Week 9: Thing 23

This class has been terrific. Now that the time constraints are over, I'm going to review those 23 enlightening things so that I can begin to incorporate them into my work and share the wealth with colleagues and friends.

Some of my favorite discoveries were blogging, especially with an avatar, RSS feeds, LibraryThing, YouTube & podcasting. As a direct result of this class I'm now very comfortable with blogging and will probably incorporate one in my library work. I know book reviews are a popular way to use them so maybe I'll start there. I LOVED learning about LibraryThing, which I've passed on to everyone I know. Podcasting was fun and so was YouTube, especially when we learned how to embed one in our blog. Great stuff!

This program has absoluted affected and assisted and inspired me to be more innovative in my lifelong learning goals. This class was a great example of how to make this learning fun and relatively stress-free. As a result, I now feel comfortable enough to try new things that I may hear about, and I'm pretty proud of that.

One unexpected outcome from this program were that it's the first time, in an online class, that I was able to look at other people's work, and as a result that helped me sometimes to get my bearings and continue on. As a result, some of the frustration of having to do this work in isolation was removed and the work became more fun because I could relax a little. This is something I have to remember with my students as I create tasks for them. Even though I shared with others, I learned a tremendous amount and I'm wondering if I would have learned that much without my peers.
The only thing I could suggest doing differently is giving some sort of extra time for working around the middle of the class. Others I know started to get overwhelmed and started to withdraw. Unfortunately, they may never get to the good stuff that keeps coming. Other than that, I loved the format, the tone was almost playful which made it fun, I liked knowing I was learning 23 things (and then some!) and as I mentioned before I could see what other people were doing.

Yes, I’d love to participate in another discovery program like this one. But please don’t take this one away, it’s a great resource.

This class was innovative, enlightening and will have a significant impact on the way I will plan on teaching from now on.

Thank you.

Week 9: Thing 22

I've tinkered with ebooks before, and I'm afraid I'm still an ebook Luddite. First of all, I understand that there are a million books online thanks to the Gutenberg Project, but I still had a hard time finding books from their selection that I'd choose to read. It did give me an appreciation of how many books there are in existence and what a small percentage of them are actually appealing to me. I did choose to download The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, which my friend's book club is reading, but the format was awful. I suppose I could edit the type size & font, which is a nice feature, but again I don't think I like reading that much text on my computer.

I do enjoy audio books, and I listen to books all the time while commuting to work. Perhaps downloading an audio book to my laptop would let me listen as I'm working around the house. It seems like more work to download one and burn it to a CD when I can just get it from the library, however. There's my Luddite side coming out again.

I've read about all of the interest in the Kindle, and I'm amazed that so many people are willing to pay $369 for one. I don't think I'm there yet, but now I'd like to try one out. I've recently read about some sort of plastic-y sheets that have the feel of paper which can be loaded with ebooks, wirelessly. So periodically you can put your fake book next to your computer and it will have a newly uploaded book on it for you to pick up and read. That sounds intriguing. I did try Daily Lit which seems like a lot of fun, but I'll have to see how readable that amount of a book will be for me. So for now, I know more of these resources are becoming available, and I'll try one out when it looks good. I appreciate the exposure to these new technologies, once again.

Week 9: Thing 21, addendum

Click below to watch a 2 minute clip of Cookie Monster asking the librarian to take out a book....and a cookie!

Week 9: Thing 21

I'd never downloaded a podcast before so this was a new adventure. I found a great set of podcasts from an NPR series called In Character. It's a series of talks about fictional characters from Harriet the Spy and Cookie Monster to Captain Ahab and Elmer Gantry. I downloaded the podcast via iTunes and then added the feed to my Bloglines reader (listen to this lingo just flowing out of me). At first I just sat here listening to the podcasts and thought that it would take up a lot of time, but lo and behold I realized that if I did other things on my laptop I could still listen. Eureka! Now, I really get it. I can be listening to podcasts at the end of my day when I'm getting ready to leave, I can listen to them at home and I can upload them to an iPod, when I get one. Its the audio equivalent of Tivo. The amount of content, again, amazes me. Until this class, I kept hearing about podcasts, but never felt the urge to use them, so I'm glad I finally hopped on board. Now that I'm aware of the process, I'll be more attuned to the podcast information both on the radio and in print so I can continue to take advantage of that format.

And now, back to Harriet the Spy.....

Week 9: Thing 20

This is one too I have used before and I do think it is another great tool. However, I've never looked for library clips on it before and I was happy to learn that Reading Rainbow and Sesame Street are on there. This gives me another source for curriculum enrichment.

I found a cute video clip called No Cookies in the Library that I'd like to use as part of an introduction to the library for our PreK and Kindergarten classes in September. The video mentions several different types of books and mentions (many times) that there are no cookies in the library....we try to teach younger students to keep food away from library books, so that's a ice tie in. There were a couple of other clips I thought would be useful from Reading Rainbow, At the Library and Tall Tales at the Library. I am trying to load any of these videos onto my blog, but YouTube won't let me sign in for some reason. I've emailed them for help, but they haven't responded yet. I'll ask around to see if someone else can see why it's denying me entry. The message is very general and unhelpful.

I noticed another blogger in our group, Sheila Harvey, had the video clip Librarian Lays Down the Law on her site. That's a great one that I'd like to show our faculty.

Week 8: Thing 19

WOW, and to think I've never heard of LibraryThing before. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this site! What a terrific resource for finding out what people think about a book and how popular it is. I wish I'd checked this site before choosing the current book I'm reading. I'm immediately going to email my bookclub friends to get them all enrolled, since this will make our next book choice easier. I'll also start exploring it's use for evaluating children's books. This site is great find!

Week 8:Thing 18 Online Productivity Tools

This is a chance for me to begin using an online productivity tool. I can immediately see this will be a great alternative to me emailing my lesson plans and documents back and forth to myself when I forget to bring my laptop or my flashdrive with me. It even has spellcheck!

It will be a nice way for our library team to share our new standards documents that we're working on and that we keep emailing to each other. I wonder if this means that eventually we won't have to purchase expensive Microsoft Office licenses for our schools...wouldn't that be a money-saver?  I wonder if we would still  need to have some productivity software that's not web based for those brief times when our internet is down.  I'll ask our tech team about this issue. Does the popularity of these online tools mean that Microsoft is going to become less profitable?