Journal #9

This week I’m exploring Google Docs/ Google Drive, which is a webtool I’ve used many times in the past.  I decided to compare it to Dropbox since I’ve now done a bit of work with both sites.

 

Summary of my experience

To begin, I opened up my Google docs account, which I haven’t used for over a year, and revisited some of the documents to remind myself how to use all of the functions of the site, like how to create, edit, save, and share files.  Then I wanted to see if things had changed since my last use, so I tried to find a “tour” or “FAQ” page.  I didn’t so I went to Google’s main site and searched for this info there.  After some searching, I found Google’s own help page, so I skimmed the features to make sure I am able to use the site to its full potential.

 

What I like

Obviously, it’s pretty convenient to have cloud storage that I can access anywhere.  So I thought about comparing this to Dropbox, which I’ve used much more this semester that I have Google Docs.  I do like the looks of Dropbox better, but a big bonus to Google docs is that (as I found out on the Google help page, here I can add comments to photos and captions to videos, which is something I can’t do on dropbox.  That might not seem like a big deal, but for flipped lessons I find that captions on videos are pretty much essential, and I’ve been looking for an easy way for me and my students to do this without expensive software and without sending the kids into the uncensored world of youtube. (Though I know they go on their own anyway. J )  And not that I need it right now, but I can translate the captions into other languages!

 

Lastly, the file storage limit (5 gigs) is a little better than at Dropbox (I’m up to 2.75 free gigs).  However, that is all I can get without paying for more space. 

 

What I don’t like

What I don’t like is pretty superficial—the way it looks.  As a PC user from way back, I like the look of the folder system that has always been present in some form in My Documents in Windows. Dropbox has mirrored that style as closely as possible (I assume without breaking copyright laws!).  Google is similar, but has a coarser feel in my opinion.  It’s not unworkable, though, and this is just my personal preference. 

 

Lastly, I do wish that the help page was a little bit more accessible or that there was a better “tour” function.

 

Use with students

Students can find google docs extremely helpful as long as they have internet access at both home and school (and most of the time they do) because they can save backups of their own work in case they forget their flash drives or have other accessibility problems.  They can also collaborate with others much easier than if they save multiple versions of the same document.

 

Reflection of literacies

This site helps kids develop many literacies, especially with its multi-media capabilities. Students can combine text, photos, and videos and share them easily with teachers and other students.  It’s relatively secure since users can decide who to share with, rather than making things public as with youtube.  It also promotes collaboration with others, a skill that is in high demand among employers—now more than ever. 

 

Overall, I will probably continue to use Dropbox for my personal files because I like the look and feel of it, but I will suggest that students use Google Drive, especially if they need to work with video.

Journal #8

Journal #8

Bibliofile and Nonfiction Mondays

One of the blogs I follow that posts a little less frequently than the others is Bibliofile, which specializes in reviewing young adult literature. A feature I appreciate is that blogger Jenny Rothschild declares the first day of the workweek “Nonfiction Monday” and dedicates her daily post to a new nonfiction young adult piece. Because of my personal reading preferences (I lean heavily toward fiction), I find it difficult to recommend nonfiction books, especially those that are engaging and not just “reference-y”. This blog helps immensely in that regard. I chose to catch up on the last three Nonfiction Mondays in which Rothschild reviewed The Mighty Mars Rovers: The Incredible Adventures of Spirit and Opportunity Elizabeth Rusch, Invincible Microbe: Tuberculosis and the Never-Ending Search for a Cure by Jim Murphy and Alison Blank, and Haunted Histories: Creepy Castles, Dark Dungeons, and Powerful Palaces by JH Everett, illustrated by Marilyn Scott-Waters.

Summary

For each text, Rothschild gives a brief summary of the concept, explains which audience age-range would find this most appropriate, and notes any positives or flaws she found. For example, in regards to The Mighty Mars Rovers, she notes, “It also does a great job of explaining why this type of exploration is important and why we're so obsessed with studying Mars.” Rothschild also gives credit to the people who provided the book (usually publishers, and sometimes her local library). Other than Haunted Histories, the books she’s focusing on reviewing currently made it on this year's YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults.

