What's in YOUR book pile?

Beside the bed, on the coffee table, in the bathroom, on your desk...most of us have a book pile somewhere. It might be books we've already read or it might be a stack of books we want to read. Take a picture of your book pile and share what you've been reading or what you plan to read!

(Images courtesy of Flickr CC)

Table 3: PhotoStory

Disclaimer: Products posted herein are for practice and NOT meant as final products.

I used PhotoStory when I did my podcast in 23 Things, but my practice with it was very brief. I did not add any music to it, only narration. This was my chance to work with the music part of it. I uploaded some pictures of a nice young man I know and set it to music. I used music from the "Sample Music" folder because it's what was there. Obviously, I wouldn't choose this music for this PhotoStory normally. I tried to go back tonight and find something good to use from Incompetech (and then I could edit it to be "just right" in Audacity), but every time I tried to go to Incompetech, Internet Explorer would stop responding and I'd have to force that window to shut. Hmmm... So here is the "work in progress":



(And thank goodness for the autosave feature here at Blogger because sometimes I do crazy things like hitting the "Back" button on my browser when I don't really mean to!)

****UPDATE**** I finally got to Incompetech, so the PhotoStory you see here has music provided by www.incompetech.com.

Table 1: Image Manipulation

Disclaimer: Products herein are for practice and NOT meant as final products.

Image manipulation is probably the area where I have the most practice. I've been putting pictures in PowerPoints and resizing them with Irfan view for a long time now. What I didn't realize until now is that Discovery Education has an image gallery in addition to the video streaming aspect. Duh! I also finally figured out how to determine which are the "okay to use" images in Flickr Creative Commons. When I did 23 Things, I was still a little confused about all the different rights attributes and which photos were okay and exactly how to credit them. Now I know that as long as it's "noncommercial" and lets me choose a size and actually download, it's okay. (I was right clicking as doing "save as" before, and so I'll admit, I think I used some photos I shouldn't have. Eek!)

The image generators were a bit frustrating. It seemed as though when I'd click on a type, it would send me to another page where I'd just have to choose all over again. Some of the links didn't make it past the district firewall. I finally found a magazine cover that I thought would be funny with the picture I chose (the Constitution), but I either I failed to save it, or I didn't pay attention to WHERE I saving it because it's not in the folder it should be in. (It was Wrestling Magazine. Get it? We wrestle over the meaning of the Constitution all the time...) So here is another one I did with it on the cover of Time Magazine. B-O-R-I-N-G.



It IS worth noting that when I uploaded the image here, Blogger automatically placed it at the top of the page. I had to highlight it, cut it (using ctrl-x) and paste it where I wanted it (using ctrl-v).

****UPDATE*****

I found my other magazine cover! I'd made a folder for it all on its own. The lesson here folks is to PAY ATTENTION when you save. Another example? When I saved my PhotoStory I have in my PhotoStory post, the wonderful Sherri M. was walking past our table. Someone said, "Hi, Sherri!" just as I was typing the name of my file for saving...and what did I call it without even realizing it??? Sherri.wp3! That is NOT what I intended to call it. Go ahead, laugh. I did. :-)

Anyway, here is the Wrestling mag cover:

Table 2: Audio Manipulation

Disclaimer: Any product posted herein is solely practice and NOT intended as a finished product.

Number One on the checklist was "Turn on laptop microphone and record using laptop microphone." I was a little confused. I'm guessing laptop microphone means the built in microphone (that picks up a voice, but also all the background noise. See my podcast in Thing 21, where you can hear a doggie having a bad dream in the background...hehe), but what application were we supposed to use to record? Hmmm..skipped this one.

I moved on to Audacity. I eavesdropped on the people around me and heard at least four people mention that for them, Audacity didn't seem user friendly. I've used it and been okay with it, but then I haven't done really advanced projects with it yet. I recorded myself reciting a part of Robert Service's "The Cremation of Sam McGee" and played it back. Yes, I'm finally getting used to hearing my own voice and I guess it's not so so bad. :-P

Then I checked out Incompetech (www.incompetech.com). This was new to me, but yea, I really like it. It's a music download site, but what I thought was great is that you can choose music by "feel" (mood), such as "ominous," "lighthearted," or "triumphant." Wouldn't it be fun to have students choose background music for parts of their favorite books? And at the same time, they are learning about mood and being exposesd to mood words. It's awesome! Dowloading is easy, too, except the day I did this, I kept getting a "page not displayed" error, but it magically solved itself. Probably just a temporary network or server glitch. I imported a piece of music into Audacity and edited it so that I had just the section of it I wanted and it was the length I needed.

