AASL Best Websites: 100 Sites and Counting June 12, 2012

On June 23^rd  at ALA Annual in Anaheim, California, starting at 8 am, the AASL Best Websites for Teaching and Learning Committee will be presenting the top 25 websites for 2012. This is the fourth year that the committee has been reviewing sites, putting together the list, and presenting the winners at ALA. This year marks the presentation of the committee’s 100^th site. As a committee we could not be more proud.

I have had the privilege to serve on this committee almost from the beginning. I have had four great years of reviewing sites, meeting on Skype, comparing, and deciding which sites would best meet the criteria for Best Websites for Teaching and Learning. Last year I was asked to serve as committee Chair and this past year has been an absolute blast.

Just about everyone in AASL knows the Best Websites list. Many people outside of AASL know about it as well. It has become the list to look to for top websites to use in classrooms and libraries. It is the place where educators go for new ideas in technology integration. Those of us who serve on the committee are constantly receiving comments on the usefulness and importance of the list. We plan to continue bringing top sites that will be of value to the areas of teaching and learning.

My time on the committee is coming to an end for now. This is a wonderful committee with which to serve and work. We review over 100 sites a year, meeting monthly, and email on a continuous basis getting everything ready for ALA Annual. We have, what we hope, is a wonderful list of sites ready for you this year. We are excited to share them and we hope that you will enjoy them. So come and join us Saturday, June 23^rd from 8-10 in Convention Center room 213D to see the Best Websites for 2012.

Heather Moorefield-Lang (Committee Chair)

Ideas for Using AASL Best Websites: You Are What You Read April 22, 2012

What five books have shaped your life? Who does your textual lineage connect you to? You Are What You Read (http://youarewhatyouread.scholastic.com/kids/) is a safe, secure environment for students to engage with a network of other readers connecting Bookprints from around the world. An AASL Best Websites winner for 2011, this reading based website has a student and adult level that lets readers compare books and more. 

There are many different ways to use You Are What you Read in the library and classroom. Students can explore the Names You Know feature to see the Book Prints of famous celebrities, authors, and even Presidents. Students can share books and reviews with peers online or with their friends at school. This site is also a great place to get ideas for new books to read from the Booklinks option. There are ballots for students to vote on, genre clouds to try out different reading categories, and a section for most listed books. Students, teachers, and librarians can get as involved as they wish. Sign in only involves a screen name and a password, no personal information is needed.  Books featured on the site do lean toward Scholastic’s press but in all it’s a great site for reading and sharing information about books.

Some more ways to use this site could include:

Following a class discussion about favorite books, teachers can have students create a list of their five favorite books.  After creating an account, students can access the web site to share their favorite books by creating a Book Print. Students’ Book Prints consist of the titles of their five books and the reasons why they are favorites. Reasons why are chosen from a drop-down menu.

Students can use the Book Links tool to discover new books to try. By typing in a book title they will connect with Book Prints of readers who liked the same book and see the other books they read. When students move their cursor over the book covers, they can click on the Book Profile button to read a summary of the book. In this way students can discover new books to explore in the school library.

You Are What You Read is a great online site focused on reading. We were very excited when it wonlast year and we hope that you will enjoy it as well. This is a site filled with books, games, and more. We on the AASL Best Websites Committee have thoroughly enjoyed exploring it and trying it out and we hope that you will too.

Heather Moorefield-Lang (Committee Chair) and Elizabeth Dumas (Committee Member)

Ideas for Using AASL Best Websites: Evernote March 6, 2012

For this blog entry from the AASL Best Websites Committee, as the chair, I would like to talk about one of my personal favorite sites, Evernote.  This bookmarking tools takes clipping websites and online tools to greater heights by letting users capture anything they wish. A winner in 2010, Evernote has gone from a bookmarking style tool with the advertising phrase of “Remember Everything.” To truly letting users do just that.

Evernote keeps websites, notes, clips, files, and images. It is now mobile so it works with devices such as the iPhone, iPad, Android, and  Blackberry. Evernote syncs between all devices, so whatever is clipped or loaded on one is on all. Evernote has a web clipper icon that can be added to your desktop or laptop. When a website is useful or worth keeping simply click on the web clipper, decide on a tag for the site, and it is instantly loaded into your Evernote notebook. Users can edit, share, and even tweet their Evernote tags.

Newer Products to Evernote

1. Skitch: Draw annotations, notes, and sketches in Evernote. Can aid in pointing out important sections of articles through illustration.

