Web 2.0

So after a long break and think about career changes and other life stuff, and frankly getting scared by a subject called Resourcing the Curriculum, which sounded as dry as old chips, and hard to boot, I am back to my Masters course, and excited about the journey afresh.

This semester I am studying The Information Environment, which is enormously interesting so far.  And practical.  I want so much to either have a library of my own, or a class of my own to try out some of this cool stuff.  And also so I can justify buying myself an iPad.  At the moment, my laptop does everything I need it to, so really, an iPad is a luxury that I simply don't need, apart from wanting one because it's so cool.

Today I have been looking at Topic 5, which is all about Web 2.0.  Exciting stuff.  My own children's teachers aren't harnessing all the new tools and exciting options, they don't even have electronic whiteboards in their classrooms.  Which is a shame, and a bit of a personal grumble from me.

Students are already using web 2.0.  They already share ideas/photos/links and so on with social media.  If we don't use this in the classroom, we will be left behind, and to use them makes so much practical sense.  Research has already confirmed that learning is more meaningful when you are actively engaged in the discovery process rather than being spoon fed every bit of information.  And Web 2.0 means that you aren't limited to the exchange of ideas within a class or school group, classrooms of students worldwide can connect and share.  Exciting stuff.

I read Mrs Cassidy's Classroom Blog, a year one blog from a class in Georgia.  These children had connected with other classes around the world and made an ebook about how they celebrated occasions like birthdays in their country.  This was available from Here, a site I have used already to download books for my Kindle.  So, parents in Georgia can look at the book, but so can the parents of the Chinese students.  Amazing.

The opportunities this gives us as Teacher Librarians are exciting.  Not only can we run library wikis and blogs for our own lessons and classes, for school book reviews and reports, for newsletters, we can help the other staff set up meaningful learning spaces for their classes too.  My own response to something I don't know but want to, is to find the answer on the internet.  This can take time, and specific answers aren't always there, like "what is year 5's homework this week?" A wiki or blog could be a place to store all those kinds of answers.

ETL 501 - Search Engines

I started this course last year, but got overwhelmed by the workload and dropped back to one subject a semester, so I read all this information before I dropped the course.  Before that it was all fairly new to me though.  I do try to use Google Advanced when I’m searching, and I have used google books and google scholar when I’ve been researching essays.  I’ve never used Google news before though.

Having had a break from study, I know I slipped back into my slovenly research habits, relying on google to give me the answers to everything.  Occasionally I would use the advanced function.  I’ve now got all my bookmarks organized properly, and I’ve bookmarked a lot of things from this particular topic so I can find them again.  I have good intentions to be a more effective information searcher.

This week we had to try out different search engines, and see if it made a difference to our search results.  Sometimes looking for things online is like blundering around in the dark, you feel like the answers you want are there, but they are somehow out of reach, maybe because you aren't asking the question in the right way. 

This was an interesting activity, mostly because I helped one of my teenagers research volcanoes a few months ago, and we had trouble finding relevant material that wasn’t horribly technical.  I had much more success with the first search engine I used.  Yahoo kids on the other hand was a disaster, 5 of the first ten links were broken, three others were far too basic for grade seven (though one would have been great for younger students), and the first two were to the same site, which had lovely photos but not much information.