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have you ever spent a ton of time preparing a powerpoint only to have it not open on your teacher's computer, or disappear from the gaucho server, or not download from your email? sucks, doesn't it? well, don't let this happen to you (again). share your presentations on slideshare.

slideshare is "the world's largest online community for sharing presentations," but you can share more than just powerpoints. you can also upload word docs and pdfs and even add audio to turn your presentations into webinars! :) you can also export and upload your sliderockets. you can favorite and comment on presentations you like and follow the people who made them and join groups of slidesharers with similar interests.

the casa people on slideshare so far are:
* mr. buchmann
* mrs. reed
* the counseling department
* and the library

i set up the counseling department's slideshare account last summer. since then, their powerpoints have been seen more than 550 times! that's a lot more looks than they would have got on someone's flash drive!

and as for our teachers, it just makes sense to have students submit assignments in this way so that they can all be viewed anywhere anytime. i taught these teachers and their students how to slideshare, and if you're interested, i can teach you and yours, too! it's fun and it's easy! :)

i think every casa student, teacher, and department ought to have a slideshare account and store their school stuff for free if only as a backup to our school's often unreliable network (aka the gaucho server).

it'd also be nice to have a network of casa staff and students and an electronic record of our teaching and your learning.

for you students, your slideshare account becomes a sort of electronic portfolio of your academic work that you can share with prospective employers and future colleges, not to mention your grandma at christmastime! :)

so check out slideshare, and if you do create an account, post a comment and let us know what you think of it. and be sure to follow us at slideshare.net/bighouselibrary! :)
 
 
 
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image from arstechnica

yesterday at our faculty meeting, mr. wade and i were asked by ms. scheele to tell fellow teachers about delicious.

delicious is a social bookmarking site that allows you to take your web browser bookmarks with you to what ever computer you happen to be at by putting them on the web.

delicious can help you search:
you can use delicious to see what others with similar search interests have bookmarked. chances are that someone has beaten you to the web and found what you're looking for first. save yourself time: don't search google; search delicious! browse tags, browse users, browse popular and recent bookmarks. search smarter, not harder.

delicious can help you organize:
you can use tags to group links and easily and quickly locate them later.

delicious can help you teach:

you can save sets of links on topics you teach in your classes and hyperlink to those URLs on your teacher web page.

delicious can help you network:
you can add other teachers to your delicious network and share your common links. here's who's on delicious at casa so far: ms. koval, mr. wade, mr. backman, the counseling department, the students! :)

delicious is by no means the only social bookmarking site on the web; there are upwards of 100 social bookmarking options! so pick one, sign up, and start using it today! you'll love it! i know it! :)

here are more links to help start you on your social bookmarking adventure:
my list of social bookmarking bookmarks on delicious

and here's a screencast of me showing you what delicious is and how to use it:
screencast.com/msannakoval/delicious

(this link is also on the just for teachers page of this website)

i double dare you to start right now! bookmark this blog post using the  addthis button below. :)
 
 
 
 
Yesterday, I presented to Casa's ELAC (or English Learner Advisory Council).

Administrators, teachers, parents, and students came together in the library to review the school's resources available for families online.

Parents logged on to the new computers in the computer lab and toured CasaGrandeHighSchool.org and BigHouseLibrary.com.

The best part, though, was when I taught parents how to use Google Translate! :)

Casa has made it a goal to do more, better outreach to the families of our English learners. And the library is proud to now be a part of that effort.

Thank you to my 5th period TAs who made this awesome YouTube welcome video for our Spanish-speaking families.

Thank you to our beloved ELD (English Language Development) program coordinator Ms. Judi DeChesere, our outstanding ELD/SDAIE teachers, our dedicated bilingual assistants, and our school administrators for inviting me to be a part of ELAC.

Thank you to Jose Luis for translating for me. My Spanish leaves much to be desired!

Thank you to the handful of Casa students who hung out to help me troubleshoot computer problems.

And thank you to the many wonderful parents who spent their evening with me in the library. I am so happy to know you and I look forward to working together more. :)
 
 
 
 
I presented this Animoto on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at the Petaluma City Schools District Office to our library-loving Superintendent Greta Vigue and her Advisory Council -- made up of one teacher representative from each school in the district.

Petaluma High School's teacher-librarian, Connie Williams, and I toured the committee members through our library websites and collaborative teacher projects. We talked about the Governor's initiative to move toward electronic textbooks -- something I strongly support and coincidentally just mentioned to my principal Linda Scheele and tech committee chair Tom Kinney today. And we asked about the possibility of unblocking social networking site Facebook in schools -- something I'm not so sure about yet (as you know, I am not a social networker). (The Superintendent said that she is working on a plan for that with Eileen Rohan, Director of Educational Services, and Mike Cole, Director of Business Technology.)

