I use both Delicious and Diigo on a regular basis in my work. They are attached to my favourites bar for quick access. Whenever I am doing research for teachers and find a great site it only takes a moment to put the link in Delcious and Diigo.
I was concerned at the start of the year as it looked like Delicious was about to be discontinued, (this has since changed). With this in mind I transferred my links to Diigo as a backup. When you rely on cloud computing you need to be flexible and realise that information is not always safe and secure. A plus for holding links on the web, is that you have access to your links regardless of which computer you are accessing.
I have been using Diigo more recently as I like the list feature available. Within this I have created lists of links for Year 11 Legal Studies and Year 10 Rites as just 2 examples. It is then easy to give the students in these classes the links and they have a list of checked sites. I have also managed to convince a couple of teachers to set up their own sites. The share feature is wonderful, as i can share a useful link with relevant teachers. Saves a lot of double handling.
Tuesday, 31 May 2011
Professional Development
Thank you to the team from Yarra Plenty for their help over the last couple of months. My approach to the program has been sposmadic at times due to time constraints. When time has allowed I was able to complete a couple of the exercises at once.
At times it has been a challenge to learn these new skills which the younger generation can learn quite quickly. I was at a meeting with a couple of colleagues of a similar age and we were talking about Twitter. All 3 of us had just started to use it, but did not fully understand it. We gave ourselves some homework to try and work out how to folow each other on Twitter. There was much laughter and sharing of our experiences. We did think that the younger generation if they were listening in to our conversation would have been lamenting our lack of knowledge.
To me the best part of this process over the last couple of weeks has been the support from colleagues and the ability to laugh at my slowness in uptake of a new technoology.
I am in the process of reading the "School libraries and teacher librarians in 21st century Australia" report and it makes for some compelling reading. As a profession we are ageing and not being replaced by qualified staff. One part of the report reflects on professional development and that some 30% of teacher librarians/librarians take no part in professional development. This is for a variety of reasons, foremost being having to personally pay to attend an activity and secondly not being given time release to attend. I am very grateful that I am one of the lucky ones who is supported in my school with wonderful opportunities for professional development.
At times it has been a challenge to learn these new skills which the younger generation can learn quite quickly. I was at a meeting with a couple of colleagues of a similar age and we were talking about Twitter. All 3 of us had just started to use it, but did not fully understand it. We gave ourselves some homework to try and work out how to folow each other on Twitter. There was much laughter and sharing of our experiences. We did think that the younger generation if they were listening in to our conversation would have been lamenting our lack of knowledge.
To me the best part of this process over the last couple of weeks has been the support from colleagues and the ability to laugh at my slowness in uptake of a new technoology.
I am in the process of reading the "School libraries and teacher librarians in 21st century Australia" report and it makes for some compelling reading. As a profession we are ageing and not being replaced by qualified staff. One part of the report reflects on professional development and that some 30% of teacher librarians/librarians take no part in professional development. This is for a variety of reasons, foremost being having to personally pay to attend an activity and secondly not being given time release to attend. I am very grateful that I am one of the lucky ones who is supported in my school with wonderful opportunities for professional development.
Monday, 16 May 2011
Rollyo
I think there is a limit to how many places a person can put information. All of these tools are useful, but need to really look at the justification in time and effort to maintain all of them. How to use this site which did not duplicte what I had previously done was difficult. It could be useful for creating a limited range of resources for a particular subject. The topic chosen for this was social justice at Year 10. The sites could be used cross school as we cover social justice issues at all year levels.
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