Paper.li: best use practices

Twitter provides a wealth of education related content and while I like to read and scan this content through the Flipboard app on my iPad, Paper.li comes to the rescue when I simply do not have time each day to keep up with new posts.


Paper.li collates tweets and RSS feeds specified by the user, then publishes them in a newspaper format. There are front page headlines, sections promising more, and referrals to individual hashtags. This can be published either once daily, or morning and evening, or weekly. The user logs in with their Twitter ID and chooses sections for the paper and publication details. This can be set to be tweeted to followers at regular intervals.

Why is this useful and what is the best way to read all these compilations? 
Paper.li collects the tweets I've not had time to see and by setting it to publish at a time of evening when I know I'll have reading time, it provides a great summary of what I have missed during the last 24 hours. I like the way it puts all the media items together so that one can quickly see which are presentations, videos and images. This is particularly useful for finding and viewing those clips and interactives that do not display on the ipad, when I'm back at the computer.
 
This is the standard display. Instead of the limited 140 characters of Twitter one is now able to see the first paragraph of articles that have been tweeted.

A  more useful display option is the See all articles which then provides options for sorting by source, topic or news spotter. This allows the reader greater control and provides information about the source of articles. Displayed in this manner it is now easier to skip down the page and choose articles for further reading.



The Archives button from the standard display allows me to go back and find earlier material, all those tweets from my PLN are not lost! By the way, paper.li it has a useful widget to embed on your blog, seen here in the right hand column.
Each day I look at paper.li publications by several folks in my PLN. Three favourites are , Library Grits daily, Professional learning news and The Tania Sheko Daily I get to to see articles I would not otherwise encounter.

Paper.li works well for me so if you have not yet investigated it, here's a concise tutorial to get you started. What strategies do you use to keep up with the relentless twitter feed?

Engaged and entangled

Four weeks into Term 4 well it was, when I wrote this post but now 10 days later time to post it!

What has been done and what has been achieved? A casual comment from a senior colleague brings me to reflect on 4 weeks in the life of a busy school library.  

Week 1. Excellence and enthusiasm
October started with the splendid ASLA conference at Riverview which afforded 3 days of top class learning. The presentations, mainly from an active Australian TL team, provided much food for thought. My contribution was Using LibGuides and Facebook to provide a 24/7 library.

During the holiday break library catalogue data was migrated to Destiny, so Wednesday was the library staff training day for the new system. Managing the translation of operations and resolving some migration issues is ongoing.

On the Friday iPads were issued to all Year 11 students. To plan for this day guides were created and resources compiled. While my TL colleagues in the library provided 4 sessions of orientation to resources for senior students, I was engaged in co-delivering with Apple trainers iPad basics to the rotating groups of students. This was a whole day exercise, with the IT Department issuing the iPads and support staff running normal library operations for the other 1200 students.

Week 2 - Engagement and enlightenment
First full week of classes commenced with eight Junior School classes  scheduled for regular timetabled periods for borrowing and research.
All secondary students returned to the first full week of classes with high expectations for their new academic year. A rush of borrowings ensued as students discover topics and staff refresh resourcces. New pathfinders and etexts were added to the library website. Immersion in the new library system ensured library staff were finding needed functionality. Teaching this week focussed on engaging year 8 students in research for a range of Design and Technology projects.

Week 3 - Enrichment and entanglement
Year 11 and 12 Economics and 8 x Year 8 Geography classes featured high on our agenda this week. Both HSC and IB economics classes were given a refresher in finding topics related to their current studies and encouraged to set up RSS feeds for their topics of interest.
Year 8 Geography classes reviewed advanced search techniques and exchanged their findings about the suitability of sites for research.
We were delighted to receive a glowing recommendation for a book promotion session from an English teacher which in turn generated more class bookings for reading promotions.

Week 4 - Empowerment and execution
The Year 10 conference is a two day introduction to senior school life and studies. Six groups of 30 - 40 students, rotate through a range of pastoral and academic activities over the two days. The one hour library sessions provided for these groups served as a reorientation to services, a focus on research tools available, a chance to view some great book trailers and explore resources for a current English topic.
The conference culminated with a Year 10 Parent Information evening on Tuesday where I had the chance to promote the Library's services and resources to about 200 parents. Positive feedback indicated that parents appreciate this information.

Involvement in a school wide committee which focuses on the improvement of teaching and learning, saw me out of the library on Thursday. The outcomes from that day impact on our need to reflect on library services provided for ESL students and the need to further empower whole school staff learning across a range of topics.

How is your term progressing? My blog entries are irregular but serve to focus my attention on the wide variety of work being done in our school library.

5 simple steps to a Scoop.it widget on your webpage or blog

Scoop.it widgets 
Many people are curating the best resources they can find using Scoop.it. You can use their expertise to display this dynamic content visually via a widget on your website or blog as shown with these 2 examples.

      


Scoop.it provides 2 alternatives for delivering content, an RSS feed and a widget. Once you are logged in choose Manage/ Export to find these options.
For the widget:
1. Choose shape - square or rectangular
2. The number of posts - default is 3 but I suggest 5
3. Select time to display, the widget above is set on 5 secs, the one on the right on 10
4. Use the slider to determine the width of the gadget.
5. Preview, adjust as desired then grab the code ready to paste to your website or blog.

How to grab other folk’s scoops using the widget 

Simply copy and edit the code below:
1. Replace the URL http://www.scoop.it/t/ebooksk12 with the address showing in the URL of the Scoop you want
2. Replace the title ebooks with the title you want displayed at the top of the widget

I have removed the first < from the code before the word iframe,  Insert it and remember to close the iframe at the end with < and /  to get your widget to work.

Code
iframe> align="left" frameborder="0" height="250" scrolling="no" src="http://www.scoop.it/t/ebooksk12/js?format=square&numberOfPosts=5&title=ebooks&speed=5&mode=normal&width=250" width="250"  iframe>

Notice that you can also adjust the size of the widget here too by altering the height and width numbers that currently are set at 250.

I've used Scoop.it widgets  here on our ipad page to display the wonderful resources that others are finding.

Have fun!