21st Century Information Literacy

This is just my demo on Animoto, but it is an application that is free and they have a special section for educational use. I think this could be a great application to showcase student projects, activities, and field trips–of course tons of fun for friends and family as well to view.

I found a couple articles and a video today that interested me related to 21st Century Information Literacy.  Here are the links and I hope you will comment on what you think.

Create, Collaborate, Communicate: Empowering Students With 21st Century Skills

Top 10 Web 2.0 Tools for Young Learners

Today I taught a lesson on sequencing to a group of third graders in our Media Center.  I often teach this skill in a small group and need to reteach it often.  It was so fun reading to a class of almost 30 students and have most of them glued to what I was saying.  I was worried a bit about classroom management but it went fine.  Only a few buggers and they responded to my verbal/non verbal redirection or proximity.   When it came to the project tin which they work in groups they were not really engaged until they realized after they finished the first part they would be able to browse and check out books.  I am not a fan of using the IMC for preps as it is done in our building.  The lesson I did is one  the media specialist does yearly.  One thing I might change is to do it with the story or author they are currently studying in the classroom to tie into the curriculum a bit and maybe give the classroom teacher the opportunity to work on other things in the curriculum.  With the scheduled IMC times as preps it leaves little time for the media specialist to collaborate with classroom teachers.  I am excited that my internship is requiring collaboration so that I can see how I can help incorporate this in our building more.  Getting back to the kids and the lesson I was impressed that they all competed the task which was to write a one or two sentences about the beginning middle or end.  Each child was given a part in their group.  As I could see the writing skills it was easy to modify as needed.  It felt so good to know that I was able to manage the class and the work-granted my supervisor was there to step in if needed.  I was able to locate books for students who could not find what they were looking for–it always makes me happy to get books in to kids hands and see them excited about what will be on the pages.

I spent time at the high school today and learned a lot.  Scheduling is very different than at the elementary level.  The educational assistant it the anchor of the program because the media specialist has to teach English course and year book as well as her IMC duties.  At our middle school it is run to 1.5 educational assistants and no media specialist.  After posting an all district email about what technology is used in my district, I have been able to connect with some teachers for my collaboration tasks form y internship.  I will be doing my middle school one with an English Teacher who is interested in blogs and wikis, but does research papers with her class and wants to go more in depth about authoritative sources and possibly using a blog or wiki.  At the High School I will be helping the Health Teacher begin a blog.  She already has a great start because she has developed a solid school web page. Unfortunately some wiki sites and blog sites are blocked and we do not subscribe to any yet.  Hopefully we will get something useful going through collaboration that they can continue and that will be useful to their students.  I spent a very long time looking on our website for our acceptable use policy and did not find it although i know there is one because I have seen a print copy.  I also found many helpful sites on how to write one and some ideas specific to using weblogs.  This policy is a very critical piece to getting the blogs up and running.

I just found a math widget for fourth grade.  It posts a page a day to support math standards.  This widget was found on widgetbox.
***1/26/09 I did have this widget on my site, but a colleague of mine who was interested found out it only gave three printables and then requested you subscribe to get the rest of the year. It would be great to have this as a widget free to educators.

I also just created this blog into a blidget through this company. It is titled Literacy.  Hopefully it will intrigue more people to visit and in a sense acts as a type of RSS feed if you have it on your desktop, blog or web page.