We took content samples from our subscription databases including Facts on File, Teaching Books, Tumblebooks, Discovery Education videostreaming and worked in PowerPoint. Not that we produced slideshows, but we looked at how users can use visuals…be they clipart, photos, maps, etc. and manipulate them for use in PPTs and other things. The participants also found out how easy it is to download and use pieces of videostreaming.

One of the things I also emphasize in this type of staff development is to look “outside the box”… think about how a historical photo can be used to teach word meanings or use a science video to explain a particular idiom. And my favorite part…using picture books to introduce a concept or ideas for end products the students can create themselves!

Another idea that came out was that by including lots of visuals and silly bits of video, a teacher will have captured the attention his or her students so that even MORE learning can take place. Our kids are visual learners these days and it is a shame not use as much “stuff” as possible.

And yes, we had an oops moment..something to always expect when working with technology. You gotta learn to roll with the punches. What was our oops?…the screen shot I made would NOT paste to the PPT so we could manipulate it. That was a first for me! But that’s ok..we still practiced with the crop tool and the grouping technique and turned our “pretend” screen shots into the weirdest new bird—a wingless chicken with a Sphinx head! Names anyone?

One other thing I did…I challenged the group to “play” 15 minutes a day…mess around in an online resource, play with PPT tools, READ blogs (yep—showed them the blogroll!), but do SOMETHING with technology or explore an online resource EVERY day. Sounds simple enough, but I know..even 15 minutes will be hard to squeeze out of the days of most of these people…their plates are very full…but it WILL be worth it…they will benefit…and more importantly, so will their students!

How did we end this action-packed day? Animoto of course!
Sample: http://animoto.com/play/a6df2b2069bf9260b24c6c822387db3a
(I can’t get it to embed!!)

I hope some of the participants will share their classroom ideas here in the comments…

Thought you might like to see the ones that came up on my radar screen recently. They can sure be a help with animal studies, weather, and geography…and I know you can come up with all kinds of reasons to check them out and use them with your students and your own viewing pleasure!

This morning CBS Sunday Morning did a feature on The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee. Female elephants are brought here to live out their lives in groups, with “best friends,” and plenty of acreage. They have both Asian and African elephants who were circus performers and zoo residents. Thoe oweners set up the cameras so that we could watch the animals, but not disturb them in this comfortable habitat. There is a series of lessons that you can use along with video footage.

The National Park Service has a series of web cams throughout its parks for a variety of reasons. The ones noted on this map also record weather statistics. Included is information on how to use the information in lessons about air pollution, acid rain, and ozone issues.

Additional web cams (without air quality info) include Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite.

Around ten years ago, I discovered the africam series of web cams and they helped turn me into the internet junkie I can be at times. most of the cams are trained on water holes where you can watch a virtual parade of animals pass by.

On the same site are a couple cams in North America…the Bald Eagle cam and the Osprey cam.

Also included at this site is a cam of the pyramids in Egypt…not the most exciting cam site unless you are into sunsets, BUT they have some things helpful to students and one is a visual comparion chart of how large things are in relation to the pyramids…fun way to present point of view, big and little, or compare and contrast.

And take a look at this…a mashup of web cam photos and YouTube video technology! What a fun way to talk about Africa and its animals! There are more videos…check the blog here.

A wonderful group of teachers, librarians and other school people are spending the afternoon learning about blogs and wikis at the Regional Service Center.

After doing a little research on their own, their comments about the experience included:

Cool Cat Teacher: using blogs, wikis to help our teachers and our students do lots of things…has helpful ino on how-to

TeenLibrarian: urban fiction for teens..short stories about teens, comments about the books and stories

Just One More Book: used author list looking for particular authors especially for middle school…not too many choices, but idea of podcasts was intriguing.

Library of Congress: upcoming events, podcasts of different authors, events, blog

Nelson Central: looking at the different classes, very simple lessons about letters for very young children that she could use with her very young students

Kathy Schrock: downloading unitedstreaming onto i-pods…using the medium in a different format

Wiki thoughts:

One of the groups present was from a district where their teachers use wikis for a variety of things: online discussion, share information between teachers about subject areas, training, communication between team leaders, etc…post changes and edits of information,post response for homework on wiki page.

LibrarySuccess Best Practices: good stuff!

We did spend the last part of the time looking at how to create a blog and seeing how “ridiculously” easy it is!

FYI:

Some other blogging “class” notes to review other thoughts…

July 10th

June 10th

and if you have any doubts about using technology with kids, review this post and watch the video (it wouldn’t work for our class today so I am making it available for the students should they check here!)

[go here to see comments the students made to the post as it appeared on my mirror image!]

Library girl tagged me to do a visual meme… a screen shot of my desktop…and since I TRY really hard to make this a learning & informational blog…I completed the task and am giving you the directions how to use a PowerPoint slide as a work surface for any photo…screenshot or digital photo.

She gave great directions for taking the screen shot.
Paste the shot to a blank slide in PowerPoint. Use the “crop tool” from the Picture toolbar to cut away excess parts of the picture you don’t want or need…of course I didn’t cut a lot way on this one because it was the desktop!
Save the results in whatever format you need or want. Remember jpeg is a great general format for lots of uses.
That’s it..easy as that!

O yes…my desktop…I LOVE this Microsoft desktop…it has been around for a really long time and I put it on any computer that I can control the desktop. I try to keep the geranium uncovered (my attempt to keeping the desktop clean) and I use the glass window panes to park things I am working on..be they documents, PPTs, or catalog records! and it reminds me a lot of a favorite part of the country that is a long way away from here and that I don’t get to visit anymore…sort of a way to daydream and work at the same time.

And yes, you might notice my trashcan …lower right corner…my homage to the many “happy” days I spent on MACs!

