Week 9, #22 Can E-books Kindle Readers?

Although they've been available for quite a while, I hadn't known anyone who personally owned an Amazon Kindle until last week. My acquaintance, who is a minimal user of technology, is very excited about the opportunity to have books delivered to him and to have the ability to store so many books in one small place. He likes the idea of reading anywhere (as opposed to reading from a laptop that you can't physically take quite as many places) and he likes that Amazon will let you remove but later re-download a purchased book. In the short time we talked before a meeting, I didn't have a chance to try it for myself but I will soon as our public library has purchased at least one.

In PA, we've had netLibrary as a part of our state-supplied databases for several years. Many kids think it is cool to have a whole book on the computer, but fewer chose it as a source when given the freedom to select their own sources. I know that academic libraries use ebooks, particularly in the computer field; therefore, I try to expose the students to using them. If I had to say why they avoid the e-books, I would list two reasons: one is that they feel Google is faster; two is that they just don't have access to the widest variety of ebooks.

The links in this lesson show the many books students can use. Project Gutenberg is one of the older projects for digitizing books. Consisting of mostly books out of copyright, Gutenberg preserves the classics but loses appeal to the youth because of the age of the materials. It's the same with Internet Archive, which seemed to have a great screen appearance and good searching ability. Ebooks About Everything had some high prices for book downloads ($180.00!) which makes it impractical for HS students.
The British Public Library books were awesome looking on the screen! However, I had some problems getting the audio to work on the few I tried. I will have to explore those in more depth.

I've been introducing my students to Google books and to the some of the university projects such as Universal Digital Library from Carnegie Mellon University (http://www.ulib.org/)and MBooks, a collaboration between the University of Michigan and Google (http://www.lib.umich.edu/mdp/). While they have some of the same drawbacks of Project Gutenberg (dated materials), they have many books that are excerpted with links to purchase. I like to get the students to discuss why anyone would put his/her book free online, in part or in whole.

I've also tried promoting audiobooks. My student library advisory council suggested we buy audiobooks and promote them. I let the students choose the format and the titles. They chose CD format b/c they felt that not all students had an MP3 player, but those who did could "rip and burn." Those who didn't have an MP3 player could listen on a computer. They decided against Playaways because they could get twice as many books on CDs as on Playaways. Their selections were a mix of popular YA novels and books used in English classes. While we've been trying for a year to gain readership, we've not been successful. Students will wait for a paper copy of Twilight rather than take the audiobook. Teachers have used some of the audiobooks in classes, especially in the learning support room. We have only a handful of ESL students but I would like to be sure they know about all of the titles. As MP3 players are forbidden in our school, I have to promote audiobooks for home use only, which is a drawback.

I believe that future libraries will have a huge amount of digitized texts so that patrons can access them remotely at all hours. Presently, I use ancestry.com to research census files. The Mormon Library is in the process of digitzing their microfilm collection--millions of rolls. We've had digitized magazine articles for years. Books are the next step.

It just might take me a while to adjusting to reading a book on my computer in the bubble bath.....

Week 9, # 21 Podcasting

I thought I knew how to create and use podcasts--until this lesson. I've listened to Mugglecast, Grammar Girl, a Spanish cooking podcast and several others. I've created them to accompany visual displays and to post online. My students have made travelogues, public service announcements and Elizabethan-era newscasts. So far so good.

However, I was not as handy using Primetime Podcast receiver software to grab and play my podcasts. The documentation was weak and my intuitiveness wasn't intuitive. I'm still working my way through it.

In the meantime, I've decided two other methods are much easier. The first is bloglines. I went to the site of the podcast I wanted for my subscription. Click, click and it plays. I also find it easier to go to the site of my podcast and click on the episode I want to hear. Windows Media Player has it rolling in seconds. I had Legal Lad playing within a minute using both of the ways listed above.

Both podcastalley and yahoo podcasts have been useful to me in the past. Itunes has given me technical difficulties in the past so I've stayed away. Of the links you've listed on the CSLA wEB 2.0 page, the tutorials by Jason Van Orden are my favorite. He is quick, easy to follow and good at "chunking" the lesson into manageable pieces. He uses Audacity software, which we also use at our school.

For YALSA's podcast page, go to http://pod-serve.com/podcasts/show/yalsa-podcasts and click the RSS feed button to subscribe.

I'd like to hear more about how others are using podcast aggregators with classes.

Week 9, # 20 You Tube

To show my students a YouTube video, I logged into my account while the computer was projecting on the large classroom screen. One of my students said in astonishment, "You have a YouTube account?"

Duh. Did he think they set an age cutoff on YouTube? Probably. I can't say I upload my own videos but I will say I search YouTube for great tutorials. Sometimes I find better tutorials on YT than on Teacher Tube.

Here is one I found:

Students like YT videos because they are short and direct. They respect the videos (in that way we actually rightfully discourage) because YT is their technology.

I like to have the video independent from YouTube in the event of an Internet connection problem. I use TubeSucker and Lame Library (an FLV player)to pull the video from YT and have it work on my laptop. This allows me to use the video in any room in the school.

I also found a few good tutorials on Photostory 3 and a politically incorrect Mercedes ad called "Blonde in the Library." (I'm blonde and confident enough to think it's funny.)

