Really?! There's an End?

Final thoughts.

What I liked - it was good to view and play around with all the different "Things". Some that I had never really noticed (like RSS feeds), some I had no interest in (Twitter), and some that I want to play around with more (podcasts and wiki). I feel a lot smarter and I can really impress my un-techy friends. It took me many weeks to catch on to the concept that it was important to fiddle with programs until they worked -- or some kind soul took pity on me. If you aren't out frequently playing with new stuff, you quickly get left behind in the dust.

What might have been helpful - it would have been nice to work on a "Thing" for a week or two, then come back to class and share what we learned and fix problems we could not overcome. Or another possibility would have been to have enough time to share thoughts through the blogs There were too many "Things" to do to spend more than a little time looking at blogs. Some of the "Things" were repetitive so they could have been eliminated in order to create the cross-blogging time.I did sometimes take a look at the digital natives among us when I really ran into problems. It would have been nice to see other ways that people could think of to use these "Things" in a library. I sometimes got caught in circular thinking and it took someone else to point out how it could be used.

What I didn't like - I hate being signed up for all these different accounts. Adding Firefox as a browser for some of the programs seems to have slowed my computer. I am now getting unsolicited email. My name and pictures are out in cyberspace never to be retrieved. And I have had to carry a notebook with all my various user names, passwords, and accounts.

All-in-all it was a good experience -- just a little too much.

P.S. I wish I had asked you before creating my wiki pages, if I could have done one as a classroom teacher, with some added library materials. Since I teach 7th grade reading and language arts much of it overlaps with the library media core. If I had organized it differently, I could have made my school administrators happy by having a wiki ready before the end of the year. As it is, they will have to wait until next fall.

Wonderful Wordle

I saw Wordle a few years ago and had some ideas for it, then forgot about it. I was happy to be re-introduced to it. I think it has so many possibilities. The one I create was mostly a copy of a book review. I added some extra copies of words I wanted to emphasize, and ta-da here's a really cool looking graphic. It's a great slick up feature for student presentations and posters.

Pod Party

I had heard of podcasts, but had never seen or heard one in action. I listened to an author interview with Suzanne Collins the author of Hunger Games.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112119277

It was very interesting. Collins talked about several inspirations for her story including Greek myths, reality TV, and the movie Spartacus. This would be great information for our students as they work on writing. About three years ago I had five 7th graders writing their own novels. They would have loved a broadcast like this. I can see using this in a library first and most obviously as a book talk. But I think an even better use would be to use it to create projects that classes could share with other classes both with in the school and among other schools. I could see using it in history classes to share different viewpoints of a historical event. Science classes could jigsaw to present different concepts. I think it would be great for teachers within a subject in the same district,using it to teach parts of lessons. In my school, one of our math teachers uses a classroom management system that really needs to be viewed to understand it enough for other teachers to implement. This is a technology I intend to investigate further.

Twitter - What a twit

Most of the tutorials in 2.0 have been informative as an overview of the particular Thing. My first thought was that I don't really want to know when I call and ask someone "What are you doing?" I really mean, "Are you too busy to talk?" As I first looked at the site, one of the suggested tweets to follow was John Edwards -- seriously???! When I searched for library, I found there are some interesting things going on in libraries. Besides the usual reading, studying, sleeping , there seems to be drug deals, bad breath, hiding out, and a suggestion for a blacklight Rave. Apparently librarians are "Hot, interesting, not killers, no longer books only, and not very helpful" (perhaps the last is due to too many drug deals). I thought the USU Revolutionary War reenactment was a fantastic, creative way to use Twitter. I especially liked the links to the blogs to flesh out the tweets. The article about using Twitter in libraries included daily/weekly tweets to keep followers informed about upcoming events and new materials. It suggested tweets with links to wiki spaces and websites. I know our new district (Canyons) is pushing for a higher level of technology use -- Twitter included. I know the superintendent frequently tweets -- I should probably look at following him. I would be interested in using Twitter to stay linked to the people I have met in this class -- they are such a great resource, I would hate to give up this contact.

