Thing 8: Collaborating, Connecting, and Sharing

Whew!  I'm finally caught up on Cool Tools - for now.
I have used Doodle in the past to set-up meetings, and also shared documents with my co-workers on Google Docs.  I liked Doodle - it was simple and easy to use.  It worked very well, even for novice users.  Now if I only could get everyone in my family to use it to try and schedule holidays and family parties!

TitanPad was new to me.  I am in charge of a district librarian committee for planning reading incentives - RocRead.  I setup a TitanPad so committee members can post and share their ideas and plan our next incentive.  It is hard to get everyone together on the same day all the time and there are too many emails to sort through.  The color coding and the ease of use was very inviting.

I'm familiar with Skype - I have used it very often for personal conversations, but haven't yet used it for school.  I would like to investigate using it with one of my library classes and collaborating with another district librarian.  I am going to investigate what tools are available to me to use it - an iPad or another camera.

There were a lot of choices for document storage and sharing on the web.  I'm also involved in a collegial circle and we are writing and sharing lesson plans.  I will ask the group if they would like to use one of these tools to share - it will create less emails hopefully!

Thing 7:Podcasting and Screencasting

I'm going to use podcasting to introduce my students to the new Kidblog I set up for my 5th grade students.  I'm setting up this blog with a lot of help from my blogging experts and Cool Tool friends, Sally and Paula - thanks girls!  Here is my first podcast. 

I'm going to put this into my welcome message to start the blog.

I did have trouble getting this to display at first.  I made a board on audioboo, copied the embed coding, and pasted it in the HTML view in Blogger.  I just previwed it and it looks like it will work.  Interesting though that when I switched back to the "compose" mode in Blogger to type the rest of this post, I can't see the HTML code anymore, even though in HTML view it is still there and works - wierd.

I think the screencasting tool would be great to set up instructional videos for students on how to use Destiny.  I will maybe post it on the school website.  Also, I may make an instructional video for subs on how to login to Destiny and check books in and out.

Thing 6: Curation Tools

Finally I understand what Pinterest is, instead of just pretending I do when people talk about it!  I liked this category.  I found great sites on the Chris Gibson site that I shared with my 2nd and 6th grade teachers to use with ancient civilizations.  She used Scoop-it and I liked the look of that site very much.  Updating and cleaning my Destiny home page has been on my "to do" list for quite some time.  There are so many great links, but the home page gets very long. It also gets challenging to keep them in a particular order as you add additional links.   I am going to experiment using Scoop-it to collect resources and then use single links by topic to the Scoop-it site instead of listing all the individual sites directly on Destiny for some of my categories.  Using Scoop-it will allow the users to see pictures and logos of the sites which will help the younger users navigate getting to sites.  My primary students can't always find links on the home page.