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What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey? I had to look back at the whole list to find my favorites. I can never pick just one! I really liked Twitter and have been told by friends who use it often that it is adicting. I feel a little more hip knowing what it is and trying to use it. I really liked delicious too. I think that it is helpful to me, both professionally and personally. Learning about delicious really helped me understand tagging, how it works and how it helps! I liked the online image generators because they were just fun!How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals? This program made me learn but in a fun way--through play! I learn well this way. Having the time to participate in the summer is great! When it comes to technology related things, hearing someone tell me how to do it or just reading about how to do something isn't enough for me. I have to fiddle around with it and work with it to really learn how to use it. This program has also expanded my horizons and made me think about things in a new way. I have been challenged to become a serious Web 2.0'er and to encourage my collegues to join me!Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you? I am surprised at how Thing #15 challenged me to think about how important it is for me to learn all about the Web 2.0 world and apply it to my library. I need to really jump in and challenge myself to learn more and more and not just stop with these 23 Things. If not, I think I would be in danger of being left behind. Before I started this project, I was content to let the busyness of my day to day work keep me from learning the new Web 2.0 tools. But I know now that that isn't a good plan any more. I need to be active and not complacent about new things.What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept? I'm not sure. I liked that it was on a blog and that it was self paced. I liked that we had to create a blog to share our experiences and see what the experiences of others were as well. If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you choose to participate?Yes!!! How about the Next 23 Things? Or 23 Things - Part 2?How would you describe your learning experience in ONE WORD or in ONE SENTENCE, so we could use your words to promote 23 Things learning activities? 23 Things has been a relevant, challenging, valuable, self-paced professional and personal growth experience!
I was quite excited to see the Texas School Librarians ning but then disappointed when I logged in because of the small number of people who are members of that ning. I thought it would be a greater number of users and that they would be much more active. Instead, the Teacher Librarian ning seems to be more of what I was thinking the TSL ning should be. I think the nings seem to have similar information that I find on the TLA list-serv. I liked the groups feature, that allows people of similar interests within the profession to share information within a smaller group. There were a few I checked out, but there didn't seem to be lots of newer posts. I'm guessing this is because it is summer time and people are taking a break. I don't see myself joining lots of nings, maybe just the Teacher Librarian ning and monitoring it for new ideas and a way to share ideas with a wider group of people. One of the things I like about my school district is that the librarians have monthly meetings. Sometimes we are split up by elementary and secondary level and sometimes we meet all together, but the most valuable thing about our meetings is the sharing of ideas. This seems like a virtual way to do this and on a larger scale.
Did I post my Photo Story correctly? When I tried to view it, the screen said it wasn't currently available.
Photo Story took me awhile. I have recently learned how to do Windows Movie Maker and I assumed they were similar, but they aren't. I was a bit confused at first because Photo Story didn't seem as sophisticated as Movie Maker. But once I understood they how they are different, things got better. My Photo Story is an advertisement for a reading program I am planning to do in my library this year called Read it Forward. A few of my collegues heard about it from the Round Rock ISD librarians at a presentation at TLA this past spring. It is based on the idea from the movie Pay it Forward. We will distribute a limited number of the book Schooled by Gordon Korman for kids to read then pass the book forward to a someone else to read. We plan to have activites for the kids who have read the book to participate in throughout the year.
I found the following video at TeacherTube. It is a book trailer made by a librarian in my district. Book trailers are like video teasers for book, similar to movie trailers. It is for a great book: What I Saw and How I Lied.(Ok. The embeddable player didn't work and I don't know why. I copied and pasted all of the info in the Embeddable player box, but it didn't work. It just posted html code when I published this post and it didn't link to the video. So I just pasted the info for the Video URL instead. If you know what I did wrong, I would love a tip in how to fix it!)
(Thanks for the comment! I fixed it!)
I think having access to these videos is great! There are lots of possible uses for teachers and students. I think it would be neat to allow students to create videos as their final product and post them to TeacherTube. There are lots of quick how to videos that are great--I especially like Common Craft videos! As a librarian, I like book trailers to use with my students. I took a course in making them and hope to put my finished product on TeacherTube for others to use.
