Second Life and TeacherTube

Tonight at the NICE meeting we viewed a demonstration of Second Life. Very time consuming but a fascinating way to rub elbows with the tech gurus. There's an ISTE party there every Thursday night. I will miss the party tonight, but our speaker Lori Abrahams was leaving the NICE meeting to change her avatar into a ball gown for the gala event tonight.

We also were reminded about visiting TeacherTube, a site very similar to YouTube with teacher created content such as lesson plans and other useful items to show in your classes. I looked for one on Noodle Tools but couldn't find it. So perhaps our own New Trier Library can upload one when it's ready. See the one created for how to cite a book in a bibliography. There is also one created for David Warlick's Citation Machine.

Citing a book in a bibliography
They are giving away a brand new laptop every month through the end of the year! Increase your chances of winning by:
* Signing Up
* Inviting Your friends
* Uploading Videos
Look here for more details.
The proliferation of web tools is both amazing and exhausting.

Judy Gressel

Electronic Field Trips

Has anyone tried an electronic field trip such as those offered by Colonial Williamsburg? Here's the link: http://www.history.org/trips/

Pricing -- which is on a per school basis -- seems pretty reasonable ($120 per trip or $500 for all seven). Supporting materials include a teacher's guide and web resources containing background material, lesson plans, and primary sources. In addition, there is a chance to participate in an interactive lesson – either during the live broadcast or via email with volunteer historians -- all student questions are answered.

The grade level for which these Electronic Field Trips are designed is 4-12 (though most are 4-8) and it might be a nice enhancement for at least some of our classes.

Garrison Keillor and Librarians

Garrison Keillor spoke to many in the library field at the annual conference of American Library Association (ALA) in Washington, D.C. this past June 2007. Afterwards he spoke with American Libraries.

He was asked "You don't believe that everything is on the internet?

In part of his reply, he said, "People have limited amounts of time, and if you take a hard look at the amount of time you can spend drifting, trying to get your bearings on the internet, you are grateful for people who can save you time and that's what librarians do -- they save you enormous amounts of time."

FactBites - Where results make sense

FactBites - Where results make sense
http://www.factbites.com/
This new tool is a cross between a search engine with an encyclopedia. The search results page itself includes key sentences from each of the sources retrieved. Uber-researcher Mary Ellen Bates, in her BatesInfoTip Newsletter recommends this as a "useful filter on search results that may help you find in-depth answers quickly." Although it will never replace Google, its advocates say that "We think Factbites is better than other search engines when it comes to presenting you with clearly summarized factual information."

Spam vs. Bacn: How can you tell the difference?

At PodCast Pittsburgh 2.0, a new Internet term was born. Recent articles appearing on NPR and in The Chicago Tribune describe "Bacn" (pronounced "bacon") which is e-mail you want to read — just not now. Blogger Tommy Vallier who helped invent the term at this recent conference says, "An e-mail from your wife is not bacn — that's personal. An e-mail from Nigeria offering to send you $3 million is not bacn—that's spam. Bacn is everything in between, the "middle class of e-mail."
Some examples of bacn:
• An e-mail from an airline updating your flight schedule
• An e-mail from Amazon announcing a sale on books
• An e-mail from The Chicago Tribune with a today's headlines
• An e-mail from Friendster announcing that you have a new friend
• An e-mail from your bank with your checking account balance
Check out the Bacn website [Email you want - But not right now],complete with YouTube videos.

Judy Gressel

Web Video Cheat Sheet

See a recently updated version of Web Video Cheat Sheet which is formatted conveniently for you to compare web video tools. The amazing plethora of websites is shocking! Most all are free; some allow you to keep a video private which is nice for student work if privacy issues are a concern.

Worth a look. Judy Gressel

Clusty Clouds

Today on Gary Price's Reference Shelf, I found the Clusty Cloud Creator which is
a tool that webmasters or bloggers can use to instantly visualize a topic using the familiar tag cloud display. You can create a cloud based on any topic or query which
are generated using our search results for the topic you enter. The nice part is that you can click on any of them to go to Clusty's search results which are generated in real-time.

HTML code is generated if you want to put the Clusty Cloud on a blog or web page. You can also customize the look of your Clusty Cloud to match your site or topic. I see the potential use of this to help students select alternate keyword searches. See the cloud I created for global warming:

Loading Clusty Cloud ...