What astounds me about YT however is the way students use YT as though it were a private site. They upload videos of themselves doing things they wouldn't want parents and school officials to see, sometimes illegal things. And then there are the incidents of young professionals not screening what they post, things potential employers can see. That's a discussion for a much longer blog.

Week 8, #19 What's a Reader to Do?

Friends who aren't techie (and have called themselves luddites) have raved about Library Thing for a while. It was one of the first Web 2.0 applications I learned about that my library colleagues praised. No wonder. It's great for promoting reading and more importantly discussions about reading. It allows people to catalog their own collections and it gives you yet another widget.

Student or adult book clubs could use this as home base. Adults might be even more enthusiastic as students can use myspace etc to share fav books.

No surprise that my list was also popular with other Library Thing users b/c Breaking Dawn was one of my titles. I was pleased to see the number of people reading a favorite author of mine-- Walter Mosley.

No surprise either that the reviews are of uneven quality, but few are truly bad. Some are outstanding--full of analysis, deep but readable. Great fodder for writing classes here.

The question soon becomes "which?" Shelfari? Goodreads? librarything? MySpace? What's a reader to do?

Week 8, # 18: David and Goliath

Zoho writer is impressive. It has most of Word's functionality; it's free; it makes documents online accessible; it allows for group access; and it gives you the code for posting into blogs like this. The only things I ponder are these: security, privacy in relation to the Patriot Act, the use of the emails to which we send the documents. I'm pretty sure these have all been considered.

The question becomes: Will people move away from the established industry standard Microsoft Word for an upstart program?

Here's the silly sample I did. You can look at it by accessing it via a link: http://writer.zoho.com/public/msm114/csla-%2318

Or you can view it on a webpage because I inserted the HTML code provided by Zoho:

Week 7, #17

The amazing talents of librarians are evident everywhere and the wiki entries were no exception. In the sandbox are of the CSLA 2.0 wiki, I found enough workable ideas for my school's curricula to fill an entire school year. Some were ideas I have considered and others were ones I should have thought about! My entry was past item 50. I was impressed that people were able to devise so many different ideas. My favorites included the history of the town and the battle of the books (even though we don't do that I could see its use in book reviews elsewhere).

My students created a wiki in world cultures class during a unit on Japan. The students love wikipedia so we decided to make our own for one country. This was a project using two classes that met at different times and never worked F2F. Each pair received a topic from the unit. First they had to create a list of 10 essential facts with sources. Then they submitted a draft essay. Next they posted the essay. They then received a second topic, one which had previously been assigned to someone else. They did a fact sheet for their second topic. After that, they edited the essay on their second topic, an essay that had already been posted to the wiki. Students then added multi-media to the wiki. At the end, the students submitted a reflection on the wiki process, including their feelings on peer editing/being edited. All of this was spread over the course of the Japan unit. I would definitely make changes in the process, especially to resolve some tech issues we had that caused essays to disappear! You can't do this with large numbers of classes at a time because you have to correct a fair number of essays in a quick turnaround. This is the idea that I will post in the Curriculum Connections area.

Week 7, Thing #16: Or What Am I Missing

What's the difference between a wiki and a blog? Why use one vs. the other?

I THINK I know the answer to that but I'm worried I must be wrong because I seem to be more concerned about this than most people.


To me, a blog is software that enables a person to post thoughts/opinions/essays, and have others respond. I might post a book review and have my peers give their comments on the book. In another blog I might send a committee the minutes from a discussion and ask them to comment on what steps we should take next. All of these I have done with students. The common thread here is that I post and others comment. This is what I see in many of the sites provided as examples.

To me, a wiki is software that enables groups to edit the same document. Wikipedia is the most known, but also most appropriate example of this. The whole is more than the sum of the parts is the theory here. When people work interactively, they are inspired to create something that wouldn't have been created had they simply added parts, or posted comments. Many of the wiki examples I see do not contain this critical aspect of peer editing. Instead, many wikis are blogs posted on a wiki site. I find the history and discussion tabs of a wiki to be the most underrated and underused aspects of the wiki software, but they are the most unique and fascinating. Again, to me, a wiki should more resemble a google doc than a blog.



In online adult classes I have taught, my students are very, very reluctant to criticize, change or comment upon a classmate's work. My HS students are less reluctant. Asking them how it feels to have their work peer edited, they comment that they appreciate having someone help them.

Sometimes it's difficult to tell if the wiki site has been created as an edited site by a group of members b/c without a membership you aren't permitted to see the editing--ie teacherlibrarian. So I can't always comment on specific sites. Some sites are a collaboration without much editing, but that is better than the blog response wikis I see so often. For example, the St. Joseph's site is collaborative but probably not much discussion, debate or editing is done. That's ok by me because the end result is a collaboration. I find the same in the albystaff wiki.

I like the discussion in the student wiki example This shows these students were collaborating and debating.

If I look at the history of the blog and only one user (usually the teacher) has posted, then I think the wiki is underused.

I agree that even for simply commenting the wiki page flows better than the blog page which can be harder to navigate. I can understand why someone would use wikispaces over blogger for that reason alone. I just wonder if I'm the only person who makes that distinction between the two types of software, and thus activities.

All that said, I'm impressed with any class using either wiki or blog software. I'm just splitting hairs.