Merry Christmas to All and to All a Good Night!

Having to work until Friday made it a bit difficult to get everything done for the holiday events. It is 8:30 pm Christmas Eve night and I'm ready for tomorrow! I hope all of you have a very joyful holiday season with loved ones.

If you have time during your days off, try some of these search engines. They are new for me and I've added them to my web page: http://arlington.spps.org/lmc.html

Information Please
http://infoplease.com/

Live Search
http://www.live.com

Gigablast
http://gigablast.com

Exalead
http://www.exalead.com/search

Polycola (searching multiple search engines side by side)
http://polycola.com

Clustering Search Engine
http://clusty.com

Alexa
http://alexa.com

Let me know what you think of these.
My goal for my blog over my winter vacation, to create a slide show.

Snow, snow, snow. We've forgotten what it's like!

I heard today it is snowing like the old days. Isn't that weird....
I've been asked by a few how to create original art on our blogs. I use Appleworks painting. I create the picture on the painting side of the program. I "save" it to the desktop. Then I "save as" a "jpeg[QT]". Enjoy!

I hope all of you had a wonderful holiday weekend!

Well, my food did get prepared (see previous blog entry) and transported to my daughters' home. It was a bit of a marathon from the time I left work on Wednesday afternoon until the Thanksgiving meal at 12:30 on Thursday. There was too much food, of course, and everyone needed time on the couch for digestion afterwards. No football in our family, so rather than stare at each other and groan I pulled out the fabulous laptop and turned on photobooth! What a riot.... We were rolling on the floor with laughter. If you're ever in an awkward crowd, try photobooth on your laptop. It will immediately break the ice! Now, I'll have to try the slide shows Anne Walker mentions in her blog with all the funny pictures created on my photobooth! A family photo album to remember.... Try it, you'll love it.

Thanksgiving Meal vs. Technology Help for Students

As I try to plan out Thanksgiving, without a day off to prepare I begin to think of all that is going on at Arlington and how to increase student involvement with technology in the classroom. How do the two connect? One is easier than the other and I prefer thinking of Arlington's students over preparing a meal.
I was working with a social studies student teacher in a computer lab. Most of the students were 9th graders and it was a very sad situation. The students were like newborns and they were very unsure of themselves. In their nervousness at appearing stupid, their behavior began to go down hill. With quiet one on one assistance after modeling the search process, they settled in and began working in a calmer manner. Therefore, if all students were given this assistance as they began the research process, they would achieve success and confidence. As I work with more and more teachers the word will get out that I'm a team player and I'm there to assist. Hopefully, we'll reach each and every student before the end of the year.

The Marriage of School Libraries & Public Libraries

I have often been surprised by how many people are not public library users. It is even more shocking when people have graduated from college without library skills. How did they do that?
I was a librarian at an elementary school for 9 years before coming to Arlington High. I was fortunate to have the public library bookmobile come to my school every other week. When the students left school for the day, the bookmobile was waiting for them. The majority of my students had a public library card because I could order one for each student as needed. The students supplemented their school library check outs with different items on the bookmobile. It was a huge success!
At Arlington we ordered public library cards for all the ELL students (400+) and taught them how to use the Rossetta Stone program on the public library website. To use the program the students needed the barcode from their library card, a school email address and they created a username and password. My hope was they would return home and show the whole family how to do this at their local library. Students here at Arlington use the Rhondo, Rice and downtown branches.
Now we're promoting the district databases and giving the students the password sheet to use outside the building, always suggesting the public library down the street.
It has been my policy to promote the public library with my students and staff. It's essential to finding just the right resources for lessons that are exciting and to model to students the pathways to information gathering.

Can't Blog at School, What's that About????

It turns out I can't blog at school most days. To blog at home is difficult because I like to walk away from the work world most evenings. But, we do what it takes to complete our experiences for MILP.
My school had workshops last Friday. We had a great turnout for our Urban Planet training and we've established a committee of 22 teachers to integrate technology in the classroom. We plan to continue with Urban Planet training and assistance. Smartboard training is on-going each week. Comic Life has been discovered by many teachers and the students seem to enjoy the projects that involve technology.
Two teachers, English and Social Studies, have joined forces to teach research through an exciting project, Ancient Athens Newspaper. They've come to the library for introduction to databases, websites, search engines other than Google, reference and non-fiction books. The students are using the library website for citation forms and "how to's", links to pre-selected websites, databases and new search engines. The students left the library for lunch and returned one half hour later. The tables were a beautiful sight, piles of books, notebooks, notecards and articles.

What an expression! Quizzical and confused sounds right....

Well, I've figured out how to add photos from photobooth to my blog! Took me awhile. I stored them in iphoto, then when I dragged an image to the desktop, they automatically changed to a jpeg or gif. Once they're in that format I can download into my blog.

