Glogster State Reports

My 4^th grade student just completed their State Report Glogs. It was a project that I had them complete in the library because there is just not enough time in a school year for teachers to get to everything and I wanted to give them another Web2.0 tool for their toolbox.

When we do a project in the library it always takes so much longer to complete because we only meet once a week and many times the students have other commitments during library special like band and orchestra or speech. If there is no school one day that puts us back even farther. Students have been working on gathering their information and pictures, and playing with the Glogster tool since mid January. The last class finished last Friday. What is a glog you ask? A glog is an interactive electronic poster. It has so many educational uses that one Glogster account is not enough for a librarian. The way it works is a teacher and/or librarian signs up for an educational Glogster account. Glogster then gives you 50 student logins. You can have your students create their login or you can do what I did, I had each student create a login with their first name being their classroom number and their last name being the classroom teacher’s last name. Not only did this offer an additional level of security for my under age-13 students but I will be able to use those accounts over next year with the same classes. It also provided an interesting grading outcome. I graded each glog against the same rubric not knowing which student did the glog. All I knew was their classroom teacher and their class number. When I was putting the grades in my grade book I noticed that many of the special education students had actually done better with the project than the gifted education students. Embedded here are several glogs, see if you can tell which students are gifted and which are in special education.

While this was not a scientific experiment by any means, I can’t wait to see if the results are duplicated the next time I assign a Glogster project. The students also enjoyed the Glogster network and looking at the glogs created by their fellow students. Great tool to introduce social networking in a controled environment, a walled garden so to speak.

F.I.N.E.

Someone in my Personal Learning Network (PLN) was complaining the other day because in response to a perfectly reasonable request his or her teenager got angry, slammed bedroom door and said, “Fine.” If you have ever heard a teenager use that word in that tone, you know that they are not using the word fine the same way you do when someone asks you how are things going and you say, “fine.” Totally different! And, leave it to the British component of my PLN to explain it the way her mother would! Not even sure which British friend it was but she said her mother defines fine as: “F.I.N.E.: fed up, insecure, “k” nackered, and emotional. And that my friend totally explains the attitude and tone of the word when it is spit in your direction! I now admit that I had no idea what “k” nackered meant, so I had to look it up myself and learned from Wiktionary that it means extremely tired or exhausted. So, now you know too. When your teen, student, child, or spouse says they are “fine.” They could mean something totally different than the word implies!

MySpace, Attorneys General Tighten Internet Safety

An article written by Joan Oleck on the School Library Journal website on Monday says that MySpace and the attorney general of 49 states and the District of Columbia have a greed to some best practices, guidelines, and educator tools to help keep children safe from predators while they are on social networking sites.

Does this mean the willy-nilly, hi-ho silver, anything-goes days of the Internet are over? Well, probably not. MySpace according to the article has already put some of the practices into place. It now reviews every image uploaded to the site, automatically makes profiles of 14 and 15 year olds private, and will start enforcing its minimun sign-up age (which is 14). I am not saying this won’t help, what I am saying is that there is no regulation forcing MySpace to do these things… so what’s in it for them? Is MySpace really trying to be the good cop? We can hope so! According to their chief of security, MySpace’s cooperation with law enforcement is “a model” for Social Networking. Again what is in it for them? Well, lets look at it rationally, Facebook has been getting a lot of air play recently… what was MySpace to do? Becoming the child-safe social network may just be their way of getting their name out there and having parents say to their teens, you can join MySpace, they’re the safe network. It always comes down to the bottom line!

Facebook backs down...

It took a little over three weeks, less than a month. I was wondering just how long it would take for users of Facebook to get fed up with the social networking site’s decision to publish their purchases to other members on the site. The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima labeled her article, “Feeling Betrayed, Facebook Users Force Site to Honor Their Privacy.” Nakashima says over 50,000 Facebook users signed a petition calling on the site to stop broadcasting people's transactions without their consent. And, Facebook backed down. They now will ask permission before they broadcast to the world when and for what you are plunking down your hard earned money. Check out Nakashima's story:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/29/AR2007112902503.html?nav=rss_technology
or: http://tinyurl.com/33l6d7.
With all of this commercialism on the Internet, is it any wonder that Internet2 is becoming so important to educational institutions?

