediately from their offices or schools? EVERY SCHOOL SHOULD HAVE IMMEDIATE FILTER OVERRIDE POWER ON CAMPUS, vested in several people. This bit about blocking access to everyone is DANGEROUS instead of enhancing safety.
• About MySpace--I am not saying that we should open it for general school use, but rather that all educators should know about it and be acquainted with its strengths and weaknesses. Not allowing educators to gain access to any website they need to see goes beyond paternalism and into the realm of insult. The assignment my students did (working from home of course) called upon them to find one inappropriate MySpace site, and one "good" site. More than anything I wanted them to explore this environment and see its possibilities rather than just have opinions based of media hype. Most of my students admit they have never even visited MySpace or FaceBook before.
  
• Here is a very good MySpace page from Florida, Ask a Librarian: http://www.myspace.com/askalibrarianfl
• Here is another great library MySpace, from Denver Public Library: http://room132.com/