I need to start listing the 23 things I've accomplished.
One I have not mentioned is my website which can be found at

http://arlington.spps.org/lmc

Visit my website and see all the resources I've put at the fingertips of our students and staff!

A day without pictures....

I now have del i cious, Blogline feeds/rss, and Google Reader on my custom made Google page to mark all milp blogs. That is 3 locations to retrieve the blogs I am reading. I've tried Photobooth and created a lovely picture of myself on a bad day, but have not figured out how to save it as a .gif to transfer to my blog. So today's entry is without art. Not a good day for me.... Can't live without the little pieces of art! I will keep working on this, so stay tuned.

What's new in my tech world?

Google Document has been the high school librarians' newest achievement. We created two documents. Each person added and edited through their google account. It was a great way to save time working together on the same document rather than sending things back and forth through email. I'd like to see if teachers could think of a collabortive student group project using Google documents. Maybe our newspaper students could try it out, too.

Camino web browser is new and ready for exploration. They do have a warning about a serious disruption with your Firefox browser. So pay attention to their page: http://caminobrowser.org/documetation/firefox/
Important to read before diving in!

We have a serious virus that affects our students' Word documents. We are encouraging students and teachers to use iwork 08. It is a new publishing tool replacing Appleworks. The students can create amazing brochures with beautiful images. It is worth checking out. Those of you with new laptops can find it in your applications.

We tend to use the things we've been using in the past and are comfortable with. But if you take the time to look in your application folder on your new computers you'll find some new technology adventures. I can't believe I didn't even think to look in the file the minute I received the laptop! I continued using the same old, same old. I'm ashamed of my narrow mind and lack of adventure.....

Del.icio.us

Picasso Me
I just entered all the MILP blogs on del.icio.us which is part of my tool bar menu and I can easily access everyones blog from my custom google page. I think this will work for me much better than the blogline system.

I'm finding the MILP blogs inspirational and hope to add more depth to mine.

Here is my favorite blog: Dangerously Irrelevant by Dr. Scott McLeod.
http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/

The Many Faces of Me

This was titled "Queen Ruth" in 2005.

Now I shall begin adding images to my blog because images are easier for me than words. . . .

As an elementary school librarian there were many more chances to use art in the computer classroom. I miss it very, very much. Now that I'm a high school librarian there is little time to play with all the possibilities in the computer labs. I understand Appleworks is no longer going to be on the new Mac computers. I will need a new drawing/painting source for computer art. Any suggestions?

Sign in, then sign out, then enter username & password, this is the key, who would have thought!

I have discovered the secret to getting into my blog and creating a post. I know, I've got to get past this..... But I must click sign in, then sign out to sign in! Who would have thought!!! I have always believed that programmers think differently than the rest of us. I promise I'll think of something else to talk about soon.

Signing in, Could it be Easier???

Signing onto my blog seems very clunky. I signed out yesterday and to sign-in this morning I had to play around with the dashboard (signing in and out again). The sign-in boxes are never just there.... Oh well, I have not given up.
Now, what are we reporting on in these blogs? How the technology is rolling out in our building?
We have a wonderful amount of technology in the building here at Arlington. The biggest problem is printers and Microsoft Word. Our Word program is seriously corrupted so students lose projects they've been working on for days. Our printers never work consistently. Every other printout is jammed or not coming out (reason unknown). We have 5 printers in the library & computer labs, all of which are extremely touchy. This becomes a huge headache when students have limited time to work.
I believe the key to technology integration in our building is more research projects. I would like to see more assignments that involve students gathering information to communicate to their peers and instructor their findings. How do we inspire teachers to do this when it involves more work than covering a textbook and the questions at the end of a chapter with a text here and there?

I think I need to sign out when I leave my blog.....

It seems like I have to sign out multiple times before I can sign in. So today I will sign out before I leave my blog (which I have not done) and then come back to the blog later and see if signing in is less complicated. Once I can make easy entries into my blog I need to think of things more profound to talk about......

Still Frustrated

I have once again spent an hour just trying to log in to post a blog entry. This is getting ridiculous. Why can't I simply sign in without going through a million attempts! I want to go to my blog, sign in and post a blog. Instead, I am signing in and getting the page to enter new blogs, I sign out and get prompts for google accounts. I go to bloglines and there is nothing after spending an hour entering junk in there..... I will not use this with students until it is streamlined and postings are not soooooooooooooo difficult. What's the freaking deal???????

Frustration!

I have worked for two evenings to enter a second post and could not get to this point. Finally, I put all the different usernames and passwords I had played with the first day we created our blogs and arrived here. It should not be this difficult. I think it was having too many things thrown at us at once. Now that I'm in, it should go much smoother. I'm anxious to try the image thing! Perseverance is the key...

Thing I

Creating a blog is very simple. Now to find the words of reflection & wisdom to share with the world.