Thing 23

What a joyous morning that I am blogging on Thing 23! I have enjoyed this online class. Many of the new technologies I had heard about but didn't know what they were. So, it all seems much less mysterious now. My favorite new "toys" are:

• del.ici.us--which is already on my home computer and will be on my school computer as soon as I get back there. I also have access to my friend's bookmarks, which will be very helpful as we are planning lessons this school year.
• flickr--especially the big huge lab and creative commons--already have my head swirling with ideas on how to use them in lessons this upcoming year.
• library thing--will use more as a personal site, rather than a school site, but it will help me keep up with my favorite authors and expand to new authors.
• I am toying with creating a library blog, but I do have some concerns with the possible contents of the comments so I am still undecided.

As a librarian, I feel it is so important to keep up with the latest technologies and to at least be familiar with what some of the web 2.o tools are even I may never master some of them. This program successfully helped to introduce me to many of these tools.

This program showed me that learning new technologies can actually be fun! I unfortunately usually go into a technology learning experience with a negative attitude, but this was a very non-threatening way to dabble with all types of tools, some of which I will use frequently.

I took the class with a friend so if one of us got stuck, the other usually could help. However, it would be helpful to have a "help" link with perhaps a dedicated email address to deal with concerns or questions we might have as we are working through these 23 things. It sure would have helped me as I was working with Rollyo and never could get it to work right!

I would most definitely be interested in taking another class in this format in the future,. My new knowledge greatly outweighs any frustrations encountered along the way!

Eye-opening, mind-expanding

Thing 22

This is the longest I have worked on this class at one time and I must say I am getting cross-eyed! But, I am going out of town next week (that is what summers are for in my opinion!) and the August 5th due date is looming large--so I am pushing on! Nings remind me of listservs--which I just read from an entry from Carol Simpson should actually be called email lists. She was responding on the Texas School Librarian Ning about the differences between this site and the TLC email list. The most obvious is that the TLC email list comes to you and you need to go to the nings. My favorite of the 3 listed was the Teacher Librarian Ning. I liked that they had an Elementary Librarian group, which the Texas School Librarian Ning did not. I actually printed out an idea under the topic Teaching Index Use and enjoyed reading the ideas of Starting the Year On the Right Foot. The Ning for Teachers wasn't very helpful for me at this moment without specific lesson plans in front of me. But, when I am planning a lesson with a teacher, I just may look on the site to see what others have done. I plan to share the site with my faculty because it is neat to see the lesson plans and it always great to get new ideas.

Thing 21

Finally something that I have used before and know a little bit about! It has been a while since I have made a podcast, but I remember that it was very time consuming. However, as I use the podcasting tools more frequently, that will hopefully no longer be an issue. I really liked using Audacity and the ability to delete all of the mistakes the narrator has made. I am very familiar with photostory and love having the students use it for final projects during research units. The kids are excited to use the laptops the district has provided for us and therefore are motivated to do excellent jobs with their photostories. As more and more teachers are going to want to use the set of laptop computers our school has, I think that there will be more issues in scheduling the use of them. For now, I use them frequently in the library! The following podcast is a tutorial for the students of how to turn in old books and reserve new books while I am with a class.

http://cfbstaff.cfbisd.edu/librarylandry/documents/PhotoStorycorral_1.wmv

Thing 20

I viewed videos on both YouTube and TeacherTube. First on YouTube I used the search term "librarians" and viewed 3 videos, none that I was thrilled with. The first one was called "Librarian's Guide to Understanding Academic Copyright". It had silly hand puppets with hard to understand English accents. The second video was "Librarian's Job Description". It covered the basic facts, but was dry and rather boring. The third video, "Librarian's Day is Never Done took a turn around the minute mark that I didn't want to see! I was much more successful with TeacherTube. I searched for anything to do with the man made wonders of the world to enhance a 3rd grade unit I co-teach with the classroom teacher. I found a video about the Great Wall of China that I thought would be a nice introduction to that.

Thing 19

What fun this was to see all of the Web 2.0 Award winners! I enjoyed playing until I realized how much time had slipped by! I mostly looked at sites that interested me personally, not professionally. I definitely agree that del.icio.us is an award winner. That was love at first site for me and it is already on my home computer and will be on my school computer when I get back to school. I also really love Flickr and have plans to use it personally and professionally frequently. Biblio.com was intriguing to me because on several occasions a frequently circulated book has been lost or loved to death and then to our horror it is now out of print and cannot be replaced. This site gives me the opportunity to buy a used, but hopefully in good condition, replacement of that well loved book. Im Cooked seemed interesting until I got into the site and realized that it was videos of others cooking--would rather just have the recipes. Urban Spoon however, is a great site to find new restaurants in my neighborhood. Upcoming.yahoo is great for finding events that are occurring withing the next six weeks, but not useful for long range planning. Finally I went to Yahoo!Answers--this was a fun site, but not authoritative answers for sure. It is in a blog format with people throwing in their thoughts on a particular answer. Fun to read, but not one that I would use for anything other than a good laugh.

Thing 18

I have been on vacation and now I must say it is hard getting back into the work mode! I have just explored Google Docs. I liked that the documents can be saved and pulled up again from any computer eliminating the need for a thumb drive. I also can see students using this site because it is a free site for the documents that they might need. Personally, I don't see me using this Google Docs frequently because it is easier to go straight to my microsoft office package unless I know for sure that I will be working on documents that will be collectively worked on and therefore easily accessible.

Thing 17

Well, Rollyo was a complete bust for me! I registered, and created a search roll entitled Library Links. I added 4 or 5 sites. I can see what I have done, but can't get the sites I added to open! I am sure for some this is a great tool. For me however, it is another password I must remember and then I am obviously not easily making the site work for me. At this moment, it is easier for me to go directly to my website or to use del.icio.us that I really like as a place to keep all of my favorite sites.

Thing 16

Wikis are an interesting concept to me. I can see using them professionally with committee meetings, book studies, or when doing collaborative work with other teachers or librarians. I am not sure how I would use wikis with my elementary students basically because it goes back to having only 2 student computers in each classroom and only 13 student computers in the library. I very much like Meredith Farkas' article Using Wikis to Create Online Communities. She mirrored my thoughts with the following: "It can be difficult for people to get used to the idea of a website that anyone is allowed to add to or edit. The notion of private property is so deeply embedded in our society that it’s difficult to imagine going onto someone else’s website and changing things, even when they want us to. We’re accustomed to websites where someone is the final arbiter on what can or cannot go into it. With a wiki, everyone is the final arbiter. If I don’t like what someone put into the wiki, I can change it. And if someone don’t like what I wrote, they can make their own changes." I do realize that you can make the wiki not open for all to edit, but I feel that defeats the purpose of the wiki. At home I plan to look at the Library Success Wiki because that site is blocked here at school.