pafa.net

One of the projects I really enjoy being involved with is our statewide summer reading program. And that’s how I found out about the awesome StoryTubes project. Children from all over the country created short videos about their favorite books. What fun! We had 7 terrific entries from NYS this year. Let’s have more next year!!!!

Interested in joining in the 2009 program? Check out the StoryTubes site for more information.

StoryTubes - Reading Energy

Just heard about Kindernet, a new children’s search engine. Though the layout isn’t the jazziest at the moment, the search results look useful and age appropriate. The developer left a comment on Phil Bradley’s blog indicating that they’re working on a new look for the site. Looking forward to seeing how this project develops.

From their “about us” page:

Core Values

• Safe
  A pre-researched set of great sites for kids.

• Relevant
  Helps kids, teachers and parents find what they are looking for sooner.

• Global
  Children are able to participate and communicate with other children around the globe.

• Friendly
  Designed to be user-friendly for all children 12 and under.

• Free
  The Kindernet search engine is free for all people to use.

(via LIB and Phil Bradley.)

It’s not too late to join in the All Together Now Learning 2.0 program that started this week. It’s being led by Michael Stephens of Tame The Web.

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!

7 Ways Your Public Library Can Help You During A Bad Economy: Handy short article on the ways library services and resources can help people at ANY time, not just during a bad economy.

1. You can get pretty much any book at the library
2. Yes, we have movies
3. Kids Activities
4. Save Money and maybe your life!
5. Make new friends
6. Find a new job
7. Libraries listen to consumers!

Really interesting comments from library users listing lots of additional services that they find valuable. I loved this comment in particular:

Using my local library has been one of my resolutions for 2008 and I can report that its going great. I’ve saved a ton of money by reading books from my library vs. Amazon.com. I use Amazon.com to research and keep track of titles and when I’ve read one of those titles from the library I check the “I own it” so I can get better recommendations.

Can’t wait for the day we all have catalogs that have those sorts of “amazon” features….. someday soon?

(via LISNews)

Hey there, all you school librarians!! Don’t miss this chance to participate in the School Library Journal’s 2.0  learning program and explore the world of 2.0 tools and learning.

The program, All Together Now: A 2.0 Learning Experience, is free and starts Monday July 21.  This is a self-guided program, but you’ll have lots of company to share your ideas and experiences with.  And Michael Stephens of Tame the Web will be offering guidance and advice throughout the program via a blog.

The program wraps up in early September, just in time for you to put your new skills and ideas to work during the school year.

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7/21/08 - NOTE: To get started visit the program’s blog

Have you ever picked up the phone, called a friend or colleague and said ‘go to xyz web site’ and then tried to say things like “click on that link at the top left”. “no not that one, the other big yellow button”, “see that thingie at the bottom” and so on. I have and it can be frustrating.

Flowgram is an interesting new service that I found out about today thanks to Greg Schwartz. It falls somewhere in the realm of screencasting services, though maybe we need a new term for this type of tool. (Maybe there already is a term?)

With Flowgram, you open up web pages, add highlighting to point out different parts of the page and add a narration to the pages. All this is done with live web pages.

When you share this with others, they see the live web pages with your highlighting in their browser window, with a small toolbar at the top of the window with  start and pause controls. What’s really intriguing, and a bit confusing at first, is the ability to stop the presentation, go off and explore the web pages that are on the screen and then return to the Flowgram to resume the presentation.

I haven’t created any Flowgrams myself. The service is still in an invite-only beta version.  I’ll be curious to see how this service develops. I can see it being very useful for quick instruction and sharing of content with others.

Greg’s Flowgram showing some tips on using FriendFeed.

And another Flowgram - this on one What is a Flowgram.