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Showing posts from February, 2013

The Care and Feeding of Your Blog

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Or How to Start One! Join us Monday, March 5th at 8pm Eastern US Time and 9pm Perth Australia Time for a FREE Webinar at the TL Virtual Cafe with Sue Waters, The Edublogger herself! Coming to us LIVE! from Beautiful Perth, Australia! (Tuesday March 5th at 9am!!!) This whole space-time continuum and time zone thing makes my head ache - Thanks for all the the help! LOL We've all been there, either we've started a blog and neglected it - feeling some deep-seated internal blog guilt or we've started a blog and sometimes just don't know what to post or how to make it grow. Sue Waters, the Edublogger herself, is here to the rescue! Sue will be giving practical tips on how to get a blog started, how librarians and educators can use blogs, and how to maintain and nurture a healthy blog without stress or guilt. Participant Link ( C lick me ONL Y on Monday Night at the designated time - nuttin going on right now until then! )  Session Wikipage - W here the Webinar w

Catfishing & Google Image Search by Image

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If Manti Te'o had just used Google Image Search by Image , he might not have had to contend with  the last media blitz interview, still being asked about his "imaginary girlfriend" catfish scandal as exposed by Deadspin . (I've been * fascinated * by this story since it broke!) And though I'm not much of a "sporty" girl (though I LOVE me my Orioles! ) I hear he handled the recent furor well and may be entertaining the idea of becoming a Baltimore Raven! You go, Manti! Stay strong! What is Catfishin g? The Manti Te'o scandal is a great teachable moment and example of digital awareness, citizenship, and catfishing.  So, What is catfishing? The Urban Dictionary definition is above. The Term comes from a  movie (and an MTV show). From a related article: " ‘Catfishing,’ a slang term for creating fake profiles on social media to create false identities, has its origins in the 2010 movie ‘Catfish,’ a pseudo-documentary that chronicled a you

Gamification for the Win! Escape from Detention

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You're looking at the proud smiling faces of a middle school Game App designer. Howard County Middle School students Tekye (and family friend to MHMS) and our own MHMS 8th grader Lasya, participated in an exciting program called HiTech - wherein they helped to create a super cool APP Game called Escape from Detention . And by the way, it's NOT EASY! It somehow reminds me of Frogger Get a peek at the game with this YouTube video! Here's a few screenshots I grabbed off my iPad to give you an idea what it looks like! From an email from Tekye's proud mom, friend Catina (and former MHMS English teacher!) "The new game offers a variety of break out scenarios at escalating levels of complexity. Download the (free) game and try your hand at “springing” the student from captivity while avoiding myriad pitfalls. Escape is available for iPhones , iPads , and Android systems. I am so very proud of the work completed by the teenagers and the HiTech team that I

Digital Curation & Sweet Scoopage

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Hi! My name is Gwyneth and I am NOT an expert at Digital Curation. But I'm learning! I joined Scoop.it! when it first came out, but it didn't "get it" and fall in love with it until I saw it in action this summer in Australia  with Joyce Valenza! (I know, pinch me, right?)   I recently found out I could customize each topic and make it look purty. There are many other curation tools like Diigo ,  Pinterest , and Storify but this posting is going to focus on my new favourite - the gorgeous Scoopit!  It's like Pinterest but on steroids! It sorta has the look of it, but has SO many more features! Scoopit does triple duty with one smart bookmarklet. 1. Collect Scoopit collects, saves, and organizes your digital discoveries or websites you want to share and explore later. Blog posts you want to read or pass onto someone else. Resources you're trying to gather for professional development or research units! Don't want to troll the Internet to f

Collaboration Rocks! Librarians & Social Studies Teachers Talk Live

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Join us for a lively and informative discussion on t ips, tricks and sound ways to get students collaborating and researching using the best of current technology integration tools.   I'm very excited and honored to announce and moderate a very special # TLChat & # SSChat collaboration on the TL Virtual Cafe !  Twitter and Social Studies Chat stars Ron Peck @Ron_Peck & Melissa Seideman @mseideman will be our guest speakers. February 4th at 8pmE US Time UPDATE : It was a GREAT webinar! Please make sure to visit the for the Session Wikipage Blackboard Webinar & chat text archive, more resources, and a larger version of their informative slides below! Thank you Ron & Melissa for sharing your great ideas and inspiring projects with us! Tlc chat 2 from Ron Peck Please vote on a topic of discussion for the next # TlChat Live! Feb. 11, 2013 8 pm ET # aasl # aslachat # libchat # edchat # satchat   A huge thanks to the amazing @ NikkiDRoberts