About Me

I started working in public libraries a longer and longer time ago (how did that happen?) as a Circulation Clerk and then went on to be a storyteller and puppeteer. My Masters took me to research jobs for corporate libraries but now I'm back working with kids again. It's so much more fun and the opportunities to learn and be creative are boundless!

Monday, August 10, 2009

Thing #23!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I only slept 3 hours last night and save taking my daughter to the orthodontist today and fixing lunch & dinner, I've been attached to this computer and I've FINISHED. Accomplishing this program has given me just the burst of energy I need for returning to work this week.

Per your questions:
1. My favorite exercises were those involving mashups, of course! They are the most fun. However, I am so excited about social bookmarking and searchrolls and have been adding bookmarks to my Diigo (formerly Furl) bookmark all day!
2. My participation in this program has catapulted forward my professional development and personal learning. My knowledge of technology applications is now current and I have learned so much about how to continue learning more on my own as I develop my own "circle of the wise". Most importantly, I have the energy and the confidence to continue forward on my own, though with so many experts a click away.
3. Several surprises came to me through this program: I now can understand how people get addicted to their laptops and their social networking sites. Before this program I pooh-poohed developing professional and academic relationships online. I also actually appreciate RSS feeds now. As a minimalist in many areas of my life, I often feel that people just jump on band wagons just to jump on. Participation in this program has allowed me to wrap my brain around the mind-boggling wealth of tools available and appreciate that some I can use and some don't interest me all that much (I really don't see myself as a life-time blogger, for example, though I will read and participate on blogs.)
4. I absolutely LOVED your format and the variety of readings and multimedia you included to instruct. If there were anything that I might ask you to add it would be an inclusion of some kind of discussion about the security of using a lot of the free tools and dangers from viruses or spyware. I would also ask if we might have more discovery units using music files. And, possibly, a few notes about copyright issues?
5. Yes! Yes! Yes! I want to participate in any program you do next! Pick me, pick me!
6. Being verbose, I cannot just use one word but a sentence will do to describe and promote the 23 Things learning activities: "The Library2Play program is THE MODEL for the way to provide efficient, comprehensive and effective professional development in the 21st century, with immediate results."

Thing #22

It is interesting to note in the article that Nings are the social networking sites of choice for educators, over others like MySpace and Facebook. The idea that students in higher education might want to use these as more of their professional/academic type of relationships is a good one. We might as well go ahead and let our younger ones see the difference and some of the implications that a public presence on MySpace or Facebook could have. Meanwhile, however, the greatest use of a Ning for my purposes would be for our professional groups. Our private school librarians and our parochial school librarians at the local level could communicate this way and share ideas.

Thing #22

I would liked to have made a podcast with audio but I don't yet have a microphone. That will be my next endeavor! Well,I made my very first photostory ever, in any case. There really is an art to it and I definitely need a lot more experience. As you can see, I'm racing the clock to finish out this program so I dare not spend any more time on the photostory. As other Web 2.0 tools, I've been to workshops or conference sessions on this but, by the time I returned home armed with my notes, I never got around to doing anything with them. This is another case where this type of hands-on, self-paced training is invaluable.

A Snowy New Year

Thing #20

Oh my goodness! I had such a time with embedding a video. I couldn't find any embedding information for some of the videos I had selected. Is this right? I did practice with Zamzar file conversions, however, for help with YouTube videos that are blocked. I think that I do now have and understanding of embedding video and that I will be able to do this to enhance presentations and lessons. Whew! I am ALMOST done with this course!

Thing #19

Lulu.com has quite a promising proposition with their Aspiring Authors program for K-8 schools. I've had several book publishing marketers send me information about publishing our students' books, but this one actually looks good. This last school year we had quite a spate of aspiring authors bringing us their stapled manuscripts to put in the collection. They love having their works, cataloged and displayed. Most of all, it seems that a real (Kapco) cover and a barcode are the cat's pajamas. I've actually made AR tests for a few for which it is possible! I think using Lulu could be quite fun AND an unusual fund-raiser for our yearly auction.