Source

I continue to find that going to the blogs actual site rather than just looking at it on Google Reader is preferable if I have the time because the formatting is more interesting, and in this case I can also read Rothschild’s followers’ comments and the links she provides in her sidebar. The source itself is well-organized and easy to read. I like that her blog posts are all the titles of the books she reviews, and in the case of Mondays, “Nonfiction” is added to help me decide which posts I want to read. She seems to read a wide variety of texts, and focuses on those that make honors lists, both traits that are helpful to me as an inexperienced proto-librarian.

Content

Unfortunately I haven’t read enough of the texts myself to know how accurate or unbiased her reviews are, but her followers, many of whom are librarians and teachers, seem to agree with most of her picks (but then they are her followers, aren’t they… J). I do like how she notes how students might perceive the books, and for what purposes those books would be best used. For example, she notes that Haunted Histories is funny and informational, but probably too lighthearted for any student to use in a formal research paper. Not only is this source a great help in student reader advisory, I can see it as a tool for purchasing decisions, as well as a resource for me to use to help teachers find content-related nonfiction that is still as engaging as a fiction novel—especially with that 70% nonfiction focus in Common Core! Her review of Invincible Microbe was persuasive enough to make even the fiction-lover in me want to pick up a copy because she explained how the book tells the stories of the disease and the people it affects.

Side note:

When I logged in to my Google Reader account recently, I was horrified—well, maybe not horrified, but at least dismayed—to read the curt announcement that GR will retire this summer! The “Learn More” link informed me that Google Reader can send me a file of my subscription data, which I can then use to subscribe through “another product”. I was surprised to see that the folks at Google would do this without providing another Google product. I’ve only ever used GR, so I guess I’ll have to find another aggregator.

Journal 7

This week I took the opportunity to get to know my Dropbox (https://www.dropbox.com/home#!/home)  a little better. 

Rationale:

I just started using this free file-sharing site in January at the suggestion of one of my colleagues, and so far I’ve found it helpful and convenient for my personal use.  However, I’ve never used Dropbox with my students, and before I do so, I should become more of an expert on its features than I currently am.

Pros:

It’s easy and free!  It is also a tool that makes things easier, not more complicated.  That’s because I don’t have to worry about emailing attachments or keeping my flashdrive with me all the time.  All I had to do was make an account and then copy the files I want to access anywhere into my Dropbox folder.   Now on my work and home computers there is a Dropbox icon on my startup menu, and I can get to any file I need.   The best part is that now I don’t have to worry about accidentally using the wrong version of a document that I updated at home but not at school.  I’m using the same document everywhere!

Another thing that makes it easy to used (but I just discovered it in making this blog post) is that there is a tour that new users can take that illuminates the different features.

 “Invite your friends, family and teammates to any folder in your Dropbox, and it'll be as if you saved that folder straight to their computers.”

Cons-

There is limited space on the free account. (But turn that in to a “pro” because  you can earn free space by sharing with friends or following on Facebook or Twitter.) Everyone starts with 500MG, but just by taking the tour and sharing with coworkers, I am up to 2.75GB.

I wish that the online tour was a little more detailed.  There weren’t many things in it that I couldn’t figure out without the tool.  What I still want to know would be the specifics on how to share folders with my students so that they can have full access to some files but read-only access to others, or if

that’s even possible.

Every once in a while, my school’s network doesn’t work very well.  If the file I need is only on Dropbox and not on a hard drive or flash drive, I will be out of luck.  So backing up with some portable storage every so often is probably still a smart idea.

Today’s exploration:

In my attempt to move beyond the basics, I took the short web tour (see “Cons” above), and then rummaged around on the “Sharing” page.  That page was pretty helpful as it explained with screen shots how to share your folders with other Dropbox users.  It also had some hyperlinks to advanced issues should those problems ever arise. 

