Week 5, Thing #12: Rollyo

I must say, part of the reason I stepped away from 2.0 for awhile was this week's topic. Perhaps I should learn how to just say, "not interested" rather than fretting over how I can best use every tool. Rollyo seems like overkill. Well-phrased search terms in Google will find what I want better than a roll in Rollyo.

I created a search for finding poetry, but it did not work very well. In my attempt to be inclusive, I had way too much , so the first hits always come back with dictionary definitions, reference books, etc. Try it and you'll see what I mean. I suppose, if a teacher had a specific topic with preferred sites, I could create a useful Rollyo. But on the fly, without inspiration, I was not impressed.

Select Search Engine...Find PoetrySearch The Web

Powered by Rollyo

I also played with Google's Custom Search, and found it easier to work with. I input exactly the same search parameters and got much better results. I believe the reason for that is that Rollyo only searches by top-level domains, whereas Google allows deeper, more limited searching. Yes, the industry goliath triumphs again.

Week 5, Thing #11: Web 2.0 Award Winners

Wow! There went a couple of hours. StumbleUpon seems to be a random sampling of stuff that other people found interesting. And, if in not too discriminating a mood, you'll find it interesting too. It is not unlike wandering into a library and picking up books off the shelving carts. Random but fun and sometimes informative. I found myself reading "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strips. I also learned that there might be a habitable planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. Maybe Spaceman Spiff can go there. And then I saw a photo of a solar eclipse from space. Whoooaaa! What a fun time vacuum.

I looked at a few other sites, too. Some widget sites, some mobile technology, but several required setting up an account which was just one too many steps for me.

Ning looks like a nice forum for a virtual book club. Hmmm.... Is there a benefit to virtual over face-to-face? I will need to ponder that one.

And my score on the Travel IQ was 93... below average? I need to brush up on my African geography.

Web 2.0 in the Hands of Students

Our school has been suffering from a bit of bad press lately. I will not rehash it all here, but suffice it to say that an administrator has been put on temporary leave and everything bad that can be said about a person who has been working as a disciplinarian in a public school setting has been said. Not just said, but printed in the local paper.

Now, some students have posted a video titled "Willard Sucks" to a site holding a contest for students encouraging change in their school. Other schools were installing wind turbines, managing food waste, etc. Our kids were griping about cafeteria food and how the teachers don't listen.

I have removed the link to the video because I have decided that I was just adding to the negative publicity.

I hate to think that linking to their video is validating them. But I also think it is important for us as educators to consider the variety of ways our students will use these new tools. Have any of us crafted lessons about the impact of public posting on our communities? In a sense, this is a bit of cyber-bullying, at least because it made all the teachers feel picked-on and victimized. Also, the teacher whose name was used to post the video without his permission is extremely upset.

Week 5, Thing #10: More Image Generating

Image chef was fun and simple. A computer class at my school has students designing T-shirts on-line at CustomInk.com. It works in a similar way. The kids have a lot of fun with it and get quite good at navigating around in an on-line design environment.

I was much more enamored with a couple of cartoon generators I came across. Toonlet is fun. It lets you create your own comic characters using preexisting templates. I like the variety of choices, from head shape, torso, hair, eyebrows etc. There is a lot of variety. That does not mean that the jokes are good as you can see by my attempt at humor.

I also liked Stripgenerator because it was fairly simple and straightforward. As opposed to the International Reading Association's attempt which is just clunky. I could imagine using Stripgenerator with a class because there are limited options. They won't spend all day trying out different noses with different hairstyles like I did on toonlet. But I think it would jazz up a dry lesson such as writing with different sentence structures. "Create a 3 to 5 panel comic strip with two characters where one speaks only in simple sentences and the other uses at least one subordinate clause in each sentence."

Week 5, Thing #10:

This came from imagechef. Simple. Fun. Seemed appropriate for the approaching holiday.

More to come...

Week 4, Thing #9

I love google's blog search! Whenever playing with a new search system, I like to put in two disparate things and see what comes up. So I searched "library bike" and checked out the results. Most of the blog searches found me lots of library blogs and lots of bike blogs, but few that brought the two together. Google found ME! Yes, this very blog was its first hit. I think this may have been due more to currency than relevancy. I had just finished that post a couple back in which I had written about bikes and libraries. But I must admit that I am amazed by Google's search logarithms which somehow always seem to find what I am seeking. Even when I am not so sure myself. So what if they read my e-mail to send me targeted adds? Surely "Do no evil" does not mean they should sacrifice potential revenue streams.

So now I have a bunch of rss subscriptions. Some comics, some columnists, School Library Journal's Breaking News, and education articles from the SF Chronicle and NY Times. And I find that, like my e-mail in box, I feel guilty if there are unread articles in my rss reader in-box. At the end of the day, I can toss my printed newspaper in the recycling bin, guilt free. But there is something about marking an article as "read" just so it won't show up that seems wrong. I mean, isn't that lying to say you read something when you really just skimmed the first two sentences? How high school! Of course, I could just ignore what I don't feel like reading. But the nagging guilt...

As far as finding feeds, I just thought about what I look at or search for regularly. Or what I would like to know about without going looking for it, like local education news. I skim the headlines in the print paper, but my rss does it for me now. The searches didn't find me anything that seemed worth reading regularly. I subscribed to a couple fellow CSLA bloggers, but those were folks I already knew in the real world.

My favorite thing about Google Reader: There is a button that says "manage friends" as if one click could manage Rebecca or Jess or.... Oh, but according to Google, I don't have any friends. Well!

Off Topic

Since I wrote about my little guy's seizures earlier in the blog, I may as well keep it up even if it has nothing to do with library 2.0. He has been doing great. He is in kindergarten now and is really starting to read independently. Just last week he wrote a story about a robot. It was furry, cute and cuddly. (or as he wrote: free, cuet and cutily)So you can all see that his brain works just fine, thank you very much. He also sings, dances, tells jokes, is learning to play the violin, and throws the occasional tantrum.

Last week, after 3 months with no seizures, he had a mild one in the night. I woke up, sat with him until it was over, then we all went back to sleep. The next morning I went to work, and he went to school. I'm thinking, "No big thing. I can deal with an occasional twitching fit in the night." Then three nights later it happened again. It was slightly longer, three minutes instead of two, but the jerks were bigger and stronger than the past. It left me feeling scared and helpless again, like the first ones over the summer. The hardest part is that I can't settle in to sleep. My son sleeps on a single bed pushed up next to my side of the bed so that I will wake up if he seizes. My husband and 90-pound dog share my bed. They both twitch, toss, and make strange noises from time to time. And it all wakes me up. So I am grumpy, tense, and did I mention the PMS?

To add to my general level of worry, a close friend of mine has a daughter who is also epileptic. (This condition is amazingly common, once you start talking about it.) But her daughter is a very different case. She is older than my son by six months, but is developmentally behind him. When she was younger, I thought she might be autistic. She talks now, but still has some symptoms of Asperger's. We have suspected for quite some time that she might be having those mini absence seizures because she does check out from time to time. So her mom took her to Children's Hospital to have an extended EEG done, where they watch her brain patterns for several hours. Within a one-hour period, they recognized 16 brief seizures. Sixteen! The family had been avoiding medicating, but after that they decided they had to. Obviously her frequent brain storms are getting in the way of her development. But then she had some reaction to the medication that was life threatening. I didn't get all the details, just that if a rash showed up she should stop the medication and go to the ER. The rash showed up last week. And the mom has had both thyroid cancer and breast cancer in the last three years. So what am I whining about? Thankfully, she is doing great.