Table 4: Video

today our library professional development was intensive technology training...an extension or practice of more 23 Things things, but also some new stuff for me. This post is part of that staff development. Here is my disclaimer: any product posted herein is not meant as a final product, but instead as a "work in progress."

The Table 4 task was video. The first thing on our checklist was downloading a video from TeacherTube and posting it here. I downloaded a cool video of "Ma and Pa Kettle" math (thanks to A. Reynolds from Terrace Elementary for pointing me to it!) and here it is:



Then, on to YouTube, which of course, we couldn't access from inside the district. I think that's a shame. Yes, I know there is lots of inappropriate material on YouTube, but there is also lots of great stuff. It would be like banning search engines because kids might search something inappropriate. Besides, I guarantee any kiddo with Internet access at home knows the ins and outs of YouTube. I know elementary students who can record their own video, edit it with MovieMaker, and upload it to YouTube! I think we're remiss in teaching students to be responsible consumers and producers of information. Okay, okay, I'll get off my soapbox now.

The next thing I did was play around with MovieMaker. I imported my own video that I took of my son's dwarf hamsters with my Flip. Import was successful...EXCEPT for the audio. For some reason, the audio, my narration, was much too fast after the import (but the video speed remained "true"). It was actually kind of funny because it seemed as if the hamsters were doing the "talking." :-) I played around with "cutting and splicing" and transitions. It will be fun to play with MovieMaker some more. Oh, when I tried to save, though, it was VERY slow. In fact, I thought it had frozen because I'd waited about 5 minutes and it still hadn't saved. Lo and behold, though, I left it running through lunch, and when I returned, SHAZAM! It had finished saving. Woo hoo! I'll be interested to see if that is a problem that continues.

Thing 23: Summin' It Up

Woo hoo! I made it, an especially sweet thing since this is my second attempt at this. :)

Library2Play and the 23 Things has been a marvelous learning experience. I know I won't incorporate EVERYTHING into my repertoire right away, but the opportunity to become familiar with all the tools has been priceless. My favorites are podcasts, YouTube/TeacherTube, Rollyo, blogging, Google reader, wikis, and the wide world of mashups. There a couple that I think are awesome, but I've found it more difficult to internalize their use. Del.icio.us, for example. I see the potential, and I know it's really easy to use, but for some reason it hasn't become part of the "way I do things" yet. I'm confident it will, though. It will just take more repeated use for it to become second nature to me. I can't wait to get the students involved in podcasts and online image generators and wikis. Actually, the entire faculty!

What I think is great about all this 2.0 stuff is that it's in its infancy. New applications are being developed by brilliant people everyday, meaning that there will always be something new for people like me to learn. I never want to be the "oldster" who's out of touch. I guess that means the kickball captains will have to host new "games" on the "playground" each year! I wanna play! I wanna play!

(And the anthropologist in me is fascinated by the way our world is changing...how our social interactions are changing, etc.)

I'm going to keep working on commenting more. For some reason, it was hard for me to do. And as I try all these great, new Things with my students this year, I'm going to post my experiences here on this blog.

Keep "Two-point-oh-ing," everyone!

(photo courtesy of Emile! at Flickr)

Thing 22: Nings

As a novice librarian (I only have one year under my belt), the TeacherLibrarianNing is awesome! It's a great place to ask questions and solicit advice. With "back-to-school" right around the corner, I was particularly interested in the discussion thread about how to "jazz up" the beginning of the year, or what kinds of activities make great school-year starters. I signed up a long time ago, but confess that I haven't ever really utilized it. Duh.

Thing #21: Podcasts

Confession: I've been dreading this one. I've been worried about what my podcast would be about, what equipment I needed to do it, and hearing my own voice. Ugh! Now that I've done it, though, I'm thinking, "Wow! That was fun! I want to do another one!" I guess what I put together is considered a vidcast? Do I HAVE to make that distinction? I used PhotoStory 3 to make a booktalk photostory of this year's Texas Bluebonnet Award Nominees. I got the covers of the books and the book descriptions from www.amazon.com.



