#21 Summarize your thoughts about this program on your blog

Congratulations!! You’ve reached the 21st thing. Give yourself a pat on the back for completing the program.

Please give us your feedback on your experience by completing this online survey and by reflecting on your learning journey by posting a few thoughts. Here are some questions to prompt you:

1. What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
   
2. How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
   
3. Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
   
4. What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?
   
5. If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you choose to participate? If so, check out Discovering Assistive Technology.
   
6. How would you describe your learning experience in ONE WORD or in ONE SENTENCE, so we could use your words to promote Classroom Learning 2.0 learning activities?
   

We hope this is not the end of our learning journey together, but the start of something amazing …such as:

• maintain your blog as your educational journal
  
• add your blog URL to your e-mail signature line
  
• re-purpose it as your classroom blog
  
• share it with your colleagues and administrators

#20 Explore eBooks & Audio eBooks

For this Thing, you will explore where you can get free ebooks and get an idea of the types of titles you can find here. Take a look around and locate a few titles of interest. Many school and public libraries have audiobook and ebook collections, so check what they have in their collections. Audiobooks are popular for ELL and Special Education students, as well as commuters who enjoy a good story during a long ride. There are a number of commercial audiobook and ebook sources, and many of these companies have exhibits at library and other educational conferences.

Discovery Exercise:

1. Explore World EBook Fair' site for FREE downloads from the Gutenberg Project. Also just explore the site - there's much to check out.
2. Create a blog post about your findings.

Discovery Resources:

• LibriVox, audiobook versions of copyright-free books from the Gutenberg Project. Read by volunteers. Started in August 2005 by Hugh McGuire. Check it out!
• British Library Online Gallery includes digitized original classics. An audio feature allows a visitor to have the book read aloud. Don't miss the original version of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures Under Ground. Mozart's Musical Diary includes 75 audio excerpts. Take the tour and encourage your students and colleagues to do so too! This resource is AMAZING.
• Check out this site, too: "Best Places to Get Free Books"
• Don’t forget to ask your school librarian for local and on-line audio book resources. Many school libraries offer the ‘core’ novels in e-book and/or audio formats.
• And...your local public library. Does it have eBook and audioBook collections?

#19 Podcasts: iPod not required

The word podcast is used to refer to a non-musical audio or video broadcast that is distributed over the Internet. What differentiates a podcast from regular streaming audio or video is that the delivery method for podcasts is often done automatically through RSS.

In 2005, "podcast" was named the "word of the year" by New Oxford American Dictionary and with the growth of podcasting over the last year and a half; it’s easy to see why. Podcasts take many forms, from short 1-10 minutes commentaries (like the ones used in this Learning 2.0 program) to much longer in person interviews or panel group discussions. There’s a podcast out there for just about every interest area and the best part about this technology is that you don’t have to have an iPod or a MP3 player to access them. Since podcasts use the MP3 file format, a popular compressed format for audio files, you really just need a PC (or portal device) with headphones or a speaker.

iTunes, the free downloadable application created by Apple is the directory finding service most associated with podcasts, but if you don’t have iTunes installed there are still plenty of options.

For this discovery exercise participants are asked to take a look at some popular podcast directory tools. Do some exploring on your own and locate a podcast that is of interest to you. Once found, you can easily pull the RSS feed into your blog reader (i.e., Bloglines or Google Reader) account as well, so that when new casts become available you’ll be automatically notified of their existence.

Podcasts have great potential for the classroom. Creating ‘radio’ requires students to write ‘visually’ so that the listener can ‘see’ the action without the use of pictures. Creating podcasts can meet many of the language arts standards that require concise language, interviewing, speaking and listening and research. Be sure to include your Teacher-Librarian when you create lessons requiring research and steps necessary to teaching information gathering skills.

Discovery Exercise:

1. Take a look at one or two of the podcast directories listed and see if you can find a podcast that interests you. See if you can find some interesting educational podcasts here like book reviews or educational podcasts.
   