2. Evernote Hello: Helps users to remember people and their profiles.

3. Evernote Food: Remember food memories, take pictures, recipes and more.

4. Evernote Clearly: Save blogs, articles, and webpages all in one place to read.

5. Evernote Peek: Use Evernote and your iPad cover to create study notes. Wonderful idea as a study aid for students.

I personally use Evernote to start putting together potential sites for the next top 25 websites for the AASL Best Websites Committee. As we are finishing and presenting one list new sites are being released and nominated. Before we can start discussing them for the next year the committee needs a place to hold them all. Evernote is a great location to hold the new sites. I am always looking for new sites and tools through blogs and Twitter. So when I see something exciting or intesting I click on the web clipper and save the site. Having Evernote on my iPad is great for pictures, clips, and images as well. There are multiple bookmarking tools out there but Evernote is one that has truly worked its way to the top. It is continuously growing and adapting. They have a lot to offer, we were excited for them in 2010 when they won, and the site just keeps improving each year.

Heather Moorefield-Lang (Committee Chair)

Ideas for Using AASL Best Websites: Skype February 9, 2012

For the first February blog entry from the AASL Best Websites Committee we want to discuss one of our most commonly used sites, Skype. This web conferencing tool is a basic and easy-to-use service that offers free voice, video calls, and instant messaging. For a nominal monthly fee users can move up to a premium level for group video calls. This is a great tool that we on the Best Websites Committee use for monthly committee meetings and website winner interviews.

John Schumacher, co-author for this blog entry, uses Skype on a regular basis. It has completely changed how he teaches. This is a great site for author chats. More and more authors are willing to give a 20 minutes free Skype session, especially during book launchings. For example Laurel Snyder, author of Bigger than a Bread Box, gave 100 Skype visits when this new book was released. Tom Angleberger, author of The Strange Case of Origami Yoga, will have 1 or 2 Skype visits a month. Kate Messner, author of Sugar and Ice, also offers author visits via Skype. Many other children and YA authors are willing to visit schools via this web tool as well.

John and his distance education teaching partner Shannon Miller have Skype author visits between their two schools. Ruth Spiro visited via Skype on Bubble Gum day on February 3^rd. When more than one school can group chat on Skype with an author this is when true community can be achieved. Shannon and John’s students have also been using iPads and Skype so that students can talk face to face to each other. This can also be a wonderful tool for collaboration, group work, and peer to peer storytelling. Skyping between schools also has the benefit of collaboration between librarians for team-teaching.  If one has a skill that the other doesn’t, they can teach the class that day. Older students can teach younger. There are so many opportunities for collaboration.

John has also seen how Skype has made a difference in public speaking for his students. Last year they were able to present on a panel for the International Reading Conference. It would be very difficult to bus 100 elementary school students to this conference, but it costs nothing to bring them to the conference via Skype.

A few other examples of uses

1. World Read Aloud Day: Different authors talk to your school throughout the day
2. Picture Book Month: Various authors and illustrators visit via Skype through the month
3. Celebrate an Animal Day: Example- John and Shannon celebrated Happy Pig Day by having a pig in the library on Shannon’s side of Skype and all of the students on John’s side were able to celebrate as well. 
4. Feature Books with Music or Art: Invite a musician or artist via Skype to talk to students
5. Veterans/Memorial Day: Talk or interview soldiers via Skype overseas or at various bases.

As with any technology there can be challenges. Sometimes connections fail either on your side or the other. Make sure to be flexible and always have a back up lesson plan just in case the Skype connection doesn’t work out.  In general Skype is very reliable; it still stands as one of the most popular web chat tools available, and has so many options when it comes to collaboration and teaching. We on the AASL Best Websites Committee use it frequently. We highly recommend it and hope that you can find some wonderful, creative uses for it in your library and school.

Heather Moorefield-Lang (Committee Chair) and John Schumacher (Committee Member)

Ideas for Using AASL Best Websites: Tagxedo January 27, 2012

In this blog entry Cathy and I are going to talk about using Tagxedo in your school. This site won in the most recent 2011 list and has been a presentation favorite since it was announced. If you have never used Tagxedo, this site is a word cloud generator. But the website takes word clouds to a whole new level. Tagxedo lets users create shapes out of their word clouds.  Use the shapes that Tagxedo has available or load your own art or pictures and create the clouds from those. The site is completely free and very addictive once you start trying it.

Tagxedo can be used to create designs of all types. It can be used for conference logos, to create t-shirt designs, or posters. Students can create a tag of themselves. Import a close cropped headshot of a student and they can create a Tagxedo of words that describe their personality, or their favorite books, likes, dislikes, and more. Tagxedo can be incorporated into school art contests as well. This site can be used for a vocabulary introduction activity and it can help students gain familiarity with unknown words. 

