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?

Week 7: Thing 17

I would like to suggest that you do not do this part of week 7's assignment; Thing #17. Add an entry to the Learning 2.0 SandBox wiki.
Kathy Dubrovsky


Thank you Kathy, for not making us do this assignment - it was time-consuming, tricky and a little frustrating.

Week 7: Thing 16 Wikis

This was very fun indeed. The deeper into this class I get, the more comfortable I get browsing around the new territory of World 2.0. It's liberating to randomly browse around and see what everyone is creating these days. I particularly liked looking at the wiki of school blogs - it's neat to see how other people are using these applications. One thing I could try to do, even with my 3rd grade students, is create a wiki that's a book review wiki. Students are required to create book reports on some of the 25 books they're required to read, so it might be fun to have these reviews put online. It would prove to be a nice incentive for them to produce work of higher quality since it will be viewed publicly.

I've been to the mountaintop of wikis, Joyce Valenza's, (yikes! is she human?) and I know I've got a long way to go with my third graders, but I'm feeling more willing to take new tasks on because I'm now more aware of all the self-help resources out there that I can turn to. I'm also using my Bloglines reader more as I delete my initial not-so-useful choices and replace them with more useful resources. Weeks of working with these new tools has made a difference in the way I'm now working!

Week 6: Thing 15

I'm currently on a search committee for a new Director of Libraries & Technology, so these articles are very useful in helping to understand where our libraries are headed, and therefore where we librarians (library & technology teachers, I should say) are headed. These articles provide an exciting view of the road ahead, a nice alternative to the doom & gloom people who claim that libraries are becoming obsolete.

In Into a New World of Librarianship, Michael Stephens discusses our role as providers. In the past, librarians waited for people to come to them looking for the services. Today it's become our job to push information out to people, provide to them as much information as we know. He describes our patrons as people who are used to finding everything they want, so our role therefore becomes to provide everything to them. Not a small task, but he claims we should seize the opportunity, and find ways to make the quest for information as easy as possible. The "one-button commands", such as Flickr's Blog This and Google's Page Creator are examples of tools we should be aware of and pass on to our patrons to make the job of seeking and disseminating quicker and more efficient. No rest for the weary, I guess.

Chip Nilges in To More Powerful Ways to Cooperate, discusses something that always astounds me about libraries...they're free and they want to help you in any way they can. A simple notion but incredible in this day and age. He talks about "harnessing our collective intelligence", so that we all improve ourselves and our world. And OCLC is putting its words into action. They began by providing their members with ways to share notes, table of contents and reviews with each other. But the piece de resistance is they're working on creating an Open World Cat with no authentication required for using it. It will be available to anyone who wants to use it. What more powerful way is there to cooperate than to make the information easily sharable and totally accessible!

To a Temporary Place in Time takes libraries to infinity and beyond. Dr. Schulty talks in terms that again make me happy to be in this helping profession. Some of her ideas are that libraries are no longer books and buildings, but conversations and communities, nice images for our profession. They are now barrier-free and participatory, as we've moved from Libraries 1.0(commodities) and 2.0 (products) to Library 3.0, Service. She projects a Library 4.0 of experience, a "mind-spa" but intellectually I'm not there yet, but I hope that I get there!

To me, Library 2.0 is fun and exciting. It forces us to keep current and keep exploring in the most fun way, by sharing and collaborating with others. It encourages us to be open and available to share our knowledge with people who can be helped by it, and who in turn will probably have something to teach us. As isolating as sitting at a computer can be, the result is that we can then know how to reach out to others in a more effective and less complicated way. The tools we're learning about and beginning to use are great resources to help us navigate through the overabundance of data and information we have to make sense of. All in all, the new 2.0 library should be the concept, the hub that connects us all to our world.

Week 6: Thing 14 Technorati

I explored Technorati by searching through blog posts, which is the way I'd use Technorati when I'm looking for something specific. Tag searching is almost as specific and is good for getting additional ideas on other search terms, oops tag names, to use when looking for info on a particular topic. Using the blog directory is the most broad and forces you to use the directory items that are predetermined. The directory didn't provide as much to choose from as the other two search types did.
As for finding out any interesting facts, one I found out that people can make money from their blogs, but you have to be a pretty dedicated blogger, and two that the most popular blog topics, after technology, seem to be the same gossipy/reality TV type topics that appear on the other mediums....tv, newspapers, radio. It seems like in general, no matter what the forum, people are going to choose what's popular.
I like the concept of tagging. It makes information easier to find and it's a nice way to be lead into other related topics. (Of course it's a nice way to lead into other unrelated topics as well) Thinking about how to tag your blog forces you to think more about your topic & related issues, which is a skill we try to teach our students. They need to get better at coming up with general terms that can help them find information when searching print & electronic databases and encyclopedias, and tagging is a great tool to help them.