Ok, I picked Twitter. I've been thinking about this Web 2.0 tool for awhile, wondering what all the buzz was about. I set up my account and found some people I knew to start following. Some tweets immediately popped up with posts from these friends and they were interesting. It gave me some ideas of what I can tweet about. Twitter is special because it allows people to follow other people and find out what they are doing now with very few words. There is a 140 word limit with any post and I can see where they wouldn't all be used on a regular basis.As I said before, Twitter has had me pondering about it for awhile. This morning I got on Gale and searched for recent articles in LMC and SLJ about Twitter, wondering how it is used in libraries. (I've begun to secretly want an iPhone but I figure I need a reason to have one. Could Twitter be a reason?) The articles I found were interesting and gave me lots of ideas. I think the idea of putting out really quick book talks is neat and could really work for my customers -- MS students! I think it could also be useful for really quick announcements like "Book fair opens at 7am today! See you then!" I think that Twitter is great for reaching my population! I also think it would be fun for my personal life, family and friends and all. I guess I would need two user names or accounts -- one for the librarian and one for the regular person. I found some big name library people to follow like Doug Johnson and Joyce Valenza. There tweets came to my homepage as soon as I added them to the list of people I am following. Joyce Valenza puts links to other blogs that have something interesting. It can be used as a way to promote blogs and share ideas that are out there right now. I am a loyal NPR listener and a few times now I've heard reports about Twiku and other forms of poetry via Twitter. That sounds fun and like a great idea for English teachers to use with students.
I played with Google Docs for my Discovery Exercise. I'd played with it a little bit before for Thing #7. But this time I took the time to go through their help pages with all kinds of explanations and how to's. They were very clear. Then I played around a bit with a document or two. I think for my students Google Docs can be very helpful. It can allow them to work on an assignment at school, save to Google Docs and then open that same document and work on it at home. They don't need a zip or flash drive or any 'thing' to help transmit their data to and from school. The only draw back I see for students is that they may not have a Google account and I'm not sure about my district's opinion on requiring students to get a Google account. I like the feature that would allow people to see your documents and even edit them. That could be very helpful for collaboration with teachers. I can see creating or uploading a document, maybe an instruction sheet for a research project, and 'sharing' it with all of the teachers involved, allowing them to edit the document. I think this could save time as well as paper, creating and sharing drafts over and over again until something is ready to be published. I think it would be helpful amoung my peers too for the same reasons. I think Google Docs has some advantages over just using Microsoft Office because it is web based and allows for sharing and collaborating in a way that can be more efficient than emailing documents back and forth for editing purposes.
I created a Rollyo search engine on volcanoes based on a research project that my 6th graders did this previous school year. The video from another L2P player was so helpful! I don't think I would have understood the how to or the purpose of Rollyo without the video! I hope this link to my search works! http://rollyo.com/index.html The name of my Rollyo is SMS-Volcanoes. I couldn't remember from the video how to get the page that has a search bar and the name of my search engine at the top. I guess I'll go watch it again because that is an important part of this tool.I think that teachers and librarians should go wild about this tool! It is so frustrating when kids just want to Google for reasearch. They don't always understand how to evaluate the reliability of the hits they are getting and teachers don't always want a lesson on evaluating web resources.
I have a wiki that has my library's online resources on it. I created it this year when the computer literacy teacher asked me to visit her 6th grade classes and introduce our online resources to the students. I think it was a good first attempt at using wikis with students. I would like to create another wiki or two this year with assignments on them for students to follow. I attended two great sessions at TLA this past spring that involved taking research online with pathfinders and presentations. One was Barbara Jansen's presentation on Collaboration 2.0 and the other was Mash It Up: Connect Students through WebQuests and 2.0. Both presentations left me with lots of ideas about how to put projects on websites or wikis. I got lots of ideas such as having the students create a wiki as the product for their research or putting the steps of a project including links to sites for research. These ideas helped me connect my research experiences as an elementary librarian where we used mostly print resources with very specific directions for students at different stations to the middle school where more electronic resources were encorporated along with print resources. Their ideas will help me morph the stations we used at the elementary level to the research needs of the middle school.
Ok, I admit to being a fabulous lurker! As the articles mentioned, I don't want to just post an insincere "Great point/idea!" comment, so I haven't done so. The idea that commenting creates community is new to me. I don't know that many bloggers need that encouragement, but it is nice to know what the readers are thinking, kind of like fan mail to an author. I found 5 Library2Play blogs to comment on, focusing on blogs that seemed to be created by librarians and that had progressed to the same point I had. Thing #15 was so thought provoking, it was a good one to read other's thoughts about and leave comments. The two blogs outside of Library2Play that I commented on were both blogs I just stumbled on. One was Barbara Jansen's blog. I had attended her Collaboration 2.0 presentation at TLA last spring and was looking for her website to add to a comment I was leaving on a Library2Play blog. She had a wonderful blog post about school districts filtering 2.0 tools that related to my thoughts in Thing #15. The other blog I commented on was Joy the Baker's blog where she posted about how to make vanilla extract! This was something that was just up my alley and I can't wait to try it! She has over 52 comments on this blog entry! Wow!I see now that commenting does help create community and wonder if someone will comment on any of my blog posts! Hhhmmmm......
