Dystopian Young Adult Literature--Why Is It So Popular?

With the final installments of the Hunger Games (MockingJay by Suzanne Collins) and Chaos Walking (Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness) series coming out at about the same time, I'm wondering how to guage young adult interest in issues surrounding the future of our world (their world) specifically issues around war, what war does to people, and the price of peace. Will books like these get students involved in politics or discourage them from seeing government and democracy as an anwer to the world's problems? Both series present flawed leaders and jaded heroes--heroes who are thought to be the possible next leader but have seen too much of "leadership" to want to be part of leading their world.

Scribblar--Free White Board Collaboration Tool

At the recent Central Valley Computer Using Educators Conference, math teachers demonstrated how they hold virtual office hours with a new free web tool called Scribblar, a slick and simple tool for online collaboration that even allows participants to use their microphones to ask questions and respond to others. The teacher who demonstrated said he likes it much better when he can draw with a wireless sketchpad instead of the mouse. I could also see using this as an interactive and collaborative white board in the library.

Poll Everywhere

As a Teacher Librarian and Technology Coordinator, I often have teachers ask about clickers or class responders--"Will you buy us some? How much do they cost?" That type of thing.

My response is: "You already have everything you need." With Poll Everywhere, teachers can use the students' cell phones as the clicking device for a web-based poll they can create/prepare ahead of time. Poll Everywhere even gives you an option to download the poll as a PowerPoint slide to add to a presentation. As the students send a text message to a number to vote, the poll shows real-time responses. For those students who are trying to vote more than once, they receive a message saying they've already voted.

I used this with a class of seniors in government. The minute the poll started moving in response to their votes I had the class's complete attention and a much more heated discussion about the role of government in people's lives and whether or note teachers should let students have their cell phones out.

Diigo and Social Bookmarking

For the past month or so, I have been using both Diigo and Delicious to see which Social Bookmarking site I like best. I have also been learning about Social Bookmarking at sites like Common Craft's in Plain English--Social Bookmarking Explained.

I have found Diigo to be more useful to me as a librarian for the following features:

• Groups: You can create them and join them. They are a great way to crowd-source creating lists of useful bookmarks on a specific topic. With the free educator version, you can also create private groups for your students to use as they gather research on a specific topic. Examples of groups: Diigo in Education, and Teacher-Librarians.
• Lists: This makes it really easy to share a group of bookmarks with someone else. Some groups I have created are Library 2.0, Math, and Shakespeare.
• Updates: If you are part of a group, you can subscribe to the group's daily update feed to see what other's in your field or interest area are recommending. Here is an example of a daily post from the Teacher Librarian List: 1 new Item See More »
  

  Spectrumofrights Comic1 - CC Wiki

  creativecommons,comics,copyright

  shared by Jane Lofton 18 Apr 10 07:06:05 - Comment - Like

http://booktalksandmore.pbworks.com/

• http://booktalksandmore.pbworks.com/

  How to create online book talks and lots of examples. This is a site Joy Millam created to go along with her CSLA presentation. It also includes examples of student work.

  tags: booktalksandmore, wiki, reviews, how-to

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

This is my first attempt at sending a Diigo bookmark directly to my blog. You have the option of direct posting or saving as a draft. I chose draft so I could append this final edit before posting. I like that it automatically includes a link to my shared Diigo links.

Wordle or Wordsift

A Web 2.0 word cloud or text visualization tool similar to Wordle is Wordsift. What distinguishes Wordsift is its more academic purpose. It allows users to highlight words based on their association with a content area: ESL, Language Arts, Social Studies, Science, Math. It seeks to help English Language Learners by including a Visual Thesaurus Window and a Google Images Window. Each of these windows changes when a user selects a different word from the word cloud. Wordsift also includes the option to view the parts of the original text or the whole text with the selected word highlighted. This is very helpful for seeing how a word is used throughout a text.

Anyway, I wanted to compare Wordle and Wordsift with a couple of text types. My first choice was the young adult novel The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer (first 3 chapters taken from Destiny Title Peek). With this piece I found Worlde more useful in that it clearly showed the first three chapters to be about character development.

My second choice was the OpEd piece "Does Gay Sex Cause Global Warming" by Daniel Gilbert. With this piece I found both value in both Wordle and Wordsift; however the Google Image feature of Wordsift would be blocked when using it at school. Our district has found Google Image returns questionable images even when operating in Moderate Safe Mode.

Wordle--As a Tool for Previewing/Reviewing a Text

Wordle is a cool Web 2.0 application that makes a word cloud out of text. On a basic level, it is a frequency analysis where the high frequency words are presented in larger fonts. I wanted to see what a really long text would look like so I uploaded our 100+ page WASC Report. I was happy with the results as students and teachers showed up as a clear focus of our school: