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.