Sorry about the extraneous noise. I ended up doing the audio on this some place other than home, where my microphone was, so I just used the built-in microphone on the laptop. If you listen closely to the narration for Marvelous Mattie, you'll hear my sister's golden retriever in the background yelping as she has a bad dream. Hehe... I plan to go back and redo this so it's more professional, but I wanted to get what I have up on this blog for 23 Things. Also...*ducks sheepishly*...I got tired before making it to every book, so after Lawn Boy, there's no narration.

(It IS taking a while to process the video.)

Thing #20: YouTube and TeacherTube

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE YouTube! I've been a fan of it for a while now, but never really thought of using it for teaching purposes. I used to teach 8th graders, so I heard about YouTube and MySpace before they became household words. I can spend hours looking up cool stuff, most of it music related or humorous. There are some really talented people out there, and how wonderful that they now have an avenue to publish their work. Makes it easier for those of us who AREN'T talented, too, because now we don't have to try to reinvent the wheel when we aren't inventors!

I searched YouTube for librarians and found some funny stuff. I particulary liked a video of "The Librarian Song," but I couldn't get it embedded because for some reason the entire code wouldn't paste into blogger. Grrrrr.... If you want to see it, go to YouTube and search "librarian song."

I'd like to see YouTube opened up in the district. Yes, there's inappropriate material that kids can access, and it will require more diligence from us, but really, shouldn't we be teaching kids to be responsible internet consumers?


TeacherTube is fabulous. I plan to use it often this year. Here's a photostory that shows the life cycle of a butterfly. I like it because it's simple, colorful, and of good graphic quality. I chose to embed it with the TeacherTube search bar.

Thing #19: Web 2.0 Awards

I really enjoyed checking out the list of Web 2.0 award winners. I saw names I recognized and a bunch I didn't. Over the course of the next months, I plan to investigate even more of them, but for this "assignment" I chose to check out Twitter, which won first place in the Social Networking Mainstays category. First, I'd read about it in several other library professionals' blogs or seen links to their Twitter pages, but what really caught my attention is that it came in first place over Facebook and MySpace, which seemed like quite a feat to me since those names are immensely popular, verging on eponymous with social networking. I wanted to see what Twitter had over them.

If I had to describe Twitter in one sentence, it would be, "It's a social network where people post 'updates,' little blurbs of 140 characters or less about where they are or what they're doing, or their latest observations about life, etc.) as often as they like that other people can sign up to follow and vice verse."

I signed up, posted a tweet (what folks call the updates about their lives), and thought, "Now what?" The directions page said the whole point was to tell people what you're doing at any given moment. That's what it's all about. I thought it was all rather anticlimactic. Just a few days earlier, I'd set up a MySpace page, which was a whole lot more fun since I got to write a few paragraphs "about me" and choose music and a skin and embed other cool widgets.

I spent some time looking for friends on Twitter, but I didn't find anyone I knew. I wasn't keeping up with anyone else and no one else was keeping up with me. It seemed rather pointless, and I was disappointed.

Then, I was reading the Houston Chronicle online, and a headline caught my eye: The tweet life is all about the social. How timely! It was an article about Twitter! After reading this article, it all makes much more sense now. The part that was missing for me was the most essential: the networking! Duh.

Now the question is, How does this benefit me professionally? I can see it as a great way for librarians and/or teachers to let others know about successes they've experienced. On those days when I've facilitated a lesson that went well...beyond expectation...and I'm riding the high that comes with it, I want to share it with others. Not just my emotions, but how it all worked, what caused it to go so well, even what could be done better next time. In the past, this sharing usually took place via impromptu chats with other teachers in the hallway after school. That was great, but I see Twitter as an opportunity to share with even more people. And now that I'm a librarian, and a "one-of-a-kind" on my campus, I don't have the opportunity for hallway chat with colleagues (meaning other librarians...of course I still chat with the teachers). Blogs are a wonderful way to share, but sometimes I don't feel the energy or committment to a blog. There's a feeling that blog entries should be longer, more in depth. With Twitter, I can jot off a few sentences and not feel the pressure of the "fully-loaded" blog entry. Twitter is like the sticky-note version. Likewise, I can see what successes and frustrations my fellow librarians are experiencing. And the best things is that it's asynchronous, so we don't all have to be in the same place at the same time to offer each other support.

Anybody else on Twitter? Let me know so I can add you!