2. Add the RSS feed for a podcast to your blog reader account.
   
3. Create a blog post about your discovery process. Did you find anything useful here?

Discovery Resources:

• There are many, many podcast directory and finding tools out there. Here are just two of the more popular ones that don’t, like iTunes, require a software download:
• Podcast.com
• PodcastAlley.com
• See also Educational Podcast Directory

Curriculum Connections:

1. Idea #1: Interview candidates for local office, or town officials about top issues in your community. Air their interviews alongside those of students.
2. Idea #2: Create a daily school news podcast, including an issue of the day such as copyright/music downloading/file sharing, Internet safety tips, or newest web 2.0 applications. School news podcasts can include jokes, stories, a daily history fact, puzzles, and other fun items of interest to students. Don't forget student surveys such as: Should we have a dress codes; Should the school sell sodas or reinforce a healthy food policy; How many hours of homework should there be each week day?
3. Idea #3: Language Learners [English Language Learners or Foreign Language Learners] can interview each other in their chosen language. Student can then listen to the interviews in class and translate, or discuss, or continue the conversation. You could make this a ‘round robin’ conversation with the recorder going around the whole class and everyone contributing.
4. Idea #4: Create oral history podcasts. Allow students to take home voice recorders to tape family members stories.
5. Idea #5: Create a tour of the school for new students. This is an excellent job for an activities / leadership class.

Do you want to learn how to be a podcaster ? Here are optional resources for those who want to learn to create podcasts:

1. Beginners guide to Podcasts & Creating Podcasts
2. How to podcast tutorial

#18 Discover YouTube and a few sites that allow users to upload and share videos

Within the last two years online video hosting sites have exploded allowing users to easily upload and share videos on the web. Among all the web 2.0 players in this area, YouTube is currently top dog serving up over 1 million video views a day and allowing users not only to upload their own video content easily, but also embed clips into their own sites easily.

While most of you are already familiar with YouTube, take the time to do some searching around YouTube yourself and see what the site has to offer. You'll find everything from 1970s TV commercials and 60s music videos to library dominos.

See also:

• Introducing the Book (hilarious! A "must see")
• Web 2.0
• Jack O'Connell Goes Back to School

Of course, like any free site you’ll also find a lot stuff not worth watching too. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explore and see for yourself what the site has too offer. :)

Discovery Exercises:

1. Explore YouTube & find a video worth adding as an entry in your blog.
2. Create a blog post about your experience. What did you like or dislike about the site and why did you choose the video that you did? Can you see any features or componets of the site that might be interesting if they were applied to library websites?
3. OPTIONAL: Try placing the video inside your blog using the copy and paste code for the "Embeddable Player.” Note: you'll need to use Blogger's Edit HTML tab when pasting this code.

Discovery Resources:
Other popular video hosting sites:

• Yahoo Videos
• Google videos
• TeacherTube

NOTE: Videos, like music downloads, are bandwidth hogs. It is recommended that you complete this exercise during light Internet usage times.

#17 Check out LibraryThing

Are you a booklover at heart? Do you enjoy finding lost and forgotten gems on the shelf to read? Then LibraryThing may be just the tool for you. Developed for booklovers, this online tool not only allows you to easily create an online catalog of your own, it also connects you to other people who have similar libraries and reading tastes. Add a book to your catalog by just entering the title or connect with other users through your similar reading tastes. There are lots of ways to use LibraryThing. You can even view your books on a virtual shelf, add a widget to display titles that are in your catalog, or install a LT Search box on your blog.

Not just for personal collections, classrooms have started using LibraryThing as well. “Small libraries are using LibraryThing to catalog their collections. Libraries are using the LibraryThing widget on their web pages to recomend books and list new titles.” Being a non-commercial site makes LibraryThing a good option for classrooms.

So why not join the ranks and create your own library online. With over 95,000 registered users and 6.7 million books cataloged, you’re bound to discover something new.

Discovery Exercises:

1. Take a look around LibraryThing and create an account.
2. Add a least 5 books to your library.
3. Other social book sites to explore are Shelfari and GoodReads. Check them out too!
4. Blog about your findings and be sure to link to your LibraryThing catalog. How popular were your books? Did you find any discussions about your favorites?

Discovery Resources:

• About LibraryThing
• Library Thing tour
• LibraryThing blog (updates & news)
• Thingology blog (“LibraryThing's ideas blog, on the philosophy and methods of tags, libraries and suchnot.”)

Curriculum Connections:

1. Idea #1: Have your students count all the books in their house (see Curriculum Connection idea for THING #16), then create a LibraryThing catalog of at least 25 books.
2. Idea #2: Students could create a LibraryThing catalog of your classroom library. This is also a great way to teach organization skills, sorting, cataloging, etc. You can have the students decide how to best organize those materials. Have your school teacher-librarian help explain why libraries catalog using the Dewey System. Create alternative systems and see how they work. This assignment can work at all grade levels; just create your lesson around the skill and ‘big idea’ level you’d like to work with. This lesson could also be used with CD titles. [In the old days, we used records for this assignment!]

