Thing #23

#23

1. What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
I enjoyed finding all these resources for things I never knew I always wanted to do, and some I even wanted to do, but didn’t know how, like making the video.

2. How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
I hope to maintain learning about new innovations on technology. Thing #19 that pretty much summarized all the new web 2.0 things seems like a good way to keep going. It will be updated all the time because it is an award program.

3. Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you? It really was fun (mostly) and that was highly unexpected.

4. What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?
nothing that I can think of. I liked the links. Maybe if you set the links to automatically open in a new window from the Thing page because I kept having to go back and find my page every time I forgot to right click. But that's me, not the Thing.

If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you choose to participate?
Yes, but unfortunately, time being what it is, I would have to ensure pd hours for it before promising myself to all this time.

How would you describe your learning experience in ONE WORD or in ONE SENTENCE, so we could use your words to promote 23 Things learning activities?
Innovative
Easy
Helpful
Pick one.

Now go and comment on some of the other Players' blogs - did that.

Thing #22

#22

Ning seems awesome. It seems exactly what I was looking for a network of librarians. I plan to join the network. I think this is good for helping me in the library just to collaborate with other librarians and get fresh takes on my ideas, as well as find other ideas.

http://txschoollibrarians.ning.com/

Thing #21

I really enjoyed the Photo Story maker. I made a video of my daughter Elizabeth that made my sister cry. I think I will really enjoy using this in the library. I can think of so many ideas - pics of kids reading books for the kids to see, something for pd of the teachers or inspiring photos of kids, etc.

My video uses Billy Ray Cyrus's Ready, Set, Don't Go. It fit, so I hope you like country. :)

Thing #20 - almost there

I love Teacher Tube.

What Teacher Tube can do: It can find great videos to HELP a teacher in the classroom by supplementing her already great lesson, add interest, and a little bit of enthusiasm. It uses technology the RIGHT way - or one of the many right ways.

What Teacher Tube cannot do: Teach for you. It does have lessons on there. Most of them are boring. If you are going for a quick lesson, use Brain Pop instead. It is part of your own lesson, not the entire thing.

While playing on Teacher Tube, I found a great little skit narrated by kids about reading.

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It's from TeacherTube

It's cute, and would be a great intro or closing to a library lesson about basic reading and imagination at the beginning of the year. The narration goes a little too fast though, so some ELL's might have difficulty following it.

Unfortunately, You Tube is blocked in my district. Their rational is "it slows down the servers."

I love the Harry Potter Puppet Pals videos. Snape is my favorite character in these, so here is a sample of one. It's from YouTube

Thing #19

So, this whole time that I have been working on 23 Things, I have been bookmarking finds and producing great searches and new ideas. Forget that list. This list is the same stuff, but better, and in one easy location! How can I use this in my library? Easy! It's organized for me. Whatever I need, it's right there. All I have to do is bookmark this site. Done!

One of the thoughts that have been going through my head is "How am I going to remember all these tools for when I need them?" This is how. Now the only down side to this assignment is having to do it so quickly; therefore having less process time. But I hope to play with it during the school year and really LEARN some of these, not just blow through them, like now.

Here's the website http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0/short

Thing #18

My method is a thing of the past. In college, before jump drives were huge, so they were way overpriced for a college kid living on Ramen Noodles, I didn't trust disks - they needed to be "reformatted" just as soon as you were done with your document. I didn't have a printer at home. Ink required money. I was a member of the Honor's Lab, so I could print for free. Plus, it was in the Humanities building, and I was a history major. The library was across campus. Easy cheesey. I developed a system for my papers. I would work on my paper at home. Email it to myself. Open it in the Honor's Lab. Work on it. Email the new one to myself. Open it at home. Work on it. Save the changes. Get confused because I had multiple docs with the same or very similar names. Email it back to myself. Print it the next day in the Honor's Lab for free. I teach my students the same method, with some improvements to prevent the confusion. They like it because they don't have printers either.

This would have saved all that emailing. Just put it in Google Docs and make changes where ever you go! This is so neat. The downside - and its a pretty big downside - is the size limit. For a word document, the size is 500kb. That's only 25 pages or so. Many of my documents are projects for school or work that is a compilation of information or a research project with links and stuff. Links and formatting add to the kb real fast, so my average size of a doc is well over the 500kb max. But... for my students, this would be beautiful. They could work on something BCIS, where the teachers encourage typing their essays for English to practice their typing skills, pull it up in my room for peer editing, then take it to the library to print, all without spending money on disks, jump drives, or anything except the 20 cents to print. Beautiful.