This website is perfect for differentiation of instruction. Students who are visual learners can express their work through word images. Tagxedo can be the unwritten research paper, a detailed representation of library investigation and work. Those students who have difficulty writing out long passages can use this site to explain their work graphically. The images from Tagxedo can be embedded into Power Points and other media. Instead of bullet points on a slide, a word cloud can do the job instead.

Assigning a Tagxedo as a way to demonstrate concept mastery does not eliminate the need to for background research or reading about a topic to develop a word cloud. On the contrary, students have to dig deeper in their thinking when they are visualizing how to represent their research or findings in a graphic format through a word cloud. 

Tagxedo is a site that the AASL Best Websites Committee for Teaching and Learning highly recommends. It is a site that many of the committee members use personally and recommend to their students and faculty. The Tagxedo website offers 101 ways to use their word clouds. Copying and pasting images is very easy. It is a very user-friendly, intuitive site that we feel your students and you will enjoy.

Heather Moorefield-Lang (Committee Chair) and Cathy Jo Nelson (Committee Member)

Ideas for Using AASL Best Websites: Animoto December 20, 2011

For this holiday blog entry we are going to discuss a site that is a big favorite among the members of the AASL Best Websites for Teaching and Learning Committee, Animoto.  As one of our original 25 winners in 2009, Animoto is used by our committee for every ALA and AASL presentation. It is the slide show that we have going as people come into our sessions. We match the slides to music, we simply love this site and how easy it is to use and we hope you will to.

My co-author for this blog is Elizabeth Dumas and she too has many ideas for Animoto.  First let’s give you a little background. Animoto is a video slideshow maker with music. Users can use background templates and royalty free music provided by the site and then load in their own images, art, and pictures to create dynamic slide shows. You can make an unlimited amount of 30 second videos for free. After that, there is a cost for longer videos. There is also a free educator’s plan where teachers receive a classroom code to set up student accounts that enable students to create full-length videos. Teachers are also able to monitor students’ work. This web-based tool allows students to work on their videos at school or home.

Animoto and 21st Century Skills go hand in hand. Below are some examples of how this site addresses various skills.

• Creativity, effective communication skills and critical thinking skills come into play when students use this Web 2.0 tool to design and create videos. Creative juices flow when students suddenly become video producers.
• Students must critically look at their choices of images, text and music to make decisions as to the best choices and arrangements. Critically evaluating each video, editing and revising as needed, and remixing videos develop important 21st century learning skills.
• Decision-making skills and organizational skills used as student prepare storyboards for their Animoto videos.
• The site’s text blocks have a limited number of characters so students must write concisely and succinctly.
• The visual, audio, and textual elements in producing the videos help students produce visual messages and strengthen visual literacy skills. 

Safety/Security

From the Animoto website: All videos are completely private. The only way someone can watch a video is if they are directed to that video’s specific URL, or if that video is posted to another website. Also, no one will be able to contact your students via Animoto.

Elizabeth and I also wanted to offer some ways to use this wonderful site in your classrooms and with your students. Examples are below:

Teachers/Librarians can create a video -

• As an introduction to an upcoming curriculum lesson/unit- a “preview” or “teaser.”
• To activate prior knowledge before beginning a new lesson.
• To showcase library resources during Open House or faculty meeting.
• To inform students & faculty of new books in the library.
• To share the highlights of a school event such as an author visit, Teen Read Week, etc. with parents/community.
• As an introduction for a presentation.
• For conference presentations.

Students can create a video –

• As a “movie trailer” for a novel they’ve read.
• As a scrapbook project following a field trip.
• To demonstrate knowledge of a concept or person. (This year our students created videos about biomes, people and events in the American Revolution, Christmas traditions in other countries, and science fiction authors.)
• To explain a new vocabulary word.  (Our sixth graders created 30 second videos about new vocabulary words for a weather unit.)
• To inform the school and community about a community service project – PSA.  (Each year as part of Teen Read Week we always include a community service project. The last project was for the local animal shelter. Students were asked to bring in pet food and other items on the shelter’s “Wish List.” The video played on the school’s broadcast channel and on the school’s website.)

Animoto is a site that many of us on the AASL Best Websites Committee have personally used. Some use the free version. Others have gone ahead and purchased the pro version for longer videos and more effects. No matter how you want to use it, Animoto is a wonderful slide show creator that will excite your students in creating new visual projects for their classrooms and libraries. We enjoy it and we hope that you will too.

The AASL Best Websites Committee wishes everyone a wonderful holiday season and will be back with more ways to use the winning sites in the new year.

Heather Moorefield-Lang (Committee Chair) and Elizabeth Dumas (Committee Member)