Connie and I offered to lead a professional development session for district teachers about the Big 6 information literacy model and/or a workshop for adult education students and parents a la the Classroom Learning 2.0 program. Though school librarians already do so much, these days there's more than ever to do, and we are happy to do whatever we can.  :)

One of the teacher reps lamented the fact that Petaluma's elementary schools no longer have any credentialed teacher-librarians at all. But we pointed out how lucky Petaluma is to have what we do have:
  • 4 secondary school libraries that are open full-time
  • 4 credentialed teacher-librarians who work full-time in just 1 school each 
  • 2 full-time library assistants, 1 at each high school (I love you, Miss Helen!)  :)
  • an inter-library loan program that give students access to materials at 4 schools instead of from just their own
  • a voter-backed parcel tax that supports school libraries  with a very healthy budget every year from now  until perpetuity (I love you, Measure C!)  :)
Though Petaluma's school libraries are well loved and well supported, who knows what the future holds. Our neighbors to the north in Santa Rosa are basically eliminating their school library programs because of budget cuts (read that story here and read Connie Williams' response to it here).

Hopefully the adoption of State School Library Standards by California's Superintendent of Schools Jack O'Connell (read that story here) will keep some districts from shutting their school library doors for good. But should it come to that, maybe Petaluma parents will fight for us the way Orange County families protested on behalf of their school libraries and the way Oregon moms got almost militant about saving their school librarians.  :)

Petaluma understands the importance of strong school libraries.  Research shows that strong school libraries have a positive, observable, measurable impact on students' academic achievement (just look at all the data from the California Department of Education and the data from 16 other states!).

Strong school libraries DO make a difference -- especially here in Petaluma.  :)
 
 
 

i made SlideRockets w/ a class 4 the 1st time this week! woo hoo! =)

(for more info about making SlideRockets with classes, click here.)

well, it went well but w/ a few glitches...

1. in SlideRocket u can't edit html except 2 hyperlink

2. in SlideRocket u can't embed a YouTube video easily (if you can even view YouTube video that isn't blocked @ school)

i tweeted SlideRocket 4 tech support and they said this:

1. "We don't let you edit HTML in SlideRocket but you can add an HTML link to an object. Just select your object then go to the Tools menu and Select Hyperlink. You can link your presentation to another slide or to an external link."

2. "We don't have a super tight integration with YouTube just yet, it's still in development but we do have a work around. At this time SlideRocket cannot directly embed a YouTube video. Instead you will need to use a free 3rd party service such as http://kej.tw/flvretriever/ which will allow you to save any YouTube video to your hard drive as a flash video. You can then import a flash video into your SlideRocket presentation."

nice. this helps. thanks, SlideRocket! =)

but now for glitches 3 & 4...

3. the teacher wanted each student to create 5 slides and then combine the slides of 3 or 4 students into 1 sliderocket. but how to combine slides created by different users prior to publishing the sliderocket as a webpage? 2 options:

a. invite a user to view your slide rocket: in the presentations tab, click the invite icon

OR...

b. add the slides to your sliderocket library click tools > add slide to library > under permissions, click the advanced tab > then click the + to add a user or group by email do this for each slide > then 1 user inserts all shared slides into 1 SlideRocket

the problem with both of these workarounds was glitch 4:

the limitations of the free account...

because the students had just signed up for new accounts w/ no previous usage history, they were able to invite people their teacher to view their presentations. (this was a good thing for them, because if she couldn't see them, she couldn't grade them!)

i, on the other hand, was not so lucky. i must have exceeded what was available to me for free from SlideRocket because i could not (and still cannot) invite others to view my presentations, nor can i share them.

the error message i get says: "We're sorry but this feature is not available to your current account level. If you'd like access to this and any of these other great SlideRocket features, please click the Upgrade my account button below."

and yet on SlideRocket's solutions page it says this:

"SlideRocket will always have a free account option for everyone." but i can't "spread the presentation love" if i can't share my presentations. ugh. i'll tweet them back and let you know what they say.

i'm still a SlideRocket lover, because i'm a PowerPoint hater, but they've obviously still got some kinks to work out. i just hope they do soon! =)

p.s. the SlideRocket team told me every time i tweet about them i'm entered into a monthly drawing for a free account. they suggested i re-tweet their tweets to increase my chances of winning. while i'm tempted by the lure of free stuff, i am ideologically opposed to spam. sorry, SlideRocket. guess i'll just have to play to pay! =P


 

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    this website
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    ms. anna koval teacher/librarian at
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    last update: 05-01-13
    copyright: 2008-2013