Thing 8# Databases and Search Tools.

The students and teachers are excited to use SweetSearch.com.  Both have found it much less cumbersome than weeding through everything at Google or Google Scholar.  Even though the College Prep students and PIG students are near completion of their projects this semester we introduced the search tool to them anyway.  So far, some of them have found it very useful for those last minute entries they may have needed to polish up their presentations.

In East Greenbush, especially in the high school,  we rely on the webmaster at Questar to handle any revisions and updates on our webpages.  I have asked the webmaster to add SweetSearch to our library's webpage as well as WSWHE.  We already link to Questar III and Overdrive but WSWHE has many other areas our students and teachers can explore.  I love BrainPop at WSWHE's site.  What a great search tool.  I can see upper elementary and middle school students having a ball with that.

Ed Kilmartin is an assistant principal in our HS and he heads the technology committee.  Through out this assignment I forwarded him anything that has excited me.  SweetSearch was the most recent and he wrote right back and told me how much he liked it as well.  When we saw each other in the hallway later in the week he asked me where I was finding all these great resources.  I forwarded him the entire Cool Tools page to let him browse through all of our Things and blogs.  I can't wait to hear what he has to say about it.

Cool Tools #7

This was a harder one to complete because so many of the options were blocked at school for one reason or another.  For an example, Scribd. was  blocked for "pornography".  I looked at it at home to see what it was all about and found it to be a great site for downloading books or at the very least, reading an excerpt from a book.

I am very familiar with all the Google options and daily I tell the students to use Google Docs if they have an email for the username.  Using Docs will save them from remembering to bring a flashdrive.  We do have a problem at school with Docs because the server is old and whatever Docs runs we can't do powerpoints.  Working in the word documents is fine.

For Cool Tools #7 I chose to learn more about two bulletin board sites, Pinterest and Stixy.  Both options open up another way for the students to present their projects to the class.  So far Pinterest is available at school.  I don't know about Stixy since I accessed that at the house.  During the work week I will try to access it at work to see if it's available.  My concern is if the tech dept. finds out about these bulletin board sites they may pull them believing they are just another social network.

If Stixy is available at school, I may work with the art dept.   One of the teachers has a project where the students have to research a photographer.  This bulletin board site would be a great place to  organize the photographs.