On the School Library Media Blog I read about a site called "My Fakewall" where students can create faux Facebook pages for historical figures or literary figures. This site looks really fun and I think I can definitely use this in my classroom!
Also at the School Library Media Blog, I was directed to the NY Times website where I read an article about informational texts and the Common Core State Standards. This was of interest to me because I have spent my last three days in a workshop about the transition to the CCSS. One of the main questions that kept coming up was "what can I do now?" The representative from DESE told us that right now one of the most important things to do is to provide our students with more informational text and teach them to understand it. The first couple days of the workshop left me feeling very overwhelmed, but on the last day we were able to sit down and devise a plan and figure out exactly where to start and how to present it to the rest of our faculty without overwhelming them.
I visited Buffy Hamilton's blog, The Unquiet Librarian, and I saw that she won the Salem Press Library Blog Award. She listed several other library blogs in this posting and she had them separated by category. I added a few of the blogs that she listed to my Google Reader.
On Joyce Valenza's blog, Never Ending Search, I ran across a post called "Why Cite" about citing sources. The posting included a video of a skit. Valenza said that she plans on using this at orientation for 9th graders, and I think that would be a wonderful idea. Students really struggle with citing sources. I have several ideas about how to work on this issue when I become a librarian.
Free Technology For Teachers has a post about how to use Google Bookmarks. I have heard/read about online bookmarking, but I am not too familiar with it. The slideshow on the posting walks you through how to use it and it seems like it is something that is fairly simple. I think this would be a great way for teachers to share sites that they have found to be resourceful. Librarians could do the same. And I think that it looks user-friendly enough that even the teachers that are not so tech savvy could use it without frustration.
Isn't the fake wall just a terrific idea. I love keeping the concept but not the hassle of actually fighting the filtering problem.
ReplyDelete"provide our students with more informational text and teach them to understand it.' -- What does this mean? Informational text about what?
You will love online bookmarking. Diigo is another great example.
What is meant by the informational text comment, is basically that we need to get our students reading more non-fiction and understanding non-fiction. The subject is not as important as knowing how to use the text features. This is something that the DESE rep said multiple times over the course of the workshop.
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