Thing #17

This is a fabulous tool. In my classroom, when I teach Google, I teach kids what to look for in a quality website. The problem is that I simultaneously have to teach kids what to look for in the summary space of the website before clicking on the website itself. This would be a great tool to teach the kids to search in a safe, reliable set of sites before teaching what's wrong with Google. I created a rollyo for my wellness websites that I have bookmarked on my home computer. Then I did a random search and it came up with an automatic result that was much more direct than my typical Google search. I could see this could be helpful just for my own benefit.

Here is my link, but it is a generic link, so I don't think my search roll will show up when you go to that link. http://www.rollyo.com/index.html

Thing #16

Wiki's - scary word - new technology scares me when I first start to use it. I know, I know. But, this one has easily become less scary. It's as easy as MySpace. It's like a blog that lots of people get to play with.

Hmmm. How can I use this in my library? Below is an example of how a teacher used a Wiki in her literature circles in a 5th grade classroom for Peter Lerangis's 39 Clues. My library is for a student body of pre-K-4th. As a person who has never taught these grades, I am unfamiliar with their capabilities on computers and around technology. I have a daughter starting 4th, but I don't think she is a good representation of the school, seeing how she has been playing on the computer literally her whole life, only about 10% of the student body at my new school has both a computer and internet access at home. I could see her using a wiki. Maybe if I start Top 10 page suggested in Thing #16 for the 2nd-4th graders. In 2nd grade, I could do it with them, in 3rd, they could do it together in the library and in 4th, I could allow them to get on it whenever they want. I think I like that idea. Or, they could Wiki abotu the Blue Bonnet books. I could have each book have a different link on the site, and students could post their opinions for each book! I like that idea a lot.

http://www.classroomofthefuture.org/2009inspire-video.asp

Thing #15

I heart 2.0. Most of what I did in my classroom for my entire teaching career has been considered to be 2.0 mentality of teaching. Now, as I transition into a library, I can't wait to apply technology and a 2.0 mentality to my new library as a way to introduce students to library and information skills.

A public school library is different than a university library or a public library. 2.0 means different things at each of these places. For a higher institution, a library is generally a place for research. My university library for my BA didn't contain fiction at all. That was all housed in the city's public library, for which your student ID was your library card. And the public library didn't contain any research material. So obviously, circulation at the university library was low, VERY low. Nobody wants to haul home reference books that weigh a million pounds. In an elementary library, the books are mainly fiction or even nonfiction for enjoyment. So, library 2.0 is easier to introduce on the basic understanding at the university or secondary education level, with librarian chatting, online sharing of resources, etc. At the elementary level, most of the online chatting would be between the librarian and teachers, and perhaps the older students, but for library 2.0's sake, the students could participate through webcams for morning announcements, and pre-selected sites for the students.

Question: Is searching for a book from home on the school's library site considered to be 2.0?

Idea to ponder:
I think this whole library 2.0 thing is actually library 3.0. Wasn't 2.0 when they let patrons begin searching for their own books?

Thing #14

I registered with Technorati and registered my blog. I tried to go in and post the widget to my blog so that Technoratis could bookmark it, but I don't know if it worked. I set it to paste automatically at the bottom of each blog, but none of my old blogs were altered. I will see if this one is changed. This one is kinda difficult. I honestly don't know if I think Technorati or any of these other tagging sites are worth the effort. It seems an awful lot like a search engine to me. We'll see. I like the idea of tagging your own blogs to make them easier to search for other people, but I don't know if I want to take the time to search for other people's blogs without using my favorite sites I already use for that.

Thing #10

I played with the smiley face image creator. I think this one is just silly, but could definitely be useful for the end of a powerpoint or making posters or soemthing. I used Wordle to create this below. I think I could use this at staff development or during teacher appreciation week to print out and put in the teeachers' boxes (in color, hopefully). I would like to put the school photo of the faculty under it, but I don't have that pic yet. I saved it as anonymlus, like it instructed. So now anyone can go search for it. I stole the words from inspirational quotes that "inspired me" and my word processor's thesaurus.

Here is my wordle. I made it using http://www.wordle.net

Thing #13

The basics of tags is pretty simple to understand. You basically search for tags when you use a search engine - sometimes. When you search a blog site, this is more common. Tags are what you use in the library to search for a book. Only we have precise tagging to make it challenging for students, unless we do our jobs. In Facebook, we tag photos with other people's names so they can see how you blindsided them with the camera. These websites, such as Delicious, Diggs, and Technorati, organizes bookmarks through codes to make our searching easier.

