Week 9, Thing 20: You Tube

I never really checked out a lot of stuff on You Tube. My biggest impression of it was as a wasteland for bizarre video clips and inane posts from teens who filmed themselves fighting or punking someone. I was pleasantly surprised. There's some pretty cool stuff on there, especially for someone with my semi-twisted sense of humor.

I really enjoyed the recommended videos. My favorite was "March of the Librarians", although it's truly bizarre how so many librarians look so similar.

I found this video of a career movie from 1946 or 1947 on choosing the profession of Librarian. It is crazy fun. The wildest part is seeing all the things that had to be done by hand and how long it took. Some things are still the same though. There's a student who asks for a book but can't remember the author or title but does remember the subject and that it's blue. Who among us hasn't had that happen?



For a while, we could only view videos from TeacherTube. An Apple trainer showed us this one entitled "When I become a Teacher". I love it.



I couldn't remember the name of it while composing this blog and was having a hard time with my search, especially on youtube. Just putting in the search term teacher resulted in some very raunchy videos. (Not that I watched them, the titles were enough for me.)

I enjoyed this exercise and will probably view and use more videos in the future.

Week 8, Thing 19: Library Thing

I really like Library Thing. I've always wanted to have a list or a reference of all my books. When I was in middle school/early high school, I had a card file of all my books. The were in alphabetical order according to title. Sometimes, I even had a little summary. (There really is no other profession for me.) I can only imagine how excited I would have been if Library Thing would have been around back then!

I signed up for Library Thing a while ago and added a couple of books. I put a few more on this summer when we looked at the Web 2.0 Award sites. My only complaint is that I can't pull up an author, choose a number of titles and batch process the selection all at once. As a reader who tends to collect books by certain authors, that capability would be enormously convenient.

Here's a question though, do you only put in the books that make you look good or do you put in all your books, even if they're not exactly award winners? Case in point - when I first started looking at other people's blogs, some have this really cool widget, shelfari, where books are placed on a virtual shelf for all to see. Great, except as I looked a couple of people's "bookshelves", they were reading "important" books and I was reading to escape. I don't think I'll be a literary snob when it comes to Library Thing because the purpose is to list my books, pure and simple.

There a few of my students who would enjoy Library Thing and I'm definitely going to put a link on our library web page.

I'm going to put both the Library Thing and the Shelfari widgets on my blog because what I own and what I read can be very different.

Week 8, Thing 18

I signed up for Zoho writer, created a blog post and had no trouble sending it! Pretty slick. I thought this would be a very good tool to use since it wasn't blocked at school and the edit area of blogspot.com was for a while. My plan was to work on my blog during my lunch break and even if I was blocked from sending what I wrote, at least it would be a lot easier than cutting and pasting and in the best format as well. As it turns out, blogspot edit has been unblocked, but it's still a nice site to go to. I'm usually at a computer that's either my own or has access to a server where I can save my documents. It's nice knowing that if I'm in a situation where I'm not, Zoho writer will allow me to type and save whatever I need.

Our CFF coach has a Google Docs account set up for our CFF team. One is for teachers to go in and schedule projects so our students don't get overwhelmed with iMovies, Keynotes, and podcasts all due around the same time. It also frees up equipment and lets our coach know where she might be needed. We just started it this year but since it's desperately needed, I'm sure it will work.

One of the blogs I read mentioned how well it should work for students who have trouble with compatibility issues between their home word processing programs and ours at school. I don't know how many times I've had kids try to get their flash drives to open up their assignment on our Macs, then my library PCs, and nothing works. If they could use Zoho or Google Docs, it might go a lot better.

Week 7, Thing 17 PA Curriculum Connection

The PA Curriculum Connection wiki is pretty nice and there are some good links. I particularly liked the Dewey Browse site, and a cool article on whiteboards. It would be great if more could be added. I couldn't figure out the invite key. I'm sure it was somewhere, but I just could not get it. Oh well, I wasn't sure what I would have added at this point.

I also had a little trouble with getting some of the links to work but I just copy and pasted them in the address bar instead.

Week 7, Thing 16a: Sandbox Wki

There were a lot of great ideas in the California 2.0 Curriculum Connections Wiki. There are a few I'm going to use and several I'm going to share with my teachers. Some of my favorites include creating avatars to represent a characters from a book; creating cloud bundles in del.icio.us for faster, more effective, searching; creating an online book club; and using a wiki for our CFF teachers to post project ideas, what has worked and not worked, basically to provide a forum for discussion of technology in the classroom.

