I wanted to highlight two of her examples from Christina Bentheim at the Dickens Elementary School in North Las Vegas, NV.

1: A wiki page chock full of resources for teacher, parents & students and with a great Glogster graphic as an interactive front page.

2: Her NetVibes information portal full of subject resources, a parenting section, teaching resources and more.

Learn how to embed almost anything in your HTML web pages from Flash videos to Spreadsheets to high resolution photographs to static images from Google Maps and more.

And while you’re there, check out their post on How to Insert YouTube Videos in PowerPoint Presentations. Another handy tutorial.

Bookmark them for future reference!

Everyone set up a delicious account and had instant network of colleagues. Throughout the weekend they all added links to their accounts. And they tagged them all with a unique tag for the group so they could create an RSS feed for that later in the day.

The group now has a wiki where eveyone introduced themselves and shared their plans and ideas that came out of the weekend. And they also set up a personal homepages using iGoogle and learned how to add RSS feeds from many different sources.

Amazingly everyone stayed awake for an after dinner session where we did some karaoke with Sims On Stage to get our blood flowing again. And everyone then joined Twitter!  I was just going to demo some social networking tools and suddenly everyone was twittering! Again, they had a built in instant network.

The session ended on Sunday with time for everyone to explore the resources in the class wiki, time to work on their own projects and to share ideas with each other.

I don’t know about everyone who participated, but I came away excited (AND exhausted!) Thanks so much to Danielle Boyea (Ulster BOCES SLS) and Rebecca Gerald (Dutchess BOCES SLS) for organizing the weekend. And to everyone who attended. It was an inspiring and fun weekend.

Wouldn’t this be a great class project?

Take a look for yourself and then get out your video cam and explain your favorite word.

One of my favorites was “fermata”, which was a new word for me!

(via: Infodoodads)

The material they’ve created is just terrific!  Access, Analyze, Act: A Blueprint for 21st Century Engagement will help you “discover the power of social media while promoting your students’ civic engagement.” This is a treasure trove of ideas, resources, interactive tools, lesson plans and more – all showing the enormous power and value of 2.0 tools. And what better context than this presidential election.

Use these resources to show the value of these tools and why we need to open our classrooms to them.

In addition to this terrific content, it was really interesting to see Elluminate in action.  Elluminate provides an environment for online learning and collaboration. Serendipitously, someone mentioned to me earlier today that they wanted me to help them test out this service later this week.

My experience tonight was quite positive. The software downloaded and installed easily without any thought on my part (always a good thing!) The interface was clear and intuitive. It included a list of the participants, a chat box, a video of the presenter and a large area where the live web pages were being broadcast. I’m sure I was seeing only a glimpse of the features available.

There were a few bumps here and there as a few web pages didn’t load right away or audio went a bit wonky, but in my experience that’s not unusual in these settings. For the most part, things ran smoothly.

If you’d like to see Elluminate in action yourself, there’s another live session scheduled for Thursday night (Sept 11), discussing Wikis in Education. Schedule and more information for these sessions is on the Classroom 2.0 Wiki

Thanks to Steve Hargadon for arranging these sessions and to all the presenters.

In a class last week, someone suggested using the the free trading cards generator at bighugelabs.com as a ‘get to know you’ sort of exercise at the beginning of the school year.  That got me thinking about and looking for other back to school ideas for this fun tool.

Like all the tools at bighugelabs, this one is very easy to use. Upload a photo/graphic or grab one from your flickr or photobucket account, enter a title, caption and some text and shazam, you have a cool trading card. You can download the trading card to your own computer, post it your flickr account, copy html code to put it on a web/blog/wiki page or print it out.

Some ideas – please share your ideas in the comments!

