Table 5-- Animoto

http://animoto.com/play/yUoWnG1Qm2gjpiLmwR2lrQ

I have never done an animoto-- so I thought I would use some of the garden critter photos I've taken to make a short one. It was fairly easy and I loved the music choices. I didn't bother to download my photos into the recommended resizer this time, but I will do that on a longer one to help reduce the upload time. My son complained that it really slowed down our network and his gaming on another computer! But after uploaded, it came back to me completed in about 20 minutes! I had trouble getting it to post directly to my blog from the animoto site for posting-- so here is the link.

I am going to get a school subscription for this, because I think I will be making a bunch of these this year for lesson starters, attention getters, and presentation of student/ library activities. Fun for me and the students.

Table 4-- Movie Maker

I took a bunch of my garden photos and put them together to make a little movie. The music wasn't long enough, so I had to repeat it several times. Next time, I will do the pictures and then find the music to fit the length better. This was easy and fun, but I think photostory is easier and more straight forward for younger students to use.

Table 3--Photostory

It was easy to make this one since I have done quite a few photostories in the past 2 years as a librarian, and with students. It is a quick and easy tool to use. I had a terrible time getting this to load on my blog at the inservice, and finally had to give up. I went home and went through the creation process again--saved the whole thing again, making sure to save it as a .wmv file, and it worked on the 2nd try.

Table 2--Audio Manipulation

This was interesting because I had only used audacity to record a voice like a book review. It was fun to add music from Incompetech, and fairly easy to edit it once I played around a bit. I tried, but the voice and music mp3 file would not upload to the wiki. I will investigate more with iTunes in the future when I have more time to explore.

Table 1--Image manipulation

The most useful thing I learned from this exercise was how to cite, add words to pictures using powerpoint, and then how to lock the two together. This will be useful in many applications using pictures.

Thing # 23 Summary

Even though I got off to a slow start, I was determined to finish by August 1st, so I have a whole week to lay around and eat bon bons before returning to a new school year. What was I thinking??? I still have a bunch of review books to read this summer. OK... so I will multi-task -- read while lying around eating bon bons.
This was much more of a time consuming journey than I had planned, but it was fruitful and necessary-- and mostly fun. This is probably one lifelong learning project that I would have put off this summer if it had not been required. I was surprised how much was packed into each Thing. Some of them had quite a few parts to look at and act upon.
My favorites and those I feel will be most useful and used by me were:
image generators, Rollyo, wikis, Delicious, Flicker toys and mashups, Shelfari, Photostory, TeacherTube and U Tube, google docs, making my avatar, and blogging in general. There was so much! Having us blog about each thing, inserting pictures and products each time, really has taken all of the fear out of blogging, and has made it really fast to do. I will definitely transform this blog into a library blog next year.
Thanks to the kickball catains--Please leave the Library2play site up all year so we can refer back to it while we start to apply all of these things in real life.
If more Things are offered later, I think it would be nice to introduce maybe 10 things at a time per semester or summer. It was quite a daunting task at the beginning and there would be no way I could have done it during the school years. I can't imagine trying to do all of the original "43 Things" in a row. I would participate in a shorter online version to explore more of Web 2.0 or similar technology applications for the library.

My quote:

Made with free image tools @ TXT2PIC.com

Thing # 22 Nings

I looked at the two Teacher Librarian Nings and saw a few people I knew! I liked the fact that you could "watch and read" those without having to register. I'm not sure I want to join a group, but I enjoyed reading some of the discussions, questions/answers for library situations, and reading about librarians and where they are. I loved the group that encourages librarians to post their blogs there-- that seems like a good way to find some great librarian blogs. I can now see exactly why it is called "social networking"-- it can be very social and a great way to network with others in your field or interest. I looked up a few groups on gardening, and found that most of them don't have more than 1 or 2 people-- some only the person that set it up. A & M had only 19 people, and their info said that Nings were not used much yet. But searching Texas brought up 66 screens of Nings-- many of them high school alumni groups. Quite a few were still in the process of being set up. I wonder how much time they will have to develop before some other form of social networking comes along to take their place.

Thing #21 Podcasts and Photostory

Wow-- finally one of the things that I am actually familiar with, and have used quite a bit. I made this photostory to document a volunteer project at our school last August. (We now have headphones, so the sound is better on more recent projects) This one used digital pictures I took, but I have done them with primary GT students and 1st grade classes for a product at the end of a research project or social studies unit. To introduce the students and teachers to photostory--it worked well to do as a class project with the students selecting pictures together using the activeboard, and then going back to research or gather information about their particular pictures. Then they returned to me in the library to use the headphones to record their part individually and choose the music to finish it off. The curricular posibilities are endless with respect to using photostory, and it is so easy for even younger students to use.

Having students or staff record book reviews or booktalks is a great way to use audacity for podcasting--and it is really easy. One thing I plan to do is to use audacity to record some picture books for teachers to use in a listening center. We have multiple copies of some wonderful picture books that have no sound recordings to go with them. So I think this will be a fun way to use those materials we already have in a different way. I think I will ask different staff members and older students around the school to record them just for variety and fun for the students to hear.