Blogs:
I was reading Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog and found his post about Teachers, Transparency, and Technology to be so timely as the use of technology in the classroom and school building is increasing at such a rapid rate. In this age of budget cuts and belt tightening, the use of technology as a way to keep the lines of communication open between teachers and parents is almost a no-brainer. By utilizing email, webpages, and calendars of classroom events, parents are able to access information at anytime. Long gone should be the days of scrounging around in a pile of handouts and flyers for a child's field trip at the very last minute when it could simply be made available online for a parent to print. Johnson points out though, one of the problems of using technology to create a transparent environment is there can be a steep learning curve and many teachers are not willing to try new ways to communicate with parents as they are stuck in an old mindset and are unwilling to change as the way we communicate as a society changes.
In conjunction with Doug Johnson's blog post, I found that in reading the blog post What a Difference a Day Makes on the blog Not So Distant Future to be a perfect example of how society is communicating and accessing information in a completely different way than five or ten years ago. The advent of mobile technology via smartphones and in the case of this blog post, Ipads, has made great strides in the move for a more paperless environment. I was thinking to myself about the chatter when early personal desktop computers hit the market and how everyone was talking about how we would do away with paper and the printed page. Which of course did not happen and with more affordable print options available, it seems the paper trail became much more lengthy. With the gaining popularity of e-readers, tablet computers, and smartphones, I think the day might have finally come where we make that shift to digitize that computer developers had in mind back when I was in fourth grade with my Radio Shack TRS80 computer.
Hand in hand with the previous two blogs I have mentioned, I found an interesting bit of information on Stephen's Lighthouse, a blog by Stephen Abram in his post Majority of Americans Use Social Sites. He stated that 50% of all American adults now use social networking sites. With this boom in social networking, it is imperative that libraries take advantage of this and reach the community at large through social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Podcasts:
I was reading Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog and found his post about Teachers, Transparency, and Technology to be so timely as the use of technology in the classroom and school building is increasing at such a rapid rate. In this age of budget cuts and belt tightening, the use of technology as a way to keep the lines of communication open between teachers and parents is almost a no-brainer. By utilizing email, webpages, and calendars of classroom events, parents are able to access information at anytime. Long gone should be the days of scrounging around in a pile of handouts and flyers for a child's field trip at the very last minute when it could simply be made available online for a parent to print. Johnson points out though, one of the problems of using technology to create a transparent environment is there can be a steep learning curve and many teachers are not willing to try new ways to communicate with parents as they are stuck in an old mindset and are unwilling to change as the way we communicate as a society changes.
In conjunction with Doug Johnson's blog post, I found that in reading the blog post What a Difference a Day Makes on the blog Not So Distant Future to be a perfect example of how society is communicating and accessing information in a completely different way than five or ten years ago. The advent of mobile technology via smartphones and in the case of this blog post, Ipads, has made great strides in the move for a more paperless environment. I was thinking to myself about the chatter when early personal desktop computers hit the market and how everyone was talking about how we would do away with paper and the printed page. Which of course did not happen and with more affordable print options available, it seems the paper trail became much more lengthy. With the gaining popularity of e-readers, tablet computers, and smartphones, I think the day might have finally come where we make that shift to digitize that computer developers had in mind back when I was in fourth grade with my Radio Shack TRS80 computer.
Hand in hand with the previous two blogs I have mentioned, I found an interesting bit of information on Stephen's Lighthouse, a blog by Stephen Abram in his post Majority of Americans Use Social Sites. He stated that 50% of all American adults now use social networking sites. With this boom in social networking, it is imperative that libraries take advantage of this and reach the community at large through social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Podcasts:
Books on the Nightstand: Episode 143.
Evolving the print book into a digital/print hybrid.
Melville House, a small publishing company has started including a QR Code in the back of five print novellas. Once the QR is scanned by a smartphone, links to more information about the novella are provided, such as historical information, maps, etc, giving the reader essentially a whole other source of information that fills in the back story of the print book. The use of QR codes is becoming more prevalent as they are being used in advertising and in stores, such as shelf talkers using QR codes to link customers to staff reviews of their favorite books.
Cool Tools for Library 2.0. Episode 60
The use of Shelfari, which is a social cataloging site where members can add books to their virtual "bookshelf" and write reviews, rate, and tag books. There are discussion groups and topics in a forum where one can discuss books in book groups and users can dialogue with other, comment on reviews and interact with each other over common interests.
Tech Tip Chicks Episode 83
The tech chicks discuss Wikispaces and their free wikis for educators. Originally, Wikispaces offered free wikis for K-12 educators and has recently began offering wikis for educators up to and including PhD programs. The tech chicks review several different websites which offer interactive educational environments such as www.typewith.me, where users can create collaborate documents in which each individual working on a single document is able to create and edit simultaneously with other users. There is also a chat feature and documents can be imported and edited. The tech chicks reviewed the website weboword.com which is a visual dictionary and unfortunately the site seems to no longer be available. Also reviewed is an interactive model of Bloom's Taxonomy, in which each level of the taxonomy is tagged using web 2.0 tools as a means to explore the different levels of the taxonomy. Also reviewed is a document summarizing site which allows a user to input a large document and it automatically creates a summary of the larger work. Topicmarks allows you to upload a document and is provides a brief summary and below the summary it gives a word cloud and each work in the cloud is colored by weight of the word and an index.