RSS - grrrrr

Surprise, surprise . . . once again I navigate through the RSS lesson right up to the add this blog and then . . . brick wall. Thanks Melissa for the hint to switch to Firefox. Someday I'm sure I will be able to do the final step without a multitude of naughty words spewing from my mouth -- today is not that day. I checked out three areas in the 100 best sites for school librarians. The first area was technology, a brave but unlikely choice for me. The one I really liked was Bright ideas for educators. there was a lot of good information about digital technology and tutorials. there were also several links to webquests and creating webquests. Surprisingly, this is one blog I may follow because it was technology that I could immediately use and much of it presented at a level I could comprehend. Under reading my favorite was called 3000 books. A young woman from Australia figured that if the average Australian woman lived to the age of 83, then she had 60 more years of reading ahead of her. If she reads 50 books a year, then she will have read 3000 books when she dies. She blogged about the books she has been reading. I wasn't familiar with many on the first few pages, but the idea of choosing carefully intrigued me. Especially if I use her math, I only will be able to read 1000 more books -- scary thought. However, My goal is to read 50 adolescent books a year in addition to the adult books I read, so maybe I have more than 50 reads left in me. It does make me reconsider rereading old favorites though. In the librarian section, I did not find any that appealed to me, but librarian.net had a link to an ask.reddit site that looked like it had possibilities. I'm still not convinced of the usefulness of blogs from people I don't personally know. I am most interested in book reviews and I tend to stick with people who have opinions that I can relate to -- even if my opinion is always the polar opposite. I guess if I spent more time comparing my opinion to common books that I have read with the blogger, I might begin to feel more trust in the reviews. Usefulness in a school library??? I think most blogs would be blocked, so an RSS would mostly be for my personal use.

My librarian passed this on to me. I showed it to my honors class and they thought it was cool -- cheesy, but cool.

Web 2.0

I should have read this before I commented on some of the other 2.0 technologies. I sometimes have a hard time seeing how these various things apply to a school library. This article gave some great ideas. The author emphasized how much we need to become self-promoters so that the general public and those in charge of funding, will understand the importance and relevance of the job we due. we also have the responsibility of staying current with the various programs so that we can be the primary "school's information provider". Some of the things he wrote about included using Library Thing as a way to show and tell the books students are reading. Book blogging is a way to encourage students to read and share their thoughts -- one of the best side effects is the social interaction that occurs when students share books. I was not able to see the usefulness of Delicious, but since students are so into social networking -- and they trust it -- they would be likely to get into sharing bookmarks.  Again the most important thing for librarians to so to remain necessary in the minds of the public is to stay visible and relevant. Hopefully, this is just one of the swings of the education pendulum. 

Delightfully Del.icio.us

I looked at this site very skeptically to begin with. Did I really want to get onto another site with random people and their bookmarks? How was this much different than using another search engine? And how could this possibly help me in a library? Turns out, I found some good information on a number of novels that I am prepping to use in my reading classes next year. So my first experience was positive. Perhaps this could be used to collaborate with people across the country. I can see some narrower uses among people within a class doing research or preparing an extensive project.I like the idea of the tags organizing my bookmarks -- it is difficult to keep it all organized sometimes. I also tend to forget what my organizing system is, so this will be helpful. I am having a hard time seeing much use for it for the average middle school student. Overall, I will definitely use it for my personal searches.I'm not sure I see many applications for my students.

Technorati

This site is primarily a directory for popular blogs, posts, and tweets. It sorts the top 100 blogs, etc. by topic. You can also search for photos. Controversial issues and topics are extensively covered. Popular media and celebrities are also covered thoroughly. Technology (as you might expect) has an enormous presence in blogs (go figure). I tried a few searches through blogs and posts. In general, there were more blogs than posts, blogs seem to (again generally) be a little calmer -- posts are more hysterical. I am not a big fan of blogs, however, after attending a literary conference in February I have some better ideas. One of the presenters, Kelly Gallagher, mentioned a way to have students do an in class discussion through a blog. I thought that would be a great way to have students 100% engaged and writing a lot.

Image Generator

It is so fun to play with these images.  Look at my baby reading to herself at 3 months.  I can see using this to generate signs for each teacher reading their favorite books. Then as students are influenced even more by their peers, it would be great to go through each of the organizations and clubs within the school.