• Book Reviews – find a photo that expresses your feelings about a book you’ve read. Write a few lines about what the book meant to you.
• Student book reports -  Use the 2-sided Character Trading Card generator from the ReadWriteThink to create a summary of the book, notes about the characters, plot and more.  (sample card)
• “5 facts” reports – Find a photo or graphic of a topic. List 5 facts about that topic. Expand this to a podcast of the ‘5 facts’ (that idea from the Beverly (MI) Elementary School Podcasts) and use the trading card to illustrate the blog/web/wiki page listing the podcasts.
• Super Powers Cards – Have students create avatars for the trading card. And then create names and identities for themselves. Perhaps super powers that relate to things they enjoy doing? Fun “get to know you” cards to figure out who’s who.
• Parent’s Night – Use those same mysterious avatar cards to post next to student projects on parent’s nights. See if the parents can find their child’s work.
• Trading Cards for Parents – Have students create trading cards about their parents for parent’s night.
• State/country reports – Photos, map, flags, etc of their topic. List most important info about their state/country in the text section.
• Review Cards – Have students create foreign language/vocabulary review cards to share. Picture of an object and the words/definitions/meaning.
• Faculty trading cards – Teachers could create their own super hero trading cards to give to students – with information about their class or maybe their own “super-hero” traits!
• Research skills trading cards – Savvy Searcher, Commander of Databases, and other such silly things. Given to students as master various research skills. Collect a set, collect a prize?
• Solar System trading cards – Use photos of planets, etc. from NASA to create cards. Have students list facts, but not the name of the object. Others have to guess what it is. More ideas, photos and an online game available at the Solar Trading Cards System web page.
• Fact or Fiction – Each student creates a card with their photo or avatar and lists 2 facts about themselves and one false statement. Use this as a get-to-know-you activity. This idea from Experiments in Technology . See that post for a cool time capsule idea.

Here are some popular resources to help with making trading cards. But please check them out for yourself to determine how they’ll work in your school setting. If you know of other great resources, please leave a comment.

Photo Resources

• pics4learning Copyright friendly images for education.
• flickr.com Use advanced search to limit to creative commons licensed images and to use safe-search.
• Tag Galaxy Fun visualization tool. Can’t limit to creative commons license though.
• PicApp Free stock photos.
• CompFight Handy flickr search tool. Simple interface and very fast. Limit to Creative Commons license and set safe search on.

Avatar Creation Tools

• meez
• Yahoo avatars
• HeroMachine
• Face your Manga

Trading Card Makers

• Big Huge Labs
• Character Trading Card generator

If you post your photo to flickr, make sure you add it to the READ Poster photo pool For more information, read this  post from The Shifted Librarian.

(photo by Jenwaller)

Free, fun, you’ll learn a lot, you’ll connect with new colleagues. The program will cover 12 topics over the 6 weeks. Join in, have some fun and learn.

To sneak a peek and see who’s already signed up, check out the lists of participants.

p.s. This is being run by School Library Journal, but it’s not just for school librarians!

140 characters, enough to say where you are during a conference and find out who wants to meet for dinner. Or to find out where there’s a great session going on so you can leave the deadly dull one that you ended up in by mistake. I’ve used it a lot during conferences and had great meetups with colleagues I would have missed otherwise.

On a day to day basis, it’s very useful for sharing breaking news, alerts about interesting blog posts, posing questions and getting fast answers. Many organizations are using it to connect with customers, patrons, supporters. Political campaigns use twitter to alert supporters to the latest campaign news. Libraries use it as one more way to distribute updates about services and events. Library professional groups use it to get news out to members and the library community at large.

What you get out of it, depends on finding friends and colleagues who share your interests. And like any community, you have to give to get. So I try to respond to questions when I can and share new resources that I come across. In return I’ve gotten help with questions of my own. Will I stay with Twitter forever? Will I be fickle and love it and leave it? I don’t know, it has had some problems keeping up with traffic lately. If they continues, people will certainly move on to another tool that serves the same purpose, and there are other ones out there! For now, I’m finding Twitter a useful way to connect with friends and colleagues.

To find out more and see some great examples of how libraries are using Twitter, read Elyssa Kroski’s terrific article in School Library Journal, All a Twitter: Want to Try Microblogging? It’s an excellent introduction to Twitter. And even if you don’t get into using Twitter yourself, it’s definitely a tool to be aware of.

As Aaron said: “I’m all for making library services easier to use, but making people’s lives easier is an even better goal.” Couldn’t agree more.