Thing #13 Easy ELM

I am loving this new password free ELM. It doesn't seem like that big of a deal to have no username and password for ELM but it is. Right in to searching without the hassle of signing in. I am using it myself much more and my students will be using it much more come second semester. We gave up trying to use it for class previously because of the problems students had getting in. It will be reintroduced first day of second semester and now I actually look forward to it.

Celebrating the MERGER (#4 again!)

Finally the deed is done and the Minneapolis and Hennepin County Library Systems have merged into one. This has been a wonderful event for our family as our neighborhood library reopened Thursday, January 3rd. We had gone an entire year with our favorite neighborhood destination cold and dark and what a sad situation that was. What with two children that had loved getting over there and two adults who adored our Roosevelt Library as well. We had been among the last to leave when it closed and we were the first family bustling in the door when it reopened. The entire day felt like a celebration of sorts. Our daughter was captured in this photo in the Star Tribune as she explored a new book.

PathFinders

I have been mulling over starting several Pathfinders @ Wellstone but this seemed so out of date. I was surprised to Joyce Valenza blogging about them too.
I had not thought about putting a pathfinder in a wiki but the more I read and thought about it the more sense it made. I think this will give me a reason to give the wiki thing a whirl.
Joyce's always intriguing blog is now posted on the left sidebar.

Say what?

Karen mentioned mashups at the beginning of our class this week and my mind went off on a tangent. I don't remember hearing this word before but it made me think of two incongruent things: mashed potatoes and car crashes. I looked it up on Wikipededia (after all our class was on wikis!) and found out all sorts of interesting information on mashups. The term can mean different things but the most interesting had to do with music. Taking two totally different genres of music and syncopating them. Maybe classical and rap. Fascination abounds with this type of creativity. Now I am interested in listening to some of these mashups or downloading them. What'll people think up next?

I am also interested in incorporating pix with my blog as I have seen Banlang do with her wonderful blog.

Thing #3

I finally figured out how to manually add bloggers using Bloglines Beta. It all rested on my dragging a button to the tool bar and then just clicking on it to add a new blogger. It was soooo easy once I caught on. My hat is off to Banlang for clueing me in to this quick, no pain way to add participants.

Thing #4

I am persuing an idea that was broght up in our last staff development about public library cards for our students. Seems very few of them have one or even know there is a public library just two blocks away. I am looking at a way for them to register for library cards here from Wellstone and then when the weather improves set a walking field trip up to get them over there.

In that same vein our circ here at Wellstone is down significantly from last year. Since I wasn't here last year I am wondering why so few students are taking books out. Anyone else have an idea on how to get students not only visiting the library for internet but getting in the stacks and browsing books.

Thing #5

I have been using my web page to keep up with the two classes that I teach and the History Day class starting after winter break. I use them almost exclusivly to post web sites that will help the class. Previously I had tried having the class type in long urls that almost always created panic among the students as they would miss a character in the long alphanumeric strings creating 404 errors. Having multiple students shouting that the website doesn't work all at once leads to chaotic teaching situations to say the least.

They are so helpful for students to work on the assignments outside of class as well. They don't need to navigate to difficult sites, they have it mounted for them already. I hope to help other teachers make use of this invaluable technology tool as well.