This is what I discovered while playing with this. My continual search through these tagging exercises was for library lesson plans. I came up with nada. I have discovered that in order to find lesson plan help on the web I will already need to know a few sites to look at. Google, and many of these others, won't be a big help. I use the internet as a tool constantly to find new ways to teach old lessons. So far in this search, the only website I have found to be useful for plans is Simon and Schuster, the publishing company. SOOOO, what I need to do, is use tagging in Delicious for all these websites I have found - others have been found for other types of resources besides lessons - to help me remember them.

Thing #12

Creating Comments - Many of the links reported several of the same items in different formats. I think that if this many blogs are out there similar in style, you would think that more people would comment "correctly" or at least more appropriately. With that said, I like what Cool Cat says in http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2006/08/how-to-comment-like-king-or-queen.html, her blog about commenting - #6 Teach commenting. I don't know how many comments I have to sift through to see helpful comments. When I read blogs, often times I want more information or questions that readers have asked. These would be two types of comments that are appropriate. But I have to sift through so many "Yeah" or "you suck" comments, that it is almost a fruitless effort sometimes. But it goes back to "you can't fault people for information they don't know." So teach what you want to see.

Drake's Takes has an interesting view - It's almost like he wants the comments to take on a life of their own and be their own style. I got the impression from him that you, the blogger, should only respond publicly to a few of th comments, and to comment on more than that should be done privately. Like only comment publicly when you are trying to clarify information that was ambiguous in your blog. Which makes sense. You want readers to feel they have freedom of speech through your blog so they will be more open with comments. If you comment on every offensive, or even positive, comment, it might prevent someone from wanting to comment later.
His blog was at http://drapestakes.blogspot.com/2008/05/edublogger-etiquette-responding-to.html.

Thing #11

I have played on Library Thing a few times already, just this summer. As I was searching for awards for authors and books, Library Thing always came up in the results. When I would click it though, there were never any awards in the awards section of the Library Thing. I think its great that Library Thing has so many millions of books in their database, but most of the information for each book and author is incomplete, and therefore not as useful as it could be. Now, as a member, I can add information to the database, but adding that would be a full time job in itself and I would never get finished. I don't know that I would use Library Thing on my own, as most of the information I would need to collect from it is available through other resources as well. The groups are interesting though. I do like how you can post a thread and get responses. I was reading a thread about questions that patrons ask. I also read a response of further readings for Twilight fans (http://www.librarything.com/topic/53692). That's cool, because I have that question in my classroom all the time! I would need more time, and a legitimate question (meaning an opportunity would have to present itself), before doing this. So I will save my opinion until it can be more informed.

Thing #9

The first thing I noticed after using Blogline's Search Tool is an overload of hits. A person has to be very creative in order to find helpful blogs. I typed in "library" and got too many generic responses. I considered what type of blog I would want. I want one with answers. I will be a new librarian. I am going to have the most difficulty coming up with great resources for teachers and great collaborative lesson ideas. I want those handed to me. At least some of them. So I typed in "Successful School Librarians." A few clicks later and I wound up on a page with a list of educator's blogs, and there were over 100 that started with the letter "A" and however many for every other letter and no information to help a person decide which one might suit them. my next search was for "resources for librarians" which gave much more accurate results. All of this is showing me that blogging can be a bit complicated than a regular search, for a multitude of reasons. If the reason for this is to help make a librarian's job easier, but the searching takes too long, then it's not a huge help, but it could be after the initial set up. I will keep playing!

Thing #8

I've had a Google Reader set up (and empty) for a couple of years. I really didn't understand it. But this summer, a librarian I met showed me her Google Reader and how she uses it to hear from other librarians, even though she herself doesn't blog. I went home and filled my Reader with all sorts of fun stuff. So now I have new recipes coming everyday, along side librarian blogs and blogs from my favorite novelists.

I really see this as both good and bad. On the positive side, it certainly does make it a lot easier to access those websites you access everyday anyway. It's faster, so you can spend more time away from the computer. The negative side is obvious: You find a ton more blogs to subscribe too because of the addiction-forming side to blogging and readers, so you spend much more time on your computer. It's information overload! But I like it. Another downside is how slow it makes Google. It changes a simple websearch to an msn search, which a lot of people don't use because of how long it takes to load. That's how my Google is now with iGoogle. Again, this doesn't mean I will stop using it.