I read all five of the articles from the OCLC link. The first few were the most relevant to me, I think. They related to how libraries need to change their thinking and what a librarian in the 2.0 world needs to be like. I agree with the three icebergs that Rick Anderson talked about. As a librarian and lover of books, moving away from the "just in case" collection can be hard. When I know a book and know that it is good, it is hard not to want to have it in the collection to offer my patrons just in case they need something I think is fabulous. The idea that user education has to change challenged me as a middle school librarian. The idea that our services need to be very easy to use or change and the idea that we need to eliminate the barriers between patrons and the information they need is a change of thinking for me. These ideas change my thinking in how I need to approach teaching information skills to my students. One challenge I find is that they are not in the same place in terms of their skill levels and access to technology tools on their own. This makes it difficult to find a good place to 'start' in group instruction. Michael Stephens gave me lots of ideas for what a librarian in the 2.0 environment should be for her patrons. After reflecting on them, I think he is right. But I feel hindered by the filters in place in the school district. Many districts today seem to operate from a defensive point of view, suspicious of what is in the web and protecting students from what may be bad. This limits drastically what I am able to do to reach my students who are living in a 2.0 world. I also feel constrained by the generation of educators who are just learning about 2.0 tools and the 2.0 world and aren't proficient in it. The video posted on the Thing #15 page was very thought provoking in terms of the two generations education is dealing with: the older generation who isn't educated and proficient in the 2.0 world and the younger generation that is immersed in it daily. There seems to be a tug of war between these two groups and I am afraid of the outcome. If we as the older generation do not become educated in the 2.0 world and adapt the way we educate the younger generation to fit their 2.0 world, we are in great danger of becoming irrelevant. After reading these articles, especially the first two, I am inspired to change but I am concerned that I may be one of the few and not the many. I am concerned that enough people aren't informed enough about the need to change and adapt in order to reach our students and patrons.
I think right now I like Delicious better than Technorati. I did the suggested searches in Technorati and was unimpressed by the results I got for each search. I feel like I can better find what I am looking for by searching Delicious for various tags. I liked the Technorati video and the thoughts that the execs expressed, but I was not helped by the actual results as much as I thought I would be. Maybe I need to poke around some more. This is making me feel a bit old as things are not as easy to figure out as I thought nor am I as intuitive as I thought I would be in figuring things out. Searching both Delicious and Technorati require a bit of a paradigm shift in thinking to come up with the better search terms. It reminds me of searching our online OPAC. If a student searches for 'cars' they don't get much. They have to know that the keyword to use is 'automobile'. After doing some searches and looking at the categories and Top Blogs, News stories, etc., I've come to the conclusion that I need to be very thoughtful in the search terms I use and it may take me awhile to get the hang of it.
I think tagging in general is very useful to me in a few different ways. One, it will help me keep my Delicious tags organized, which is something I should be good at being a librarian and all. Second, it should help me find things of greater relevance for my students and find them faster if I search by tags. I like the idea of tags but the problems, I guess you would say, come from the fact that everyone can put their own tags on themselves. Flickr pointed out that if you search for a commonly misspelled tag, you may only find half of the things that are really out there and fit what you are looking for. I also noticed that one of my tags I used singularly sometimes and plural others. I need to go back and correct this so that I can better organize things, but I have to stop and think which would be the better tag -- blog or blogs; wiki or wikis; library or libraries. I didn't think of this at first, only after I had waded in, so now I need some re-thinking! So to sum up, I think tagging is great! But it is only as good as its creators, which is everyone in the world so there are going to be some 'mistakes'.