Ok, I guess I fulfilled the meme… I tag anyone who is interested!

Happy 9th birthday to Google…can you believe it!

From the site:
Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake.

I really don’t remember BG (before Google!) I have certainly taken advantage of much of its growth and development. Here’s the timeline from the site itself!

P.S. Don’t you just love the clever artwork each and every time on special dates? I would love to know those creative people…bet they are fun!

If you are a “techie” or a big sci-fi fan, this is probably the test for you, for sure!

It was fun…and did make me think about some things!

Caution: it is a tad long, but not too time-consuming.

ANIMOTO
http://animoto.com/play/a462c2d1fe46475b480b18b8b6e7f6e3
this link is the movie I made to learn the process using the only batch of pictures I had handy…hence the reason for it only being 26 seconds long.
If it doesn’t play because of a password issue, try one of theirs…I saw a cool little movie about skateboarding in the preview pane. It is a simple 1 – 2 – 3 process.

Of course, at this moment, I am not sure it will be available inside my school district…guess I will find out tomorrow.

All the interesting techniques with the pictures, Animoto did that…it does ask you to highlight a few of the pictures for extra punch…and you can choose one of their music files…not too many to my taste, but, hey…it’s free!! and it does all the work for you…so I am not complaining! (You can use your own music file–be sure you are not violating copyright!)

Go have some fun…it is E-A-S-Y.

P.S. It took me longer to create this post than it did my little movie…of course typing can be a bit of a problem when your space bar all of a sudden decides to stick! o, brother…technology is fickle, isn’t it?

I took these pictures of the newest wind farm in West Texas…just north of San Angelo and outside of Sterling City along Hiway 87. The turbines look closer than they really are…the first picture gives a better perspective as to how far from the double-lane, divided hiway they are.

And yes, I stopped the car to take the pictures! I was interested in taking a picture or two because I drive this road pretty regularly and NEVER saw the construction of these HUGE objects (see facts below) until July…and I was almost past them before I “saw” them. This time I was watching carefully… and when they were wrapped in a beautiful early morning ground fog like a bride in yards and yards of tulle, it took my breath away! Friends and family often wonder why I enjoy the rather lengthy drive from Houston to the area…well, wonder no more…this is just one reason! It was a beautiful late summer morning.

I saw my first wind farm years ago in Southern Cailfornia along I-10 as you cross from Arizona into Cailfornia and was pretty impressed then too. I have seen a couple of older locations in Texas, but no matter how often I see them, I am always impressed with the size of the turbines. From a recent San Angelo newspaper article:

Sterling County’s first wind farm has:
- 415-foot turbines that stand taller than the Statue of Liberty, which is 305 feet tall from the ground to the tip of the flame.
- Each generates 2.3 megawatts of electricity. A megawatt, or 1 million watts, can power 400 homes at any given moment.
- The housing for the turbine atop the pylon, called a nacelle, is the size of a school bus.
- The generating equipment inside the nacelle weighs 25 tons.
- Each blade weighs 14 tons. Its tip speed of 220 mph powers a drive shaft through the three-stage gear box that produces 18,000 revolutions per minute.

If you would like some more information about wind farms and wind power, check out this site. It includes a video clip, a powerpoint presentation, and lots of photos from another wind farm site near Abilene, Texas. Found this slide interesting!

Ironically, as I was making three return trips from the Dallas area going south on I-45 in August, coming north on the freeway were oversized trucks carrying these huge blades. I wondered at first what in the world these items could be and then the light bulb came on…blades for these turbines headed somewhere north…not sure where, since they were travelling up I-45, but anyway, figured they must have come by ship from somewhere and were off-loaded at the Houston port. According to the article, it looks like my theory was correct…and they are constructed in Denmark.

ANOTHER reason I love my various road trips that I take! I just get to see all kinds of interesting things and learn “new stuff”…did you know the Texas rest stops have wireless internet? !!!

Anyway… do you need some new books on wind power for your renewable energy collection?
Wind power of the future : new ways of turning wind into energy / Tecco c2003
Wind / Naff, ed. c2007
Wind power / Petersen c2004 Children’s Press
Generating wind power / Walker c2007 Crabtree
Wind power / Morris c2006 Smart Apple Media
Wind power / Sherman c2004 Capstone

Key words/Subjects: wind power, wind farms, wind power plants. Other call #s 621.31, 621.45

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They are looking at samples of blogs and getting a sense of what blogs contain and what bloggers write about.

At the beginning of class, because they are a new group pf students, we popcorned out what comes to mind when you say the word “LIBRARY.” Their answers included…resource, book, books, information, technology, FUN, interactive, access, reading…. What are your thoughts?

One of the students brought up a very important question? What do you do if parents of your students do not want their picture on the web? (we had been viewing the video from the elementary school’s student blogs). I suggested doing audio podcasts only in the beginning or making blogging an after school elective! What suggestions can you give this person for her concern?

The students are looking at different types of blogs and noting the similarities and differences found in blogs. I will post some of their findings at a later date.

I had fun…I hope they did too (and I hope they learned a little something about blogs as well!)

[Please go here to my "mirror blog" to use their comments about the experience]

An of course, many of us digital immigrants can remember first hand all the hulabaloo there was over the Kennedy-Nixon televised debate and the “famous” shadow problem. And how we all were riveted to the TV during those terrible days in November only 3 years later.

So why were “we” so shocked that blogs and other web pages were important elements in the last campaign or two and that this go-round’s candidates are also busy creating digital videos that show up on YouTube or the nearest cell phone!

Why would we expect them not to use the latest (and greatest?) methods of communicating to reach as many voters as possible with their plans for our country’s future?

So…why can’t “we” accept that it is  JUST as necessary for our schools to use these tools  in educating  as many students as possible for our country’s future…and theirs!