As an educator, I have subscribed to blogs that do amazing things. One posts new lesson plans, both for English and for Librarians. I have one for grammar. And a ton more. I just hope that blogging is not blocked in my district. I don't know yet because all of this has happened over the summer!

Sarah

Thing #7

I heart Google. I have always only used it for searching. Last week, I began using my iGoogle account I created so long ago. That is awesome. Now I have quotes on there, news headlines, and hungry turtles that I get to feed. The only disadvantage is now it takes a long time to lead, like msn.com, which is why I don't use that application.

I think it's my Google Reader that is slowing it down, but then I like that, so is it really so bad? I love the idea that I can subscribe to different blogs to know when they have written something new, and I no longer have to remember to go and search for their blog. I have some of my friends' blogs already subscribed. And as I am working on my internship project, I am finding all these authors that have blogs. It's getting to where I am disappointed when an author doesn't have a blog. It is becoming expected now, instead of just random.

Then I tested the Google Calendar. This is exciting. I have a smart phone, so this feature may or may not be something I really get into. But I called my sister, who was just complaining about not having a digital calendar. I like the texting feature. It sends a reminder directly to my phone. I also like the fact that I can put the information in pretty much however I care to, and it will sort it out and organize it accordingly. I don't have to remember hyphens and commas. It does it the same way every time. Cool.

Some of the others I have been using for ages. Like Google Earth. That is awesome. You can see my house on it. One day in class, I was showing the students Google Earth on the Promethean Board, which is really neat because you can use the pen to play with it and move the map. So we had fun pulling up everyone's houses (who wanted to show them) and playing with the program. Some of the kids had used it before, of course, but it was much more interesting on the Board.

Thing #6

I read and played with mashups according to this Thing. I love the idea of using it, although I am still a little confused about the definition of it. Would a mashup be a combination of my blog being posted on Facebook, or posting a link to a CNN news article, along with comments about the article that, once a friend on Facebook comments on your link, the comment would also be on the CNN website? As far as I can tell, this would be something great for a librarian to have on their page for student assistance. One thought I had is a general lesson I use for creative writing and new words for the basic colors when describing the physical appearance of something. The website http://www.krazydad.com/colrpickr/index.php?group=stock would be a great link to help the students relate better to this creative writing assignment to get visual images to help them better link their color to the assignment.

Flickr, Thing #5

Honestly, I'm not to enthused by this thing. I think if it were new to me, I might find it more exciting. I have been using Flickr or something like it for years. Facebook has a picture sharer, and Kodak. If Flickr interfaced with Facebook, that would be groovy. Imagine if something in your status sent a search to Flickr to show pictures or groups you might like to the side bar where other new stuff pops up. That would be awesome. This brings to mind a question for me though. What makes Web 2.0, 2.0? Is it because of the interfacing, interconnected possibilities this brings between the user and the internet? Maybe because Flickr seems so old hat to me that I don't connect it with things like the Google Reader and blogspot like I should. I do like the search mechanism, all though it is just as persnickety to use as any search engine. My search I used was LOC, so you can imagine the problems I had with that! I wanted actual pics of the LOC. Who knew I was so picky? I like the fact that it sorts the pics for you based on copyright status.

7 1/2 things (#2)

I think my strongest of the 7 Things is "Begin with a Goal in Mind." I live my life based on goals. Goals for the school year teaching - I want to have this percentage of students pass the TAKS, I want to have this percentage of students get a 3 on their writing, etc. Personal - I want to remember not to respond to students this way, etc. I basically have goals for every aspect of my life, big or small, plus long term and short term goals for each section.

What I feel like is my weakest is the 6th one, use technology to my advantage. I probably use it more than other teachers, but I am trying to move into librarian mode. In my classroom, I have a Promethean board and projector, my student computers, and a scanner, plus all the standard equipment. I don't use the internet to its full advantage. That's mainly a time issue. This year, I am going to try to use blogs more in my classroom. Every year, I faithfully try to add another component.

23 Things, #3

Apparently, I have had this web blog for more than two years. Little did I know...

After much frustration, I created my Avatar. Ain't she pretty! I haven't done any of the other stuff. This is my first blog. I am trying to connect it to my Facebook. I don't know how that's going to work out. I know a lot of people who do that. I just wish I had directions. I'm really good at following directions.

Sarah