In addition to the complete mess above, I also found out I have to add a few classes to my schedule.  Have you ever asked a question, hoping for clarification and then having the answer bite you in the butt?  Well, that happened to me and as a result, I get to see my favorite grade level (note sarcasm) for an additional class period a week.  Not only was this news to me, but it was news to my principal as well.  It turns out this is a change from last year that no one knew about until I asked a question related to something else.  Nothing like letting everyone involved know about the change on the first day of school after schedules have already been completed!

This has probably been the worst start to any school year I’ve had.  I feel completely unprepared because I haven’t been able to get ready the things I’ve needed.  I don’t have barcodes printed for all the students so they can check out books.  I have new books waiting to be cataloged, I can’t do it.  I have a ton of magazines from the summer that need to be added to the collection.  Teachers are trying to look up books in the catalog but can’t access it because the system is down.  My frustration has led me to be a little less patient with the students, which is not a good thing.  I haven’t been as happy about starting the year as I should be.

I got an email that an upgrade to the software is going to take place Friday night.  I hope I come to school on Tuesday and everything is working.  It will make for a much happier me.

This was a very fun night.  It was exciting seeing the faces of the students, some eager to return and others eager for summer break to continue.  I can’t speak for all of the teachers in my building, but this night really seemed to kick start the school year for me.  Sitting in meetings doesn’t really get the juices flowing, but seeing the students is another story.

Tomorrow will be a day to continue getting ready for the start of the year.  With any luck, the circulation software we use in the library will be up and running, which wasn’t the case last week.  If it’s up, I’ve got a lot of work to do.  If it’s not, I guess I’ll be meeting with teachers, planning for the next few weeks, and processing books.

Even though we’ve already been back 3 days, seeing the students tonight really gave me the sense that I’m ready to go back to school.

In my previous post, I mentioned the need for an app to scan a book barcode and save the information in a list to be exported for easy ordering.  I heard about another app that scans barcodes, Shop Savvy.  I thought I’d try it out.  This app does a nice job of scanning a book barcode, but like SnapTell, does not provide enough information about the book.  One thing that is nice about this app, however, is a link to reviews of the book as well as web and local pricing (see screen shot). There is a feature that allows you to save the book to a Wish List. Unfortunately, at this time there is no way to export the wish list.  According to the app website, they are working on adding this feature.  Again, this app does a nice job of doing what it does, but what it does, isn’t what I need.  I guess I’ll keep searching.

I’d love to have an app that would allow me to scan the ISBN of a book, look up the information in some database, and create a list of the scanned titles. Most importantly, I’d like to be able to export that list containing the necessary information, so I could upload the entire list to be ordered. I found something that works – sort of.

SnapTell is a free app that can do SOME of what I’m looking for. The app can be used to scan an ISBN barcode or take a picture of the cover and retrieve information about the book and create a list of books scanned. The list of books, containing cover art and title as well a link to Amazon.com, can also be emailed from the app. Pretty cool. I tried it 6 different times and SnapTell was correct every time. I didn’t try with old titles or books with multiple covers, but was satisfied with how it worked. Sort of.

While this app does what it can well, there is information missing that I am looking for. When a book is scanned, what appears is simply the title of the book as well as online prices and local prices. In addition, links to Amazon, Google, and more are listed if you want to purchase the book. For my needs, the title just isn’t enough. I need author, copyright year, publisher, and most importantly, ISBN number on the page of results. This information also needs to be on the list that can be emailed. If I had this complete list, I could copy the data, paste it into the company website I use to order my books from and a list would be produced for me. I can’t quite do that with SnapTell.

I’m going to keep searching for more barcode readers to see if I can find one that does what I need it to.  If you know of any, please let me know.

On Thursday of the DEN LC Symposium, we took a break from Bentley University and took a field trip via trolley to downtown Boston.  There, we attended the Building Learning Communities conference, put on by November Learning.  A couple of DEN STARS, Lee Kolbert and Teryl Magee were presenting at the conference.  I didn’t attend either of their sessions, but from what I saw on Twitter, things went well.  I was pretty excited to attend this conference, not only to catch a few sessions and see some friends, but most importantly, to watch the keynote by Michael Wesch.  He’s the one behind the Vision of Students Today video.  I heard Dr. Wesch give the keynote at WEMTA, our state technology conference in the spring of 2009.  He gave a great keynote then and he did the same again in Boston.  While the topic of his talk was different than is was over a year ago, I did see some similarities in parts of his presentation.  Regardless, he had a great message and delivered it a humorous, easy to understand manner.  When he finished, he got a standing ovation.