The only thing I still don’t know is if students can have “read-only” access or not.  Since it’s not mentioned anywhere, I’ll assume that they don’t.  Just to double check, I also looked through the “Privacy” page, to see if there were separate privacy settings for individual files, like there are on Google docs and our network’s shared drive, but that wasn’t an option I saw.

I would use this tool with students (probably high school level) if I were coteaching a with a classroom teacher and the students had to complete any type of group work.  This tool would allow students to share copies of papers with each other and edit them, while eliminating some of the troubles that usually come with group projects like students losing the group’s flash drive.  I could also share instructional documents with the students.

This tool would help students gain digital literacy as it is an easily accessible online tool.  It would help encourage higher-order thinking skills and decision making that comes with truly collaborative group work.  Rather than the burden of typing or coordinating being on one or two students, they could all easily work together.

Journal #6 Professional Reading

After skimming some blog posts on book reviews and primary grade-level topics, I found an entry that caught my eye has a high school teacher.  This one comes from the School Library Journal blog feed. 

Summary
This post entitled "STEM Video Game Challenge Encourages Librarians to Mentor Students" by Lauren Barack was on the SLJ blog called The Digital Shift and was informative and encouraging. Barack reports that for the third year E-Line Media and the Sesame Workshop sponsored the National STEM Video Game Challenge, which awards prizes to middle and high school students who create video games that promote "science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)".  This is the first year, though, that librarians were specifically called upon to mentor students via the Challenge's new partnership with the
 Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).  The organizers of the challenge see librarians as mentors in learning, and libraries as centers for investigation and discovery, matching perfectly with the aims of the competition.  The article notes previous years' winners, reasons why librarians are valued as mentors, and the potential prizes for winners.

Resource
What better professional reading for a future librarian could there be, besides the School Library Journal blog?  There are many other blogs and resources out there, but SLJ is pretty comprehensive and credible, and I had built up several week's worth of unread entries (which is over 100!).  The list of unread posts on my Google Reader feed was pretty easy to skim to select a few that seemed interesting and applicable.  Most of them were about book reviews by genre, which was a helpful way of organizing entries.  One thing I did not care for was, as I've noticed before, the format of the entries themselves is lacking when viewed through Google Reader, rather than the blog itself.  With this particular post, there were not as many hyperlinks, which surprised me.  But that's an easy fix since I can visit The Digital Shift by clicking on the title of the article once I have it open from the RSS feed.  Another benefit of going straight to the source is that I got a list of suggestions of related articles to read.  One that I really enjoyed was about alternatives to using google, which I posted for everyone in the general discussion forum.  This added content is just one reason why I prefer to read the SLJ blogs rather than subscribe to the magazine, not to mention that it's free!

Content
I found this article very encouraging because it recognized the vital role that school librarians play-- and the people recognizing that vital role, were not just librarians themselves!  The initiative to include librarians in the STEM video game competition seems to have come from the challenge's original sponsors who saught out the help of the IMLS.  These sponsors have some clout in innovative education already, so the fact that they highlighted how important library services are should provide some good PR for librarians, which we need in today's world of budget cuts and the "I'll-just-google-it" attitude.  The article also made it easy for people to get involved, providing a link to the Mentor Resource Kit, which parents, students, teachers, and any adult wanting to be a teacher can find helpful.  The kit provides important dates and multimedia tools to help explain how the process works.  There are even workshops to attend.  Unfortunately, the only "real life" workshops I saw were no where near Illinois.  But I don't think that excludes midwesterners from participating as the online tools should be enough to get kids going.  I would love to see libraries in Illinois taking advantage of this competion. 

I guess it's easy for me to say that librarians should try this since I'm not a librarian myself yet.  If I imagine myself in that situation, I would feel like this could be a scary, daunting task.  My background is in English, afterall, not science!  What if I mess up?  But I think this is one of those times where I have to remember that it's better to try and fail than not to try. Not only would it be great inquiry-based learning with a high engagement factor ("Common Core" anyone?), but what a fabulous way for librarians to further build relationships with students and mark the library as an essential component to all kinds of learning!