****California 2.0 Curriculum Connections - Online Applications and Tools

Idea #1: Have your students count all the books in their house (not including cook books.) Have them sort them by type (fiction/nonfiction, mystery, sports, subject, size, color -- their choice) and list these on a spreadsheet. [Note: you may want to limit the books to 200.]

Idea #1, part 2: Have your students count all the books in their house (see above), then create a LibraryThing catalog of at least 25 books. [Or, some students could make a LibraryThing catalog of the classroom book collection.] Note: a discussion of the number and type of books at home will vary greatly, and could be a good discussion. Not all students have access to reading material at home while other homes are floor-to-ceiling books.

Hold workshops for Web 2.0 tools.

Idea #4 Create a Ning for your school staff. It is fun

Idea 5. Instead of a presidents paper report, or an explorer's paper report, have you class create a NING with the students representing their president, explorer, etc. in a social network. Students could add pictures, comment one another etc...

Idea 6. Use Joyce Valenza's wiki to update, rebuild, revise, etc. your library web page for the school 2.0 world - you find her at http://schoollibrarywebsites.wikispaces.com/

Idea 7. Use google tools to share documents with staff that they can then edit and modify for their own class use. This way you can provide them templates for library visits that can be edited for a specific project.

Idea 8. Create a NING to provide a discussion forum for your students and staff-- essentially an online book review/discussion forum!

IDEA 9 - LibraryThing is a great tool for students, too. It could be introduced to students in the beginning of a year and could be set up with categories of books read -- course-related, entertainment, extra-curricular (or a better sounding name.) Over the years, each student will see how much they've read/grown, what their friends have read, and so on. Lots of possibilities. This could become a school literacy strategy.

Idea 10. Google Docs or Zoho are perfect for collaboartive lesson planning. We already use a Word template. I'm going to import the template into a Google doc and share. the Google calendar is perfect for scheduling between the classroom, library, and computer teacher.    

Idea 11- Wordle-http://www.wordle.net/. I used Wordle this week with students. I had students watch Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech. Then we found a text version of the speech online and copied and pasted it into Wordle.net. The word cloud it created was then used by students to complete an acrostic poem which spelled out Dr. King’s name.

Idea 12. This website it awesome to help create vocab lists. http://www.visualthesaurus.com/vocabgrabber/# I really like it.

Idea 13. Use DocStoc for free, downloadable documents. Users can upload documents to be used by other users. It is also can be used by students to find documents needed to help with assignments.