#16 Take a look at online productivity tools (word processing, spreadsheets, and more)

One major benefit to web-based applications is that they eliminate the need to worry about different software versions or file types as you email documents or move from PC to PC. Another bonus is that they easily accommodate collaboration by allowing multiple users to edit the same file (with versioning) and provide users the ability to easily save and convert documents as multiple file types (including HTML and pdf). And, you can even use many of these tools, such as Zoho Writer and Google Docs to author and publish posts to your blog. Another new free and open productivity suite is OpenOffice.com.

It’s this type of integration with other Web 2.0 tools that also makes web-based apps so appealing. For this discovery exercise, you are asked to take a look at a web-based word processing tool called Zoho Writer, create a simple document and then document your discoveries in your blog. If you are up to the challenge, you might even export your document as an HTML file or publish it through Zoho to your blog. With Zoho and web-based applications, the possibilities are endless.

Discovery Exercises:

1. Create a free account for yourself in Zoho Writer
2. Explore the site and create a test document or two.
3. Try out Zoho Writer’s features and create a blog post about your discoveries.Optional: If you’re up for the challenge, try using Zoho’s publish options to post to your blog.* Note: You can also explore Google Docs, Google's online word processing, as an option for this exercise.
4. Check out the Google Sites tutorial.
   
5. If you’re up for the challenge, try using Zoho’s publish options to post to your blog.

* Note: You can also explore Google Docs (formerly known as Writely), Google's online word processing, as an option for this exercise. All these tools keep getting better and better.
BTW: Here’s a Zoho-created document (viewable as a webpage) about some of the beneficial features of Zoho.

Discovery Resources:

A short list of web-based productivity applications – Note: This list was authored in ZohoWriter and exported as HTML. Try OpenOffice.org -- it is ideal for using with netbooks because you can be productive without being online.

Curriculum Connections:

1. Idea #1: Have your students count all the books in their house (not including cook books.) Have them sort them by type (fiction/nonfiction, mystery, sports, subject, size, color -- their choice) and list these on a spreadsheet. [Note: you may want to limit the books to 200.] This could yield a powerful picture of student access to reading materials, especially if looked at statewide or districtwide. Compare the results with district, school, or classroom overall literacy levels.
2. Idea #2: Use Zoho for class assignments. This makes it easy to work on materials anywhere!

[Note: Remember to include THING# in your heading posts.]

#15 Add an entry to "Sandbox" Wiki

A sandbox is a term that wikis often use to describe the area of the website that should be used for pure play so for this discovery and exploration exercise, go to the sandbox portion of the California Classroom 2.0 Curriculum Connections wiki -- go ahead and play! The magic password is "cl2.0"

Discovery Exercises:

1. Visit the California Classroom Curriculum Connections wiki and go to the section devoted to one or more of the topics covered in the 9 weeks of the Classroom Learning 2.0 course.
2. Create a post in your blog about the experience. How might you use wikis?

Discovery Resources:

· PB Works Tips

. Web Tools 4U2Use - a wikispaces wiki full of 2.0 tools in education

Here’s a sampler of educator wikis: Flat Classroom Project, International Collaborative Literature Project, Language Links, Math 12 V Outcomes Portfolio, Wikispaces for Educators

As a public document, teachers are often concerned about using wikis for classroom discussions or notetaking. There is also concern about kids who post inappropriately. You can assign students numbers or login names [or let them choose their own] so that you can keep track of who is contributing to the discussion. As teacher, you have the power to moderate what goes on. Make sure that you receive an e-mail notice whenever there is a new addition to the wiki. This way you can maintain a useful and appropriate wiki. The following ideas can be used for any subject.

Curriculum Connection:

1. Idea #1: Select one of your favorite curriculum ideas from your own blog. "Copy and paste" it to the California Classroom 2.0 Curriculum Connections wiki or the curriculum blog created for your group. Remember, the magic password is "cl2.0"
   
2. Idea #2: Create a “kid-o-pedia.” Make a kids ‘Wikipedia’ with fun facts. Make sure that every fact is checked and verified and cited. This can be done with as a Language Arts assignment and each page can be a different content area. [i.e., Science fun facts or American History fun facts] or it can be a specific content area [i.e., Physical Science – with each page a different set of facts.] These facts can be extra credit and can be used for other assignments or you can allow students to use these facts on their test.

*NOTE: The Classroom 2.0 Curriculum Connections wiki was created using the free version of the Bay Area based PBWorks, a tool that lets you create webpages that anyone can edit.