Thing #17: Sandbox

Such great comments and suggestions to play with in the Sandbox! I latched onto one, and I am going to have to make it happen! Someone suggested making a wiki for teachers to post books they use for teaching reading and writing skills. That would be great! And it could be organized by grade level, so other grades see what has been used in the past and try to find new books so as not to keep repeating the same book over and over. Also, I thought content pages would be helpful. I love teaching math, science, and social studies through informational picture books! It would be such a great resource for teachers to be able to access, contribute to, and use in a very real way! I will add a link when I establish the wiki, or find one that has already been started! Keep playing everyone! :)

Thing #16: Wikis

Wikis are so cool! It's so much better than you email me, I email my friend, and so on and so on. With a wiki everyone has access to the same information at the same time, and it's all in one place! I used one for a group project so that my partners and I could post things we found to use in our presentation. It made it so much easier to keep track of what we still needed, and who was doing what. Then my husband's family was trying to organize things for a family get-together, and the email trail was getting to be ridiculous, so I offered the idea of a wiki and everyone loved it! Of course there were those who felt un-techno-savy who needed email reminders, but for everyone else it was great! They were even able to post pictures for a PowerPoint someone was putting together to show at the party. I was so proud to be able to educate my in-laws and make their coordination so much easier!
Plus, there are so many great things to use a wiki for in the library! Here are a few: have teachers post websites, rubrics, lessons, worksheets to share; have students post book reviews under genre headings; students can share the best websites to find information for projects or topics of interest; parents and teachers can use a wiki to communicate needs, concerns, suggestions, or help. I love all the wikis out there about libraries and books! My favorite link I found was to the Guys_Read website. Sometimes it's hard, being a female teacher-librarian, to figure out just what a 10 year old boy might want to read, but this place takes care of that for you! The hardest part about all the sites out there is that I don't know when I'll have the time to peruse them all, and where I will keep track of the ones I like! I guess I'll add them to my "delicious" page for safe keeping!