Social networking can make you smile…

Lately in my district and in my graduate class we’ve been looking and talking about social networking. I can’t think of social networking as only MySpace and Facebook. I consider video conferencing a viable social networking experience. My students have benefited from 2 video conferences with published authors so far this year. But video conferencing is so much more than that, it is social networking at its finest. Besides, video conferencing with friends can make you smile more than anything posted on YouTube! On the day after Thanksgiving I was signed on to iChat on my Mac, hoping to start up an Instant Messenging chat session with my sister-in-law. PC users often Instant Message, Mac users videoconference! At the same time I was signing on to iChat, on the big island of Hawaii my friend Barbara (one of the reason’s I’m a librarian… she was my children’s very techy elementary school librarian back in the early 90's) was signing onto her Mac iChat. She invited me into a video chat. We talked for over an hour about our families, her computer upgrade, and how long it has been since we have seen each other… it has been 10 years since we visited her when she lived on Oahu. It has been even longer since we all lived in the same area, yet, because of email, cell phones, and video conferencing; we have kept in touch and have remained friends. Social networking through technology is the difference that is keeping us connected with people we have not seen for a long time. I have seen this happen over and over again. Because of the Internet and blogging, I am back in touch with friends who are missionaries in Germany. I did a simple Google search for my friend Shelly and I found her on the very first hit. The reason I found her so easily was because of her blog! We now email each other and I am sure we will get in tough by cell phone when they get back to the states later this month. There are some people who touch your life and you don’t want to let them go. Thanks to Social Networking over the Internet, I don’t have to!

Del.icio.us

The del.icio.us social bookmarking experience is something different! I am currently using del.icio.us to bookmark some sites for use in a project on Internet2 that I am working on with a group of students in my class at St. Joe’s. I tend to get lost in clouds, so I am using just the tagging feature for my bookmarks. I must admit my tags are a mess. I have not gotten the hang of it yet. I have multiple tags that stand for the same thing. How do I choose a tagging format? I want to use the tag information literacy but I can’t because del.icio.us won’t let me put a space in my tags. So I have multiple tags for information literacy: information, information-literacy, and Information_Literacy, all because I can’t remember what tag I used last time. Tagging should be simple but for me it’s not. I think most librarians have this problem because we are used to having things tagged for us. I am determined to start a new del.icio.us site and have all the tags conform to Library of Congress Subject Headings. I also bookmarked the link on my Congerjan del.icio.us.
Anyway, I have been using del.icio.us for about a year but I must admit that all I was doing was saving bookmarks. I never even shared my links or took advantage of the social aspect until recently. I turned on the sharing feature during class as others were joining del.icio.us. I joined Will Richardson’s network almost immediately. I also added the links from my favorite podcaster, Brian Dvorak who does the EDTech101 podcast. I also have two more people on my del.icio.us network now. It is interesting to see what other technology integrators are saving to their del.icio.us accounts. I hope that some of my fellow librarians and my friends in my St. Joe class will try this social aspect and we can add each other to our networks.

I Twitter…

I Twitter. Twitter is one social network that has caught me up in its clutches. If you are reading this blog you can check out what I have been twittering on the right hand side. I like Twitter. On Twitter I can catch up on friends who are traveling, what technology my librarian friends are playing with, and update the world in as few words as possible. Notice I did not say keep up with my family. The rest of my family uses Pownce. I joined Pownce because of my son. He says Leo LaPorte likes Pownce better but Leo so told his audience that he likes Jaiku better! In fact, Leo mirrors his Jaiku posts to Twitter. In fact, on his Jaiku Leo wonders outloud what will happen to Jaiku now that it is a closed system. But will he then go back to Pownce... nope, in one of his Jaiku posts he says he's headding back to Twitter! He says many of his friends are on Twitter and he misses them. And there it is from Leo's mouth... he's going where his friends are. That is what happens with social networking, we go where are friends are... or in my case where my family is... so if I want to keep up with my family and talk to them I have to go over to Pownce. But I am not getting rid of Twitter. That's where my friends are. So, I can use Twitter for my professional posts, and keeping up with my library friends, and use Powence for family stuff. Works for me.