Blog This!

If you have the Google Toolbar, you can easily and quickly blog about any site you're visiting! Simply click on the "Send To" button to share the page you're currently on. To share an excerpt from the page, simply select (highlight) the section of the page you want to share before clicking "Send To."
A new window will open up and you'll sign in to your blogger account.
Then, you can type up your post, and the link to that page is automatically inserted for you!

Which Blog Host?

There are so many hosts out there for blogging, that it can be daunting to choose where you want to call home.

This of course, largely depends on what exactly the blog will be used for. If you want to encourage an educational use of the blog, it wouldn’t exactly give you credibility to host your project at Xanga per say. However, it also isn’t a good idea to immediately dismiss hosts simply because they haven’t been used for such in the past. Who knows what tools and learning can be achieved through friend’s friends pages? And isn’t using blogs for educational tools right on that same line of thinking?

Take Live Journal for example…I have one and it has very friendly collaboration tools, more so than any other host I’ve found. If I’m interested to find other library journals, I simply do an interest search, and voila…many communities and individual journals come up. The friends page concept also helps me to keep track of my “friends” and the journals I’m interested in without having to learn and use a different tool/service. However, the personal nature of even the name, Live Journal, wouldn’t lend itself to serious educational connotation.

Then we have all these fun tools from Google, which make blogging as easy as you may want, with a million different ways to update, but only a few choices as how to display things, and not an easy way to find each other. If you do a blog search on Google, it only searches the content for your keywords, there isn’t a central interest bank to find each other with.

Edublogs and other such important sounding hosts have the ability to tag, like Live Journal, which is such a neat organizational tool, but their layouts and posting access is limited to clumsy looking links and complicated terminology designed to look impressive, but really just intimidates and confuses. Nothing like obfuscating to beat the competition, eh?

So…where do we host? What one service could possibly meet the needs of these new bloggers? How can we show a simple service that holds some dignity and respect behind it’s name (no My Space stigmata, please!) and yet is streamlined enough to have a very uncomplicated and unintimidating way to update and learn blogging, with enough tools to keep it exciting and fun?

Is there a perfect host out there?
And is Google going to be upset that I am asking without giving them top billing and perfect referral even though I’m posting on their service!

Document Collaboration

Have you guys heard about Writely?

A Google tool that lets you collaborate on documents, or simply hosts them on a server with back-up so you can access them anytime, anywhere.

This has a lot of potential to be very useful for revision, and group writing.

Check it out: http://www.writely.com

Web Literacy WebQuest

This webquest focuses on giving the student tools to evaluate and judge web sites for accuracy, bias, and value. Built around research on Marine Animals in the Pacific Ocean, and intended for an audience of elementary to middle school students.

http://marineweblit.pbwiki.com

http://marineliteracy.wikispaces.com/

This is my first time writing a WebQuest, please suggest changes, comment on what you think works or doesn't and why, and let me know what you might do differently.

Introduction and about me

A young woman working towards a Library Degree, I currently work in the central office of the school district’s Library Services. My main duties are cataloging, managing the processing department, and giving technical assistance to all our library automation software users throughout the district. I also maintain our Union Server.

Even though I had graduated high school before ever going on the Internet, I’ve stayed abreast of all things technological and am more of a digital “native” than most of the people around me. I help out with all things technological in the library.

I also support the Elementary Library Coordinator, and we have several professional development workshops during the year that I actively teach in.

This blog will be mainly for integrating new technology ideas into the curriculum of our district. Since this is an experimental phase, some of the ideas presented will naturally be better than others. I encourage feedback of all kinds, whether simply commenting to say hi, or asking questions, voicing concerns, or giving suggestions.