I have used Delicious for awhile, but not as completely as I can now that I have a much better understanding of tagging and how it works. I was introduced to Delicious last summer and got an account and saved a few things to it thinking it could take the place of My Favorites in my web browser. But I didn't keep up with it because I didn't learn all that I could do with it, especially with the use of tags. I loved learning that I could add the Delicious button to my tool bar to easily save a website to my account while browsing. I think the tag button will be helpful too. I noticed when I add a website to my account that it suggests tags to use, either recommended or most popular. I found this very helpful because sometimes I would be unsure of what tag would be the best one to use to describe a site. Delicious and social bookmarking have good potenial to be helpful for research. If you search Delicious for bookmarks based on potential tags, that could greatly cut down on the amount of time spent searching the greater web for sites. I know of a school librarian who has made a Delicious account in the name of her library that allows students and teachers to add bookmarks. I can see how this would be helpful for finding sites that students think are relevant to their topics of research and allow them to help each other with research. The whole point of social bookmarking seems to be to share some of the treasures available on the web and create a community of people with common interests. It is also a time saver! It lets everyone share in the work of others. These are both things that students can benefit from and relate to information literacy.
LibraryThing is fun! I'd heard of it, but never checked it out. Now I want to add more books to my library and carefully tag everything! I've seen Shelfari on other peoples blogs. I wonder if that is similar to LibraryThing. I also have some family members who have extensive libraries of their own who might like to put them on LibraryThing as well. I don't know that I see lots of applications for use with my students. I may introduce this at a book club meeting so that kids can see it and see that they can add books they have read and liked as well as those they own. The idea of recommendations of new books based on the books in your library may be helpful to kids--and me! It can be a sort of alternate reader's advisory tool for the hard core readers. I don't know that it would appeal to the reluctant readers because it may be too much work for them.I found a YA literature group in the Groups section that I joined. I also found a cook book collector group which I considered but decided not to join right now. It is very small and I don't know how helpful that would be. There were some other children's literature groups that I decided not to join as well just because their focus may not be as relevant to me as the YA literature group.
Image generators are fun!!!
I was able to work with some on the list, but others were blocked. I was able to use ImageChef to make a post on this blog. I liked Dumpr and the Rubix Cube photo I made of a book cover. I used Glogster to make a "thing" to add to my library's website that is under construction. I will upload it here, although it isn't finished yet. I have to figure out what I want the links to go to. I also used Slide, which another librarian in my district showed me, to make a little slide show of all of the Lone Star book covers for this year's list.
I found that these websites were generally easy to use. I just started making things and figured it out as I went along. For the library, I would easily be able to use these image generators for things to add to my blog or library website. I have seen some of the ImageChef images added to handouts for meetings, which should be easy to do as well. I just have to remember to used them to kick up my handouts, PPT presentations and blog posts up a notch!
Create your own
Rubik's Cube
This was really hard!
I liked the article on surrounding yourself with your own circle of the wise. I thought it was good advice and advice I had used before in other circumstances. As I searched the search tools, I found very little. Technorati was the easiest to search, but I still didn't find much. I used search terms like YA literature, school library, school librarian, middle school library and got hits each time, but not what I would consider good hits. It was frustrating to wade through everything! I found that many of the 'hits' listed had their last post 100+, 300+, and even 600+ days ago! That can't be a current blog! Also, sometimes I would click on the hit and the blog would have been deleted. The other search tools weren't much more help. The one that I did like, just a little bit, was the Edublogs' Award Winners page. They had a list of blogs by category and it was a short list. That told me they were good and I just clicked down the list to find blogs that would be relevant to me. I found some that I already had subscribed to on my Reader. This confirmed they were good blogs to subscribe to, but I didn't find anything I thought was worth adding to my Reader.
I learned that you can't just search by YA literature and find something good. I found some blogs that belonged to authors and one that was an online book, but I found some strange ones too! (But the strange ones were too strange to share!)
RSS feeds and readers are great for the lifelong learner! I have tinkered with my Google Reader a bit before completing Thing #8. I need to become more disciplined about logging in on a regular basis and reading what's new. I like how the reader will make things easier and more time efficient for keeping up on all that is out there to know. The web can be intimidating to me because of the width and depth of information. It can feel like such a small and insignificant accomplishment to me to read just one or two blog posts of the millions generated each day. It would be easy to feel like I am making no progress. But with a reader, it is possible to make the web feel more managable yet still feel like I am part of the wide world available to me. My goal is to use the reader daily to keep up with a few of what I consider the best blogs for me. I would like to find about 5 blogs that are very relevant to my professionally to follow daily. Another librarian mentioned that she had read a posting on Doug Johnson's blog stating that people should take a minimum of 15 minutes daily for their own learning. She applied that to technology and trying something new or keeping up with what is going on daily. I take that as permission to read a few select blogs daily to keep up with what is going on in Library Land!I think that readers can be helpful to any librarian, teacher or administrator in this same way. It is a tool that a life-long learner can use to keep up with the most relevant blogs or news sites for their profession.
