Wednesday, August 30, 2006

She's at it again!

I found another interview with Joyce Valenza. Brian Mull from November Learning interviewed Joyce about libraries. This is a great podcast that once again- inspires the rest of us to "keep it up!". I took notes and will be using information like this when I talk to my principal next! Enjoy the listen!

Listen to the podcast

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Our Senior Class

We're starting school today and I'm thinking about teaching mini-lessons on plagiarism, verifying sources and copyright issues (among other things!) I have been thinking about they level of these students I'm working with.

Teacher Librarian Joyce Valenza had a wonderful chart she constructed with recollections on how life has changed for librarians through the years on her blog NeverEnding Search.

Plus, I'm thinking about our seniors that will be graduating this year. I'm hoping that we are preparing them for that "ever changing world" giving them skills that they need to be successful. My perspective was enhanced when I took a look at the Beloit College list regarding the mindset of these kids. Hmmm remember Pogs and Duck Tails?

When you look at the lives of 12-24 year olds, in a study/article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times. Thanks to Michael Casey's Library Crunch- I have some better ideas of what they have been thinking...here are a few quotes from Michael -

  • IM use is almost equal to email use in the 12-17 age group.
  • "Social networking websites such as MySpace.com are very popular...just under half of girls and 43% of boys reported visiting such sites, joined by 56% of young women and 41% of men. The older adults were less likely to spend time on social sites -- 66% of men over 21 said they do not visit such sites, along with 52% of women."
  • "Fifteen percent of girls 12-14 who visit such [social networking] sites said they spend more than four hours a day doing so."

Finally: Karl Fisch has a terrific presesntation that he started the year to get his teachers thinking. If you haven't yet seen "Did You Know?," you've GOT to watch it- WOW!

I would love to see what you think! Let me know!

Monday, August 21, 2006

Writely is Back!

I have been waiting a long time to share this. Google bought a collaborative word processing program quite a while ago, and has been working the kinks out. It is called Writely and is a free program which may be quite a hit with educators. The interface is very similar to popular word processing programs, and documents can be saved as HTML, WORD, OpenOffice, or even PDF's! When you save the document to Writely, you can invite others to share (edit) or view the document.

It is nice, because it keeps all previous revisions and you can review any or all of those when you feel like it. It even has RSS so you can set it up on your aggregator to be informed when there are changes! Nice.

Enjoy playing with it. If you want to send a document to someone- try me! I'd love to try.
~pg

Ghosts in the library!

Here is some fun to start your week- looks like ghost of a man and his dog at the 100 year old Phoenixville Library has been getting kind of crabby. According to NBC Channel 10 flying books have been captured on the security tape and they even brought in ghostbuster equipment! Wow!

Enjoy!