Week 9, Thing #23 Summation

Thank you for offering this wonderful online tutorial. It has been informative, entertaining and expanding. It is difficult to chose favorite discoveries or exercises as I have enjoyed so many of them from the Gutenberg Project to creating images to cataloging my private library at LibraryThing. Each of these activities effected my world in different ways. Some of the lessons I plan to develop into lessons with my students, other activities I will try to formulate into staff development exercises for the classroom teachers, and still others will nourish my life outside of the job such as access to worldwide literature. Setting up RSS feeds has helped me stay connected to my profession and explore new fields as well. The format of this tutorial fit my lifestyle perfectly. Assistance was readily available if needed. I could work at my own pace including taking a four month break. At this point I cannot think of any way to improve its format or concept but something may emerge when I try to teach some of these skills to students and teachers. Right now I want to continue to play with what I have learned. I plan to sign up for Discovering Assistive Technology in the fall. In describing this learning experience, I would have to say that I feel as though I have just opened my eyes on a new world and it's amazing.

Week 9, Thing #22 eBooks and audiobooks

Checked out all the sites listed in our discovery exercises and resources. It is truly amazing what is available to the public for free or a minimal charge. I found the World eBook Fair site to be a researchers dream site. Collections varied from government documents to medical documents to social history to mathematics. What a resource! The Gutenbberg Project seemed to focus primarily on literature. I listened to portions of several audiobooks from LibroVox and toured the British Library Online Gallery. The BLOG is a truly amazing resource.

The projections Michael Hart quotes are very thought provoking and one can only imagine what the future holds when one takes into account the impact of the iPad. I think the iPad more than any other eReader will have the greatest impact on our access to information and literature.

Week 9, Thing#21 Podcasts

I've been doing podcasts for a few months now primarily to listen to NPR's Fresh Air program. I've added the RSS feed for NPR to my bloglines account. I find that very useful for a quick look at what is being aired. I listened to "Circulate This: Stories From the School Library." I thought it was a very powerful message in a unostentatious way. I plan to send it to all my Board of Education members in hopes that the more tech savvy ones will take the time to listen. I'm keeping the idea of creating a Podcast swimming in the back of my mind. Too much to do now with school wrapping up soon. I want to mull over how we could use it within the district and the benefits versus the time required to do something of this magnitude.

Week 9, Thing #20 YouTube

It's hard not to like YouTube for all the silly, entertaining things you can watch but it's also an incredible time sink. Most of the time it's like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack to find that one great, thought provoking video in the midst of so much amateurish, juvenile video. I guess it's the idea that it is open to all, that it's content is not determined by a corporation's bottom line that makes it such a powerful medium to convey information and viewpoint to the masses.

There are some videos that can be used as appropriate teaching tools in the classroom and the library for our visual learners. The videos don't have to be serious to make learning fun such as the Dewey Decimal Rap. I can see my students soaking in the Dewey Decimal Rap song while picking up some useful information. I think it would be useful to link to some YouTube videos from the library web page for instructional purposes and to get students involved in creating videos about the library.

Week 8, Thing #19 LibraryThing

I really enjoy LibraryThing. I picked it out as one of my favorites from the Web 2.0 awards and have explored it in greater detail ever since. I catalogued a bunch of books in my home library. It was interesting to see which ones were the most popular. Reading through the discussions of the most popular book I catalogued, The Help by Kathryn Stocket, it's interesting to note the different perspectives other readers bring to this book. I am not linking to my home library catalog because I'm a private person.

One of the features of LibraryThing that I really like is the entire local events calendar page. It's a great way to connect to what is happening in your area and to other local LibraryThing followers.

Week 8, Thing #18 Online Productivity Tools

I signed up for a Zoho account and immediately created a document to share with the other librarians in my district. I have previously used Google Docs and found Zoho to be much more user friendly. It is so similar to Microsoft Word that creating a document was easy. I then shared the document with 5 other librarians. I also found sharing to be much easier in Zoho than in Google Docs. I think online apps like these are a perfect match for the iPad.

Week 7, Thing #17 Sandbox Wiki

I enjoyed playing in the California Curriculum Connections wiki. It was interesting to be able to read through the various curriculum ideas using image generators, blogs, avatars, etc. While I generally discourage my students from using Wikipedia for their research, I have a better understanding of the process of a wiki. I think I would create and use a wiki more for collaborating with my colleagues than for student work..

Week 7, Thing #16 Wikis

I explored a number of the library wikis and found that many contained links and information that I could use right now. The librarians in my district plan to give a presentation to the Board of Education on the "State of the Libraries" and we want to back up our presentation with as much information as possible. We are updating our Policy Statement, our Action Plan and Goals, and our statistics for the past year. Creating a wiki would allow all of us to contribute and edit these documents without meeting in person. The California K12HSN Calaxy site looks very promising. I also liked the Library Bloggers Wiki, Library Success: A best practices wiki, and the teacherlibrarianwiki. I will be using these resources frequently in the near future.

Week 6, Thing #15 Future of Libraries

As an elementary school librarian, the article that spoke to me was, "Into a New World of Librarianship" by Michael Stephens. I agree the library is human. For my students aged 5 through 10, it is a "socially and emotionally engaging center for learning and experience." My responsibility to them is to meet their needs using the tools that I have available. In these current economic times, I have no tech, no budget, and limited time and space. At the same time, I have an increase in the number of students that I serve. The skills that I am learning now through this course will enable me to better serve my students and my teachers, advocate for our school library to the District administration, the Board of Education and the public, and to create for the future.

The conference sessions I would be most interested in would be using Web 2.0 tools to enhance and differentiate instruction to my students in the library and to teach these skills to the classroom teacher.

Week 6, Thing #14 Technorati

I have to say I was a bit disappointed using Technorati. I searched for School Library Learning 2.0 in Blog posts, in the POSTS and in the Blogs Directory and came up with zero hits.  Searching Google, Bing, Ask, and Yahoo resulted in lots of hits. I did notice that Google searched only the terms library learning and blogs and ignored the school and 2.0 components of my search.  When I limited my Technorati search to library learning, the results were more productive. Exploring popular blog, searches and tags was impossible because that section was currently unavailable but would be back in the future. I thought using Delicious was much more user friendly.  Technorati was heavily weighted towards business and entertainment. Tagging strikes me as having a much more powerful search capability than ordinary keyword searching. However, that may not always produce the best results.  I chuckled when I saw one post with a tag "journalism" when I would hardly call the blog it was referring to as journalism. The big question is when does this free for all in tagging become too massive that it reduces its own effectiveness?

Week 6, Thing #13 Del.cio.us

Delicious was fairly interesting to explore. I found myself analyzing the tags given to different bookmarks and comparing them to the bookmarked article.  I didn't necessarily agree with all the tags used to describe a bookmarked article but it provided an interesting perspective. I did like the search feature. I used that to compare the bookmarks that I have sorted the old fashion way in files. I think the greatest advantage is the ability to access to bookmarks anywhere.     

Week 5, Thing #12 Rollyo

This was very interesting. I can see the potential for creating a search engine tool for my 5th graders for their various research projects. It would give them a place to start for basic information. I created a Rollyo on women's history. I searched for Martha Washington using my Rollyo and was impressed by the results. I liked the fact that I could export my bookmarks to one location accessible from any computer.

Week 5, Thing #11 Web 2.0 Awards

After exploring dozens of sites, I narrowed my selection down to WorldCat and LibraryThing. Both sites received Honorable Mention on the Web 2.0 Awards site. Of the two, I found that WorldCat would be most useful to me in my library setting. I am frequently asked where a copy of a popular book, that has been checked out, could be found. I had quite a demand for the Newbery winners this year, and my students wanted to get the book at the public libraries in the area. I searched the catalog and found useful information for specific titles such as reviews (from GoodReads and Amazon), subject access, author information, and user tags. I could also use WorldCat to check out a title that has been recommended to me by my students. On the personal side, I thought LibraryThing was great. I'm always looking for book recommendations. Checked out Ning for Computer-Using Educators and had fun playing Travel IQ.

Week 5, Thing #10 Image Generator

Well, this was fun and the possibilities were endless. I could easily play around with this for hours on end. Sleep? Who needs sleep? I like the comic strip generators but had difficulty thinking of something funny. I know my students would love playing with the ReadWriteThink comic creator. I used Image Chef for my "Stone Soup" image (www.imagechef.com). I actually created a number of images but settled on this one. Uploading the image was very easy, just follow the directions given by Image Chef. I enjoyed skipping through the custom sign generator with their "Wacky Packages." Couldn't help but notice that there are many image generator sites to update a MySpace page.

Week 4, Thing #9 Library blogs

Checked out all the search tools listed on the page and found Technorati, Google Blog Search and the Blogging Libraries wiki the most useful and the easiest to use. Bloglines search tool required quotes around my string of search terms so that they appeared together and not randomly. The Google Blog Search was quick but the blogging libraries wiki was right on target with less distracting type and advertising. I tried Blog Pulse to see what tracking conversations was all about. I broadened my search term from school library learning 2.0 to library just to see what would happen. It was interesting but not quite what I expected or needed.

Week 4, Thing #8 RSS newsfeeds

I set up an account with Bloglines and started to subscribe to a bunch of newsfeeds. I like the idea of having the latest news fed to me with a click. It saves so much time and helps me to keep up to date on the latest in the library/information world. Without my library tech this year (I lost her to budget cuts), I have very little if any time to spend going from website to website reading to keep myself current. At first I went a little overboard subscribing to many newsfeeds, but I found that some did not provide me with the information I was looking for. I decided to focus on newsfeeds that were directly related to my job as an elementary school librarian primarily book reviews and school library related issues.

Week 3, Thing #7 Technology eReaders

I recently received a Kindle as a gift and have downloaded several novels from Amazon as well as from 3rd party sites. I'm of two minds when debating the pros and cons of an ebook reader versus hardcopy. The Kindle is fantastic when sitting in the middle seat on a airplane with very little personal space. Plus I can have a wide assortment of options to read when traveling-- novels, newspapers, etc. However, I still enjoy the feel of a physical book. When reading I like to go back and reread passages or jump ahead to read the ending. That's a little trickier to do on a Kindle. I think I might enjoy reading on an iPad a little bit more with it's visual element of a page turning. Probably the most distressing thing about using an ebook reader is that I can't share a book I've really enjoyed with my friends and family.

Week 3, Thing #6 Flickr mashups

I really enjoyed exploring Flickr's mashups and some of the other tools. The mashup that most intrigued me was Flickr Color Pickr. I found it amazing and had to agree with KrazyDad Jim Bumgardner that "it's purpose is simply to provide wonder and delight." I couldn't agree more. It was delightful! I tried several more of the Colr Pickrs and found them just as interesting.

I then went on to create a Librarian Trading Card. I have kept it private for now as I want to edit it a bit first. I thought it would be fun to have my 5th graders create a trading card to go along with their biography book reports.