Our CFF coach has already created a wiki for our teachers as well as ones for various technology camps we held over the summer. At this point, they provide teachers with links and training materials but I know she'd love the idea of a more interactive wiki. One full of ideas, encouragement, and a sharing of resources. As it is, we rarely have time to meet for trainings, let alone informal share time. It would be an incredible collaborative effort.

As we near the end of our discussion of wikis, I want to share another useful outcome of wiki use. One of our teachers observed an interesting benefit of wikis in the classroom. Last year, we had some very bright, very chatty seniors. They were great kids and livened up any classroom discussion but some students couldn't get a word in edgewise. When one of their teachers had them working with wikis, she found that some of the quieter students really had an opportunity to shine because they found their "voice" could be heard online. The amazing thing is, it didn't stop there. A few of these quieter students started to become more vocal in class once their confidence grew.

Week 7, Thing 16 Wikis

I liked this assignment because it helped me become a little more at ease with wikis. I'm more comfortable with a blog than a wiki because it's similar to standard writing - someone writes, I read it, if I like it, I can choose to respond if I care to. A wiki sets that standard on it's ear and many people can get into the act so it's the loss of control that probably freaks me out.

That being said, wikis are an awesome tool for school. One of our science teachers teaches almost exclusively with wikis, with incredible results. When asking one of her students about how he liked doing assignments on the wiki, he told me he really liked it but, "you actually have to read the stuff, I can't fake it like I used to." Edutopia has an online article about her entitled "Wiki Woman". She posts in her blog "Hurricanemaine", this year, she decided not to pass out a textbook and is using the web and her class wiki for all her teaching and learning.

As for me, I plan to get it in gear and make use of the wiki space I created last year and set it up for students to post book reviews and series title lists. Collaboration and the ability to edit postings are some the best things about wikis.

My favorite wikis from this assignment are Library Success: a best practices wiki, - they have a really cool page called "Library 2.0 in 15 minutes" and the teacherlibrarianwiki,because I love anything to do with Joyce Valenza

Week 6 Thing 15: Library 2.0

The articles on Library 2.0 were very thought provoking. Their viewpoint concerned public libraries where the experience can be very different from school libraries. For those of us who are ready, willing, and excited to be embracing new technologies, Library 2.0 sounds great and is a great thing to give our patrons. My family members and friends are no strangers to computers and work with them on a daily basis. When I visited my sister and her husband, there were once a total of four computers in the living room and the TV was on, causing our father to shake his head and walk out in frustration. Yet, if they went to their library and found too many Library 2.0 type services instead of a straight "search and find a book" environment, I'm not sure how they would react. They might embrace it, or they might be on the phone to me to see what kind of library nonsense was going on and did I know how to use it. I know my dad would walk out in frustration and wait for me to come home. That's what he did when they put OPACs in. (Although I think he did figure it out himself, he's pretty adaptable.) The point of this is that not all patrons will embrace Library 2.0 so it's probably something to ease into. If a library has a budget like the one my town, it won't even matter. They're just lucky to have books.

In the schools, it's a bit different. My students could teach me as much about Web 2.0 applications as I could teach them about library skills. Therefore, I have to keep up to keep my students engaged. I have a large group of students who love to read and keep my circulation numbers up. I also know I have to compete with so many different technologies - computer games, texting, TV, video games, etc. I have to show them that the library, the information in it and accessed from it is relevant to them. I have del.icio.us sites and I finally have a web page. I plan to develop a wiki so that students can write reviews of books I also hope to have students create a del.icio.us site of the best reference sites to share with others in the school. As a CFF school, we have access to so much technology, it's becoming second nature to us. The most important thing is not to loose the message in the medium.

The irony of Library 2.0 being easier to implement in a school setting is that schools use filtering systems and many of the Web 2.0 aps don't always get through. We have a two tiered system now that allows teachers access to YouTube, flickr, and blogs but I don't know how many of them get through on the students' computers. We have a forward thinking administration that usually opens things up for us but it's not always the case in many districts.

Web 2.0 applications are getting more and more common, so it is inevitable that they are filtering into the library setting. Library 2.0 is here and it's up to us to make sure it impacts our library in the best and most productive ways possible. It would be foolish to use applications just to flaunt them but instead, we need to implement them wisely to enhance our programs and better serve our patrons.