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.