Pageflakes As a Personal Learning Network Portal: Learning and Research 2.0

Back in January, I wrote a post about Pageflakes and the screencast we had created for our media center.  Now Joyce Valenza has inspired me with her latest blog post  about ways we can use Pageflakes with our patrons!  As Joyce points out, we can certainly use iGoogle with our patrons to help them design feeds through their GoogleReader accounts to keep up with the latest news on a particular topic from their favorite web resources:  news outlets, blogs, and RSS feed searches from a few databases.  We showed iGoogle to 9th graderst this past year, and they were very much impressed by the power of iGoogle, but now Joyce and Clarence Fisher  have me thinking about how we can use Pageflakes as personal learning network information portal.

I am not sure how I missed this, but there is a “Teacher Edition” of Pageflakes for educators—it is not really too different from the “regular” flavor, but the widgets and template are more tailored for items and feeds of interest to educators.   Pageflakes could be a powerful tool for teachers—imagine creating a screencast for your students around a particular unit of study in any subject area! 

However, I am really thinking hard tonight about students taking the reins and creating their own learning portal and personal learning networks; there is a student version of Pageflakes available, too!  As Will Richardson pointed out in this blog post,

“From a teaching standpoint, pages of this type can be pretty effective for bringing in potential content and then making decisions about what to do with that content. “

Take a look at these three examples: 

• Joyce’s test Pageflakes for Global Studies
• Lisa Spiro’s “Digital Humanities Research Portal”.   
• Will Richardson’s Darfur Screencast

All of these screencasts give us a tantalizing taste of how students could use Pageflakes as a personalized research portal.  Note how both examples pull in feeds from podcasts, authoritative news outlets, and vodcasts.   If students are blogging their research process, they can even pull in the RSS feed from their blog as part of their personal Pageflakes portal.  Note also that you can incorporate widgets for favorite search engines as well!  Students can also pull in their personal Google Library feed, You Tube videos, Teacher Tube videos, SlideShare presentations, del.icio.us RSS feeds….the possibilities are truly endless!  Organizational tools, such as sticky notes and “to do” lists, are also available. 

For the short term future, I want to experiment with Pageflakes as a personal learning network for students/information-research portal in three ways:

1.  Teacher-Librarian/School Library Media Specialist lens:  I will seek out a teacher to pilot the use of Pageflakes as a personal learning network/portal at my high school this fall.  We will work together to design mini-lessons to show students how to harness the power of Pageflakes for a particular research assignment.

2.  Classroom Teacher Lens:  As I do the  multigenre research project with my night school students this fall, I want to build a new requirement that they create their Pageflakes screencast to reflect their research.  We could easily incorporate screenshotsof the screencast and a live link to the Pageflakes screencast in their final Word document or better yet, move away from Word and create the final product in Google docs or as a blog/Wiki.  I could also create a blogroll to everyone’s Pageflakesresearch portal on my class blogs that I use with my students.

My third and more ambitious goal is to see if we could get one of our senior English teachers to collaborate with us and use a student created Pageflakes screencast (along with a research blog created by each student) as one of their artifacts for their Senior Project.  This is our school’s first year piloting the “Senior Project” since this year marks the rise of our first senior class—how exciting would it be if kids could easily view each other’s research projects and Pageflakes screencasts?

I will keep you all posted on how these three initiatives come to fruition this fall as the beginning of our school year is just three weeks away!  If anyone else out there is taking on similar collaborative planning projects, please email me at buffy.hamilton@cherokee.k12.ga.us —I am always happy to share ideas and experiences “from the trenches” with another media specialist.  Stay tuned!

A footnote:  Tonight’s blog post and the ideas that have come out of it are the result of my personal learning network I have established using Web 2.0 tools….I will be blogging more about this topic in September! 

Buffy Hamilton, Media Specialist
Creekview High School
http://theunquietlibrarian.wordpress.com
http://theunquietlibrary.wordpress.com
http://webtech.cherokee.k12.ga.us/creekview-hs/mediacenter/

MS Library 2.0 Summit Birds of a Feather Lunch Tables

MS Library 2.0 Summit Birds of a Feather Lunch Tables

Originally uploaded by msulibrary1

Are you teaching Web 2.0 or Library 2.0 courses to your faculty or fellow educators? Here is a sample of photo of a great idea from the MSU Library 2.0 Summit (that I wanted to attend but could not because I could not leave my summer school peeps!) a few weeks ago. I love how they organized the tables by Web 2.0 tool….I am going to borrow this idea for a presentation I am doing July 12 at UGA and for my blogging class I am teaching July 14-15.

