After reading the article Say Good-bye to your mother’s school library by Christopher Harris I started thinking of other applications of blogs in the school. I previously mentioned using blogs for students to be able to comment on books. Students could also post book requests or recommend books to peers. Right now in my school library this is done by filling out a piece of paper and putting it on a bulletin board. Wouldn’t be great if students could do this from home!!! Well a blog would allow them to do this. That way, if they just finish a book and are truly excited about it, they could type away right away as opposed to waiting until they get to school.
While reading about the students the students talking about their novel Night with students 700 miles away that I could set up a blog for my French students to talk to students in another high school. This has been done for years, but not it could be done quicker and more efficiently. I used to do this with students via the means of writing letters to pen pals, then updated it by writing via email. Now I can update it once again by having my students create a blog. We could add pictures of our class, school using Flikr or add video using one of the Instant Audio and Video sites that I have been reading about.
Harris confused me when writing about the flex Library schedule with the librarian. Is Mrs. Smith and her class simply going to the library to exchange books? When or how do the weekly lessons take placed? Either it was not explained very well, or I am still not grasping how the library is functioning. Can anyone out there explain this to me?
Since reading the article, I have set up an account on LibraryThing.com It was extremely easy to do. I have some books to my list and now I am able to find other books that they suggest. Are any of you part of this group?
This may be a good site to try to gain some reading excitement for my Communications 11 and 12 classes. Perhaps if I can get them to name some books that they have enjoyed reading, we may be able to find more books for them to read.
I have also tried to download Scuttle to do my own bookmarking of books that my Literacy students can use in their content area classes. Unfortunately, the download was not successful for me. I tried to download a few times, but had no luck. If you were able to do this, please let me know.
Overall, I have to say that this article was very useful for me as I was it gave me a few ideas on how to implement Web 2.0 into my lessons.
Week 14: Playtime - Glogster
15 years ago
Flexible scheduling is one way of organizing a library timetable. A traditional, fixed schedule is one where the only time a class comes to the library is for their weekly book exchange/lesson. In a fully flexible schedule, there is no weekly lesson and the TL does not necessarily see every class every week. The schedule is left open for kids to come and go (individually or with their class) to get books and do research as they need to. Some libraries also operate with a mixed schedule (some flex time and some fixed time). A flexible schedule allows the TL to focus on teaching and collaboration rather than on traditional library lessons.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the clarification. I think that I would choose the mixed schedule as both are improtant. I like the ideas of a flex schedule to be able to team teach with teachers. This would give me the opportunity to teach both teachers and students about lessons using Web 2.0. However, I think that it is also important to have traditional library lessons to teach about bibliography, copyright etc. Plus it is fun to read to the different classes as well.
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