Thing #18

Open Office actually feels "cleaner" and less complicated than Microsoft Word. I haven't use a Mac in a very long time, but the Open Office products give me that there is less behind the scenes, less layers of code or something, the same feel that I used to get from using Mac office tools. I really like the PDF feature! With Microsoft products I have to "print" my documents to our "Cute Printer" in order to make PDF's. Now I can make PDF's at home, where I don't have a Cute Printer installed. Open Office also seems an extremely economical way for people to get word processing tools, especially in these economic times and for our less-advantaged schools. This discovery session has been another eye-opener for me.

Thing #17

I don't know if I'm more excited about Del.icio.us and Diigo or Rollyo! There are fabulous applications for Rollyo, the first being for those yearly research projects. Working in a parochial school, Catholic saints are a perennial research topic. We have a great collection of saints books on the shelves but so many students, particularly in middle school, prefer to get online. I've provided a link to my saints sources on this blog. A note to the ambitious and creative: there are really no websites about Catholic saints particularly geared for children! We need some good ones! With all of this 2.0 learning under my belt, I may just create a website, or at least a wiki for our students and teachers.

Thing #16

I am still a little afraid of setting up a wiki myself but the only way to really "get" these 2.0 tools is to hold your nose and jump in. Despite my fears, I see lots of applications for wikis in our school library and at our school. One of the first applications I might attempt will be a type of library procedures wiki. There are only two librarians but for posterity it would be useful to have all of our opening and closing procedures and schedules in a public place, not just in my filing cabinet in a notes file. Notes about updating databases, end-of-year tasks, scheduling could be available on our wiki. Using a wiki to plan for author visits, especially when we are sharing an author with other schools, would be very useful. Just recently we hosted author/illustrator Will Hillenbrand and the emails that went back and forth among the six schools, Will's agent and Will himself were copious! We could really have made it all VERY easy for everyone involved by including his schedule, the information about the ordered books, etc. on a wiki. For our school parents' club, I can see a wiki being extremely useful for our auction-planning committee and even our binders of by-laws and volunteer notebooks. I love the idea of using wikis for more personal information about books to read. We librarians could post recommendations of books to read and the students could comment and make their own recommendations. As you can tell, I'm excited to get started. As always, however, my sails get a little deflated when I talk with our Technology Director about such ideas. We are blocked from most 2.0 tools at school, unless there are specifically "safe" and "for schools" versions.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Thing #15

The article about the small Michigan school library was heartening because it often appears to me that the outside world changes so very quickly and schools are inevitably several steps behind. We study and evaluate changes or additions to our school technology and the process seems to take so long that the world is moving on about the time that we implement our new tools. The technologies employed in the library follow those of the school as a whole. Our own school is blessed with fairly good funds and good technology. What is the possibility of a 2.0 library for schools that don't even have enough working computers for technology classes? I see that a roadblock to widespread successful 2.0 school libraries is access to reliable and current technology. Another roadblock would be access to 2.0 tools that are "secure" for use by young students. We'll have to have more tools that have been "teacherized" and can be used in the educational setting where most schools block access to social networking kinds of tools.

Thing #14

I'm liking Technorati a lot more as now we've had to go to it several times. I'd have to watch the video tutorial on it again but I could swear that the search boxes weren't exactly the same in real life as in the training video. Hmmm.
As a librarian accustomed to using controlled search vocabularies, it is something of a switch to realize, "You mean, just ANYONE can be a catloger or and indexer?!" But I can see how personalizing tags is just what makes these tools social and collaborative. What were those old tomes we used to search to check who had footnoted whom? The name escapes me but these open resources for storing and sharing research and adding tags must be making research a great deal more alive and certainly less lonely than it was when I was in school, finding, copying, reading articles on my own, totally alone. These tools must be having such an enormous impact on research in all kinds of fields. I almost wish I were in graduate school again.

Thing #13

I have been reading about this thing called "Delicious" for the last couple of years with absolutely no idea that it was the tool I've been looking for! I've even asked aloud around school for suggestions of how best to keep track of all of the websites and materials I've found on the web. The closest I came to a tool was Trackstar, but this is so much better. I'm pretty sure that we are actually blocked from Del.icio.us at school but perhaps the one that was called Furl, but now seems to be called Diigo, is something that we can use. We've so needed this way to organize the resources that we all find! The Diigo site allows one to set up private groups and for a school that is important. This is one of the absolutely best tools that I can use immediately. A link from our school library website would be just fabulous to direct everyone to resources that are perfect for a particular subject. I'm excited!

