I attempted to work through how technologies’ characteristics of storage and performance affect fluency. It represents a start. Please follow this link to see my attempt.

I create many digital booktalks for use in my school. Although I have directed students to use animoto, I myself usually used moviemaker or photostory, so I decided to give animoto a try. I found animoto to be quite user friendly and intuitive in its design. I found myself frustrated with the time limit of the free version, I was not able to use all of the images and text I created. While my usual booktalks I create cover 8-10 books, this one for animoto contains one book only and a related magazine article. I used images I took (copyright). I was quite impressed with the selection of music animoto contained. While for my purposes, I think photostory is the best option, I will continue to direct students too animoto as I think it serves their purposes well. I also see it as a means of introducing teachers to digital production.

I have used delicious for my personal bookmarking for quite some time now, but I had not yet made the transference to educational use. I created one delicious account for the sole purpose of accumulating “professional” bookmarks which I can use for teacher training, etc.  http://delicious.com/lizhood

Then I had a brainstorm. I am in the midst of working with an 8^th grade teacher on research projects. We generated a list of topics with the students of current issues they feel strongly about and they chose research topics based on their interest. Topics range from cell phones in school to dress code to teen pregnancy.  Because the issues are “hot topics” much of the commentary/data on these topics is best found on the internet. In order to facilitate students research time, I created a delicious account for my media center  (http://delicious.com/stmsmedia) and began accumulating bookmarks as we (students, teacher and I) found appropriate sites.  I linked the delicious account to the online card catalogue.

Then I sent out a school wide email  with the account information and an explanation of delicious  (I attached  a video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTtbnBNs5C8)so that we can begin to accumulate bookmarks pertaining to multiple curricular areas. I was so excited on Thursday and Friday because a math class was researching statistical data so we began bookmarking and tagging those sites. I am in hopes that more teachers will begin to bookmark and tag online sites as they realize the value of this tool.