Thing 6 Curation Tools

I read all of the information about curation tools and what I am most interested is the fact that curation tools use higher thinking skills and are a way to check to see if students know the research process and it also allows for creativity.

I read the articles and I checked out some of the tools and picked lessonpath mainly because it works through google and what I use for school has to be able to be used through google chrome.  I had trouble with this tool. I ended up making two, I am not sure how.  I also couldn't figure out how to change the order of the slides.  I inserted a video and realized that it does not want the embed code but the actual utube address. I wanted to see if I could use this for a fourth grade project that I do.  I would have to resolve the problems I had before I could conceivably do that.

Here is the link for the project that I created:

http://www.lessonpaths.com/learn/i/dr-seuss-8/dr-seuss-biography

Thing 5 Presentation Tools

THING 5 PRESENTATION TOOLS

  I did not know that there were templates for google slides which I learned from the list of resources for this assignment.  I was excited about Tellagami, as I work with elementary students grade K-4 but this tool only seems to work on Apple products.  I have to be able to use google if there is any remote chance of the application working in school.  I was impressed with the Kentucky Digital Library and I liked the visual presentation of all of the tools in Joyce Valenza's site.  One of the articles highlighted the fact that people remember 80% of what they see and only 20% of what they read so visual presentation is key to learning.  I also liked the reviews of the tools that were listed in the article entitled. Powerpoint Alternatives.  I would like to check out slidedog at some point as I am interested in how you can put up many different types of media on the same site.

In the end I used Movenote and paid the $5.00 which is a very good deal.  On my website,  I have had a link to a voice thread that does not really work this year so after messing around for a while and making some mistakes, I did manage to insert my Movenote into the spot that I had the voice thread.  I did not upload a video of me talking, too scary as it is early in the morning and a snow day, but I would like to play with this feature.  I wonder if you can have an avatar instead of an actual video.  I typically have students do this feature on my webpage and I don't want their picture on there.  Here is the link to my page:

https://sites.google.com/a/schalmont.net/jefferson-library/

Hopefully it works for you too!

I read the articles for this assignment and looked at all of the tools.  I have some familiarity with Animoto and I have had a voice thread off of my webpage at school.  It has not been working too great and probably has something to do with the fact you cited that it is no longer free.  I also signed up for storybird and am looking forward to using that.  

I wanted to do something for this assignment that I could use at school and in order to do that I needed to test what would work on the chromes that are used for school.  So Animoto was out as it is not accessible through the firewall so I settled on Pow Toons.  

Attached is the Pow Toon that I did for a project that is upcoming with fourth graders.  I found it fairly easy to use.  I had some difficulty deleting the hands that transitioned that I didn't like and whenever I tried to insert a voice over the whole thing crashed which is probably on account of the chrome books and the IT department. 

 I had fun doing this and here is the link:

https://www.powtoon.com/online-presentation/fPkVm00CTT6/barackobama/?utm_source=transactional&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Transactional-Publish-success&mode=movie#/

Cooltool3Twitter

Thing 3 TWITTER

I took the five week twitter class through UB this fall semester and so I have some familiarity with twitter.  I have made lists.  I have used piktochart.  I have a hashtag @mybookbests.  I have seventeeen followers, mainly the people I took the class with.  

I am still not comfortable using twitter and I find the volume of information overwhelming.  I read through all of the materials that were posted for this assignment and I thought they were excellent.  I learned how to get rid of accounts I was following in my lists that were not useful.  I also joined a couple of new twitter feeds.  I especially like @weareteachers and @pollyaida.

I also took the advice about building professional learning communities and I joined the librarian part of the upcoming ISTE conference.   Two of my colleagues and I have a poster presentation at the June 2017 ISTE conference in San Antonio.   I also joined a couple of the facebook groups that you mentioned that I was not already a part of, namely SLATT and the International librarian facebook page.

I loved using piktochart and I know there are other tools like that and we may use one of them to create our year end annual report.  I can see how twitter could be very useful, however, it is blocked at our school.  I was just informed of a work around.  I was told that the link is not blocked in Schoology, so I plan to create a Schoology page for my library and apparently I will then be able to access facebook and twitter through it.  I have always wanted to use twitter to tweet out book reviews to my students and the community.

I found all of the information posted in the assignment to be very useful and I will be referring back to it.  I also learned how to copy my page from twitter, drop it in paint and then upload it into this blog which was an achievement for this technically challenged neophyte.

Thing 2 Photo Fun

I read all of the materials for Thing 2 Photo Fun.  I especially liked http://bighugelabs.com/.  I used the MAP MAKER and mapped out all of the places I have been in the world which was very cool.  One application of these picture tools would be for students to choose places in the world they would like to go to and then give clues about what country it is.  In keeping with that theme, I have uploaded pictures of all of the countries I have been in the world.  Here they are:  

pixabarris

kollibri5

klausshausman

mariamichelle

fxxu

cosaphotography

skeeze

Danielwanke

fotobias

mariamichele

by tpsdave

jackmac34

Thing 01 Blogging

Hello, my name is Mary Shands.  I work at a K-4 elementary school in Rotterdam, New York.  I have been a school librarian since 1991 in the same district.  For fifteen years, I worked as the high school librarian and this is my ninth year as the elementary librarian.  

I have taken three of the on-line UB classes and loved them.  Not only did I learn new things that I could apply in my work, but I liked the on-line aspect and the camaraderie of the group discussion forums.  I also find that taking classes like these, keeps me interested in the profession.  I try on a yearly basis to get out of my comfort zone and to try new things. The one problem I might have with this class, is the lack of deadlines. I do much better with deadlines.  

What I learned about blogs was a rediscovery.  I had been using blogs about seven years ago for a project that I did with fourth grade and then fell out of the habit because I switched to a different platform for the final product.  I found it very useful to look at all of the grade level examples of blogs and I also started following one of the recommended tech educators that I had not heard of before on Face book.  I also learned that you can use Canva to make cards which might come in handy and how to upload a picture into the blog.

How I think I might use the blog professionally is currently, the middle school librarian and I have a joint STEM program.  She has something called, Maker Monday.  What she does with the middle school students that day is pre-packaged and brought over to the elementary school the next day where middle school students assist the elementary students with the project.  It would be nice to keep a blog about this so that we can see a history of the projects and share it with the community.  It will also be handy in remembering what we did for the next year!