Thank you, MSU, for inspiring me!

How Peach Books Spoke To My 10th Grade Summer School Peeps

I have a marathon of grading tonight, so this will be a short post…I will try and blog more next week when summer school is over, and I can catch my breath. 

I just had to share with you one of the reading journals from one of my students, Bryan.  He is a student who has struggled with school, and as you will see below, he is a bit spelling challenged (he can never remember to hit F7 to spell check in the new Word 2007).   His reading journal is part of our Peach Book Project—my students got to choose any Peach Book nominee they wanted to read independently (they had class time, and I am very much an advocate of the Atwell mantra of “time” and “ownership”.)  Their task was to write 5 reading journals, create 5 multigenre learning artifacts, and to compose a final reflection essay we did today in the library (of course!) :-). 

As I said, spelling is not his forte, but he has worked so hard the last three weeks—he is not the greatest speller, but he tries, and that is everything in my book.  The emotion and heartfelt sentiments he expressed about his book, The First Part Last by Angela Johnson, literally brought tears to my eyes; I had recommended it to him, and as you can see, he took to the book like a duck to water.   To see any student, especially a tough guy like Bryan, react to a book like this….well, his post says it all.  Here is what he said in his final reading journal from our blog:

June 25 2008
The frist part last
110-end

this book had and surprising sad ending that almost made me cry. Bobby talks about heaven and he wishes that he could go back to all the places his friend thought was whack and at the very end he wished to hold his baby in his arms again. his grandmother witch its his mom only smiles at Feather when Bobbys not looking.

i loved this book so much it has been a wonderful book that enspired me in my life and if it hadn’t been for the peach book project i wouldnt have enjoyed the experince of getting into a book i liked. toward the end i was hoping it wouldn’t end. everytime i fliped a page i would get exictied because there would be more and more .THANKS MRS. HAMILTON! =)

I would consider this to be one of our greatest accomplishments in summer school!  Bryan D., thank YOU!

J.K. Rowling Commencement Speech: “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and The Importance of Imagination”

Take time to read the text of the speech available at http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html .

This is an amazing speech that will go straight to your heart. 

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement : Harvard Magazine

 

Who Inspires You As a Librarian?: Ode to Joy

Who inspires you as a librarian?  I have been blessed to have many librarian mentors along the way as a child and as an adult.

Joy Mabry is someone who has been an inspiration to me for nearly twenty years now—I first met her as a barely twenty-something at our district teacher center, and she has been an unfailing source of support, encouragement, friendship, and wisdom.  She is an educator who has touched countless lives in the Cherokee County School District—she still has students from her days as an elementary school librarian who approach her with words of gratitude and thanks for what she did for them as their school media specialist.   I can only hope that I could have even an ounce of the positive influence on students as Joy Mabry has done and continues to do so even as I write this post.  If Joy were a library book, she would have been showered with every literary accolade and prize that one could win—she is definitely a Pulitzer  of a librarian!

Joy has especially been my “rock” the last few years as I opened my media center, and our patrons at Creekview High owe her a debt of thanks as she was an advocate of our media center (and still continues to be!!!) when our library barely had shelving in place.  I have also had the pleasure of interviewing her for a research project at the University of Georgia in which she shared her history as a reader and writer with me; I am hopeful she will let me eventually make that interview a live podcast you all can enjoy. 

When I think of people who have shaped me as a person and as a librarian, Joy is at the top of the list.  Her spirit, her wit, her boundless energy, her faith, and unwavering enthusiasm always make my day.  I am proud to be an “adopted” granddaughter to her and grateful she doesn’t judge me for my inability to change lamination film (she did this for me throughout 2006-07!).  Thankfully, my other qualities do make up for that flaw.  :-) 

I would like to publicly give a shout of thanks to Joy Mabry—friend, mentor, muse, librarian pioneer, maverick, and lifelong learner.