Thing #12

I've taken to heart the advice both to continue the conversation with the blogger by commenting meaningfully and to respond to the comments of readers of one's own blog. The other piece of advice, commenting just to say "thank you" to the writer, is also an eye-opener. Being new to the whole world of blogging, I just wouldn't have thought of any of this. Now we have instructions for teaching our students the best practices of blogging! My mind is completely "bloggled" (pun intended.) I ended up commenting on the CoolCatTeacher blog. I just love that blogger. She is now one of my heroines. While searching for others blogs on which to comment, I got overwhelmed and so I left off for now. I do hereby commit to commenting on blogs from now on.

Thing #11

Library Thing is very easy to use, from setting up an account to "cataloging" books. Rather than use it as a catalog of what I own and have physically in my house, I prefer to use it to keep track of books I've read. I know a gal who has a shelf in her house for "books to be read" that she has bought but hasn't had time for. One could also tag titles on Library Thing as "to be read" when one hears about a good book (I'm always writing on scraps of paper in the car when I'm listening to NPR.)
The groups our there are interesting, to say the least. The most interesting thing to me is to see how vastly different opinions can be on a specific title. I was looking at a group that reads juvenile fiction. One person would recommend a book for 4th to 6th graders and someone else would say it was too scary and appropriate for 6th and up! The list of everyone's childhood favorites was also interesting and contained some surprises to me, although some of my favorites were also listed. Library Thing will be a useful tool for selection, I think, to add to other selection tools.

Thing #10

Now I'm under the gun and hope that I can get through the rest of the material by tomorrow noon! We've been on vacation with family and I haven't wanted to be nonsocial, though for the first time I did tap away on a laptop in the midst of folks on vacation. I can see why so many people seem to get hooked until they ALWAYS have a laptop with them! I've taken far too much time with both the RSS feeds and the image generators and now I'm behind.

Big Huge Labs is till my favorite site as well as Image Chef. They are easy to use. As noted by some other bloggers, I had issues with some of the other ones. The Comic Strip and the Custom signs never displayed my comics or signs. Kid-friendly and and Dumpr never even loaded. I do like Wordle and Glogger, though Glogger seemed slow and my creations were artistically lacking!

I'd like for our students to make their own reading motivation posters and posters using Glogger for books or stories they've read. It would be interesting to take the blurbs from book jackets and put them into Wordle, or create Wordles out of lists of adjectives describing novels or characters.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Thing #9

1. I preferred using Edublog and the Library blogs on Suprglu. My main focus at this time and with the new school year beginning is to connect with myriad sources of information and inspiration for my library programs. I'm mostly interested in librarians', teachers' and technology educators' blogs and those to do with literature.
2. Sindic8 took a long time to load when it finally came up and then sometimes would not load again at all. This was not useful for my purposes, though it may be a fine resource for some.
3. I really loved linking in to the CoolCatTeacher blog and eventually re-finding The Book Whisperer, about whom and whose book I had only just read. Those two gals are definitely going to be part of my "circle of the wise".

Monday, August 3, 2009

Thing #8

1. I think that I may end up liking RSS feeds after all. I'm not usually one to complain about someone "moving my cheese" or one to be resistant to change, but it will be an adjustment to actually use these feeds myself. Setting up an RSS feed, though, is exactly what we used to have to do manually in the corporate information centers in which I used to work, culling and clipping and copying articles to create information alerts for consultants working in various industries.
2. For professional development purposes, my RSS feeds will help me keep informed and keep my creativity sparking with regular links to articles by and about other librarians and what they're doing. I'll be able to keep up my link with world and international news through my quick links and maintain my Spanish language fluency with a few links to Spanish-language news sites and blogs.
3. Our social studies classes my be able to be the first to use RSS feeds. Our students already watch CNN Student News and our social studies teachers are excellent at raising our students' awareness of current events. By looking for particular topics on various sites, students could compare coverage and media bias, while also tracking developments of certain current events (elections, negotiations, discoveries, etc.) Our principal could create a public RSS feed for parents on particular topics related to education. We librarians could develop public feeds for our students and parents to sites about books and reading.