Wow! Google has so much to offer! I played around with a few of the applications. I liked the Google Calendar because it allows you to set dates by year, like birthdays which are always sneaking up on me! I liked Picassa because it wasn't blocked and I could really see and search photos. I will try this site when I need pictures for book trailers, but I have a feeling it isn't as extensive as Flickr and the photos aren't quite as fabulous. I set up my iGoogle page with all kinds of gadgets and things for myself. I think I will find the Reader especially helpful in keeping up with what is going on professionally in a very time efficient way. Google Notebook is neat! I think it woudl be useful to students as a way to 'take notes' of their online searches. The unfortunate thing is that is an application that is not available to new users, which means that over time many students will not have access to it. (I think Google Notebook isn't the first application to be launched and then reach a point where Google no longer supports it with upgrades and stuff.) I also poked around in Google Docs. This application seems to have the greatest potential for use by my students. They often want to work on assignments at home and need a way to 'transport' their files from school to home and back to school again. Google Docs will allow them to do this easily. I am a bit worried about whether we can require students to have a gmail account, which is required to use any of these applications.
I liked the mashups. I couldn't login to the website to make a librarian trading card, but I saw some including one for Micheal Stephens, who I saw at TLA in spring of 2009. The site I liked the best was Endless Interestingness. It displays the "Interesting" pictures from Flickr and lets you scroll through them in any direction. When I first looked at the word mashups, I thought that these applications would allow you to combine photos to create a new picture. But it seems a little more techy than that with the creation of a new application. This seems like it would take some knowledge of computer code and code writing ability, which isn't at all my forte. Some of the photos are really amazing! I could easily find too many to choose from to take and put on my blog! As for applications of Flickr and mashups in my middle school library, I can see using Flickr to find photos to make book trailers. I think it would be fun for anyone to browse all of these images and find some that appeal to them. They are so creative! I think many of these images would expand a person's vision of the world. Many of the photos aren't what a person might first think of when they think of art. Many are of everyday people or things can be seen anywhere in the world. It would be easy to look at many of these objects and quickly move on, thinking that the object is just 'ordinary'. But the photos show that ordinary can be extraordinary and that it is worth stopping to study something, rather than just skimming over something and moving on to the next. It reminds me of a new book I saw within the past few months, The Black Book of Colors. It is a book in braile and challenges the reader to think about how to describe a color to someone without sight. Looking at all of these photos challenged me to think about what actually constitutes art and what makes something ordinary or extraordinary.
Visiting Flickr required some creative searching because it is blocked in my school district. I found some pictures by doing a Google search with Flickr as a search term. I guess I got in the back door. I saw some beautiful pictures that people posted! Here are some of the pictures I found that I thought I might be able to use on a blog or wiki in relation to my library. I was thinking I could put a caption with the photos that would be about finding information or reading.
Ok, I admit that I had already made my avitar before starting the 23 Things journey. That was a cool new thing that someone had taught me how to do. I'm doing these 23 things because I need to learn about everything after blogging and avitars. I need to learn how to do some of the fun stuff so that I can make my blog better and learn new things that I can hopefully put into practice with assignments and assessments with teachers and students.
I liked the slide show about the 7 1/2 Things. I'd seen some of it before, but the refresher was necessary. I think that Habit 5, "Create your own toolbox" is the habit I am best at right now. As a librarian, I have to know how to find the answer which requires having the right tools for each situation. It also makes me think of the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" where contestants get lifelines. Don't you think that a toolbox has some of those lifelines in it?I think that Habit 6, "Use technology to your advantage" is the most difficult habit for me. I see people with their Kindles and have no interest in them because I like holding the books so much! I haven't decided about the iPhone yet. Do I really want that much contact with the world? Do I want to feel tied to a gadget? I know what I know how to do with technology and I learn something new when I need to use something new. I don't really enjoy just playing around with technology things so much. I'm no where near being a 'techno geek' and I am fine with that. The technologies that I use routinely in life I have figured out how to use to my advantage, but I am not a person that is constantly on the look out for the latest technology. I distinctly remember hearing about email long ago and thinking 'Why would I want to use that when I like getting letters in the mail so much?". I was wrong. Now I do rush home to see if I have good personal email at the end of the day!
