Wikis as Websites for Libraries-It's not just about the code, is it?

This morning we held our second Wikis as Websites session of the year for members of the Salvadoran library community and members of ABES, the Salvadoran Librarians association.

Widget Fever

It was great to see everyone again, and they were certainly revved to get back into their wikis. After a brief refresher it became all about the widgets and code. The looks of surprise and then joy on people's faces when they saw not only the variety of useful widgets and ways to embed codes from various online services, took me back about 6 months, when I too caught the widget bug. Of course fantastic websites are not just about the code, but what a hook! Code in the form of widgets is like opening a little door or window to another source or collection of ideas, in an highly engaging manner.

The sheer enormity of of widgets/gadgets/flakes and embedding code out there, for free I might add, is enough to give anyone widget fever.

Today we looked at embedding slideshows, glogs, Librarything and Shelfari book shelves, blogs and rss feeds using widgetbox, youtube videos and Twitter feeds. In the end we could have used at least one more exploratory session, but hopefully participants will maintain their momentum over the next few months.

But there is more!

During the last part of the session our Library Assistant fed back from her Guatemalan Digital Literacy conference experience using Prezi. It was her first time presenting and her first time using Prezi.

What's Prezi?

If you haven't tried Prezi yet...you are missing out on a great interactive presentation tool. Yes it's a web app and yes you can also download your work! Try teaching it to kids, what a fantastic way to get away from the ppt and enforce presentation reform guidelines!

Back to the Conference

Our conference wasjoined by others who had attended in Guatemala.  Some joined us in person and others  did so virutally using Elluminate. It was the first time I was able to use my Learn Central V-Room with anything larger than a group of friends. It was fantastic and the participants in El Salvador got to listen to and learn from  speakers in other areas of the continent as well as those physically present. This was the first such experience for most of the participants and they were thrilled by it.

I am going to break out the V-Room again this school year with our Spanish classes, enabling students and teachers to  link up and participate to student presentations in real time.

Is anyone else out there using Elluminate with their kids?

Finder Fox Widget

Now you can make your webpage/blog more interactive for readers. Just  place the finder fox widget on your web page and any reader who highlights a word or string of words will be given the choice to tweet them, look them up in Wikipedia, or search them out on Google and Twitter. What a great idea!  You can trial it right now as I have added it to this blog.

Reflections on PageFlakes

Our school is definitely a Google school. We have switched over to Apps and love teaching and learning using all the  Google Web Apps that come with our school accounts, as well as with a regular GMail account. Although we have a preference for and utilise everything Google,(within reason) as it applies to educational practice, we recently made the decision to switch from teaching  iGoogle this year to PageFlakes . Several things were considered when making the decision, but three areas in particular really swayed the balance:

1. The Anything Flake allows you to put just about anything on your page, including important links, pictures, text and gadgets and widgets from other sites.


2. PageFlakes provides a greater level of freedom in designing pages, not only can students choose from different predetermined themes and page designs, and alter colour schemes,  they can also easily create their own themes and page designs by using their own imagery.


3. RSS Feeds can be added to any  page, so they can be organised by topics, or placed on a page of their own.

We have taught the kids how to search out feeds and place them on their pages. They are able to add flakes as well as widgets and gadets from other sites, using the Anything Flake, and have created pages for their main subject areas as well as hobbies and interests. They love being able to customise their pages-this is a real hook! The next step will be teaching them how to share their pages and create page casts. The real power here is in the creating of a set of pages from which they can readily access all their accounts, links, and tools.

Our next big PageFlakes project will be to use pages as pathfinders for projects that not only include  links and feeds, but also photo galleries, text, audio and more.

Wouldn't it be great to also have the kids collaborate on group pages on given subjects, compiling banks of related resources that they have come come across or created in the course of their work?

It's the mark of a great application, when not only is it extremely useful, but also very difficult t0 get the kids away from it at the end of a lesson!