The rest of the day included several sessions, one by Lisa Thumann (resources here).  I wanted to attend this session because she was going to be talking about YoLink.  I’m interested in learning a little more about this search tool and she shared some information.  I later visited with a couple of guys from YoLink to get more information.  I’m looking forward to trying this with my students.  I also attended a session Visual Literacy.  We need to help our students the best we can when it comes to building background knowledge and helping them understand concepts.  Pictures and videos can do that and I can certainly say, it’s not happening enough in my school.  Our students haven’t had a wide range of activities in their lives to broaden their experiences so anything we can do to help them understand the world around them will be a huge benefit. also attended a session by Adora Svitak.  Honestly, I was not impressed.  Perhaps I should give this 12 year old prodigy some slack, but it was pretty clear she needs a lot of practice giving presentation.  I wasn’t the only one who walked out early.  With that being said, I heard quite a few positive things about a keynote she gave the day before.

Due to an unexpected opportunity in the evening, I did not travel back to Bentley with my DEN friends (I missed the rockin’ 70’s themed party back at Bentley).  I had time, however, to stay and watch the closing keynote for the day.  This was given by Richard Halkett.  He is the Directory of Strategy and Research, Global Education for Cisco, in London.  I really liked his message – we need to change “the script” to make fundamental changes in education.  He said we can simply replace a textbook with a Kindle.  We have to make bigger changes.  Just doing the same thing with a different tool is like changing from a blue pen to a red pen.  He’s right.I did have similar conversations with several people about the sessions themselves.  Many of us felt that the attendees were very much at the beginner level when it comes to education technology, some of the tools involved, and integrating the technology into the curriculum.  A number of people noted the lack knowledge most audience members had attending this conference.  It was a huge change compared to ISTE, which many of us attended.  I do think it’s a good thing that there are less experienced people attending theses conferences.  They are just beginning to grow their learning.  It’s not bad they are beginners, it’s a good because they’re learning.  I think this confirms a couple of things.  The first is that there is still a very large majority of people who are not using enough technology in their classrooms and with their students.  I think we all probably witness this in our schools.  The second thing is that the technology knowledge level of the DEN LC members is head and shoulders above the average teacher.

It was a good day.  I’m very thankful to Lance and the DEN leaders who worked out our attendance.  It was a nice change of pace from Bentley and a different opportunity for us to learn – even though we all had to wear our DEN LC Symposium t-shirts, kind of like a school group on a field trip.  I guess when you think about it, we were.

We arrived the next morning with our pieces of paper taped to the chalkboard.  Yes, chalkboard.  There were 4 sessions available, with 6 options in each session.  For each session, everyone just chose what they wanted to do.  Each topic was discussed in a different location.  The sessions were pretty unstructured, basically discussions started by one person, but continued by whoever was in the room.  The number of people in the sessions varied from 3 to about 20.

I led a discussion dealing with collaboration and how to get reluctant colleagues involved in collaboration – both on a professional level and for student learning.  Here are the notes from our discussion.  I think it went pretty well.

After this “unconference” was over, there was some talk about how great this would be in a school or district when it comes to professional development.  Like many other educators, we’ve all been in PD sessions where we sat thinking, “This doesn’t have any relevance to me.”  Think about this unconference idea.  Wouldn’t it be great if the teachers chose the topics they wanted to learn more about?  Wouldn’t it be great if the PD was led by the teachers?  They would have a more vested interest and would get more out of the time.  Ultimately, this should lead to more learning.

If you want to read more about our Unconference, you can do that here and here.

If you’re looking for blogs to start reading/following, go through the list, there’s a brief description about the author of the site and a little description of what they write about.

The Best List of….  Can there really be a Best List of list?  I’m not sure.  Obviously, these lists are simply opinions of someone or some organization.  What makes the list more credible, I believe, is our personal opinion of the person or organization.  If I heard a list of “The Best Teaching Sites” from John Doe, I might not be as impressed – because I don’t know anything about John Doe.  However, when a list comes out from a respectable organization, I tend to take the list a little more seriously.

Recently, the AASL came out with their Top 25 Best Websites for Teaching and Learning.  This is a great list and definitely worth your time.  The list is broken up into 7 different categories:

• Media Sharing
• Digital Storytelling
• Manage and Organize
• Social Networking and Communication
• Curriculum Sharing
• Content Resources: Lesson Plans and More
• Content Collaboration

It’s nice when a list is sorted and the AASL did a nice job.  Take a peek.