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/

Getting Ready to Have a Conversation About Avant Garde Cataloging 2.0!

I am honored and delighted to be a guest speaker this Saturday for Dr. Mary Ann Fitzgerald’s EDIT 6380 “Cataloging for Automated School Media Centers” at UGA/Gwinnett.  Speaking to budding school library media specialists is always a thrill, but this particular event is especially meaningful since Dr. Fitzgerald was my program advisor and has been a guiding force in my life since 2001; in addition, it seems like it was just the other day that I was a student in EDIT 6380 in the summer of 2005!

My resource bookmarks are available at http://del.icio.us/theunquietlibrary/7-12-08, and my presentation (which is more of a visual guide…I will be doing a ton of “show and tell” with our library blog, our library website, and other library 2.0 tools) is available below:

I am excited to share how I am using library 2.0 and web 2.0 tools in my media center to organize and deliver information to our patrons.  I can only hope that what I have to share will inspire others to join in the fun! 

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!

Konrad Glogowski’s Pedagogy of Blogging from NECC 2008!

 

Konrad Glogowski:   I just discovered this blogger, educator, and teacher in recent days, but he has some really interesting posts and experiences to share with us.  You can visit his blog and read more at http://www.teachandlearn.ca/blog/. 

blog of proximal development

 

more about “Weblogg-ed“, posted with vodpod

Feed, Tag, Research: Remixing for School Library 2.5 (Library Remix 2.5@NECC 2008)

 

necclibrarians08 » home

If you have not heard the buzz about this NECC session, then head over to http://necclibrarians08.wikispaces.com/ to get the scoop!  Here you will find the recorded Ustream video of the session, plus terrific resources from all the presenters on the panel.  What was this session all about?  Here is the official description in a nutshell:

School librarians are leading learning and instructional change. Discover how we are re-visioning reading, research, and “library” for 21st-century students on the Read/Write Web.

As if this link isn’t enough, feel free to check out my favorite buzz and discussion on this important NECC 2008 panel discussion by visiting http://del.icio.us/theunquietlibrary/LibraryRemix2.5 .

 

 

 

more about “Team Force Teacher Feed: Ustream.TV S…“, posted with vodpod

Saturday, July 5 @ 11:00 AM: Classroom 2.0 Wrap-Up and Review of NECC 2008

 

classroom2dot0 » live conversations

From educator extraordinaire Steve Hargadon:

http://www.classroom20wiki.com/live+conversations

The NECC wrap-up and review show. EduBloggerCon, NECC Unplugged, the Bloggers’ Cafe, and all the rest. The best links, leads, streams, podcasts, vlogs, and blogs. What you loved, what you didn’t. We’ll try and document all in a special 90-minute show.

Go to http://www.elluminate.com/support/ to make sure you have everything installed needed to participate in the live session and to configure your Elluminate software that you can download at this site; it takes no more than 5-8 minutes to do this.

Whether you attended NECC 2008 in person or not, this live discussion will be a great way to see the highlights of the conference and get ideas for your library or classroom!

ALA or NECC 2008: Which Convention is Generating the Most Buzz?

Is it me, or did the NECC convention generate more buzz?  I have been part of an amazing NECC Convention Ning, and read all kinds of wonderful Tweets about the convention on Twitter.  I barely heard a gurgling sound from the ALA Convention….again, it could just be my vantage point, but other than one blog post and a SLJ article, I have heard nary a word about the ALA Convention whereas I am saturated with the NECC buzz!

How about you other librarians/media specialists out there?  Did you hear/read/virtually participate more in NECC or ALA this past week?   Should ALA or ALA members have offered more participation virtually like NECC/NECC participants did?

NECC Envy? Try the NECC Ning!

Are you like me, unable to attend NECC in person?  If you can’t be in San Antonio, then being a part of the NECC Ning  is the next best thing.  I joined up about a month ago, and it has been a blast to hear and learn about what has been happening out there through the Ning.  It’s not too late to join and to get in on all the buzz!

NECC 2008

 

Recommendation: Twitter Article@SLJ

All a Twitter: Want to Try Microblogging? - 7/1/2008 - School Library Journal

Back in March, I blogged about the joys and benefits of Twitter, an instrumental element of my personal learning network.  If you haven’t tried it, then check out this fabulous article about Twitter from Ellyssa Kroski over at School Library Journal.  This article provides an accessible yet thorough introduction and overview for Twitter newbies and veterans alike!

I am always happy to Tweet with fellow librarians and educators!   

Twitter / buffyjhamilton

My Resource Page for Teaching Multigenre Research Papers

 

Multigenre Research Projects Summer 2008, Buffy Hamilton via kwout

It is a work in progress, and it will have to be moved in a few weeks as our district moves from FrontPage to Sharepoint (boo hoo!), but here is my current resource page on teaching the multigenre paper.

http://webtech.cherokee.k12.ga.us/creekview-hs/buffyhamilton/multigenre_research_projects_summer2008.htm

Here you will find:

• My handouts in PDF format
• Blog reflections from the students
• Sample papers written by real high school students
• My favorite resources on teaching and learning with multigenre papers

While I have dabbled with this project with short stories, this is the first full scale effort I have completed with a general research topic.  I would like to do a full scale project of this nature with a novel next year…it is just hard sometimes with my night school pumpkins, especially with the EOCT course, because of the time factor.  However, I am really pleased with my efforts this summer, and I already have ideas on what I will do again, and what I will do to make this project even better!

I need a few days to clear my mind, rest, and reflect before I write my final blog post about this research experience.  However, I can say that I highly recommend it!  I will be writing more soon on what I feel that my students and I learned from this research experience.

The Unquiet Library: Our Annual Report, 2007-08

The Creekview High School Media Center, “The Unquiet Library”, is proud to release its annual report for 2007-08.  In this report, we highlight what our library program has accomplished in the four roles of the media specialist/media center set forth by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL):

• Teacher
• Instructional Partner
• Information Specialist
• Program Administrator

This report highlights collaborative planning and lessons taught through the media center, skills taught to students through information literacy mini-lessons, circulation and visitation statistics, database usage statistics, and upcoming program goals for 2008-09.  You may read the report by clicking here, or by visiting the link below. 

Monthly Reports, Creekview High School Media Center

 

 

A Poll for Librarians: What Is Your Favorite Library 2.0 Tool?

Take a moment and let me know about your favorite Library 2.0 tool!