Week 6: Thing 13

I've just played around with Del.icio.us after hearing about it for so long and thinking that I was doing just fine emailing myself url's whenever I wanted to save one. Lo and behold, after the first Save, I could feel myself thinking that maybe people were right, maybe this is a good thing. It does solve the dilemma of trying the access the same data from multiple places very nicely, especially with the tags you can apply to each site. Our school is a K-3 school, and I'm not sure that it would be good for our students, but it would be a great tool for our teachers. We're constantly in search of more websites and the searching usually takes place at home where there's free time. I think I'll introduce this at one of our training sessions this spring.

Week 5: Thing 12

It's hard to pull yourself away from Rollyo. I signed up for an account and headed into the search roll for politics and.... once again went off into another world for quite some time. The problem with this course is that it exposes you to so much that it's hard to pull yourself back on task. I like this site for all that it offers, but I need more time to make more effective use of it. I'd like to think about using it for resources for our curriculum topics, which I tried to a limited degree. I found one resource that I'll start using with one of our grades tomorrow, it was one that we hadn't used before, so for that Rollyo I thank you.

Week 5: Just for Fun

Week 5: Thing 11

I feel like I'm tottering toward the future because when I explored the Web 2.0 winners at least some of them now sound familiar. I chose Google docs to try and I think it's a great idea. Its an application that lets you share any document online with people you select to share with. I think this would really come in handy for working on projects, grants or professional development with other people. Is this going to be the way of the future - everything stored on the web instead of on our desktops? It seems like these new web applications are trying hard to help keep us connected as we work in isolation at our own computers.

I also joined Ning and discovered that the librarian group I'd joined had been started by Joyce Valenza, the fabulous Joyce Valenza. When does that woman sleep? I did join an elementary librarian group to see what issues were being discussed there and it was only slightly interesting. I think as with any social network, you have to find people that you find interesting and whose opinion you respect before you can get more involved. The biggest challenge seems to be wading through all of the extraneous postings to find something that is of interest to you, and there is so, so much to wade through before you get what you want. Persistence is important on the web, so that once you find something good, you can then use your newsreader accounts and RSS feeds to deliver them to you. That's when you can get down to the nuggets of valuable information and sharing that could be meaningful to you.

I'm also wondering what the recommended procedure is regarding userids and passwords with all of these new sites that I'm signing up for. I think you're not supposed to use the same id/pwd for everything, but it does get very complicated trying to remember which combination of items you used for each new application. Maybe this topic will be the point of some further research.

Week 5: Thing 10

The cartoon generator is a blast! I need to continue to look through the hundreds of cartoons to see which ones would be appropriate for younger children. In the meantime I found this Peanuts cartoon which was so easy to modify and fun to play around with. I also found the jigsaw puzzle generator and the poster/magazine cover generator fun options to play around with. Will I be able to remember all of these great tools at the right time? Hopefully, these are too good to pass up.

Okay, I'm changing my mind now, it's not such a blast. I'm unable to upload my cute little Charlie Brown cartoon. It says the server may be too busy, but I've been trying for quite some time. Am I doing something wrong? I've tried saving the cartoon in a word document and adding that, but it doesn't accept it for some reason. I'm feeling like I'm so close but so far. I'll put this aside for now and try again tomorrow.

Plan B...made this movie poster which is cute but not what I was hoping for. I'll continue to try to create the cartoon which I liked better.

Week 4: Thing 9

I can see how my blog feeds are going to grow enormously. I liked using Technorati to find other blogs, it seems the most straightforward to me. I enjoyed following some of the political blogs, with everything from rightwing smear campaigns to funny Obama t-shirts for sale. Now that I've experimented with finding blogs, these will be another terrific resource for current events and issues I'd like to learn more about. I found the blog EdTech Journeys to be especially interesting as it focuses on the importance of the student in our educational journey...how often we focus on the latest educational strategy in our professional development and forget about the feelings of our students. A favorite quote: "Education is what's left when you've forgotten the facts."

Week 4: Thing 8

I've taken advantage of having my own reader account to follow the entries of a favorite author's blog that I periodically check. I will be adding more author's blogs to this account. Also, I look for book reviews, like Roger Sutton's Horn Book comments since I find him knowledgeable and irreverent. I've also taken the advice of others and have added some of my classmates blogs to my reader account. It is nice to have one central place to check on blog updates. I'm sure to be adding to this as I read more people's blogs. Again the amount of entries to be read is astounding to me. I have to make sure I build more and more computer browsing time into my schedule.