Thing 23

What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
I loved using Photostory. I think it is very easy to create vidcasts using this program. I also enjoyed working with Flickr. Google Docs is one of the most useful discoveries that I will use to save documents online from this point forward.

How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
This program has shown me how many resources are available on the Web 2.0 and that there is always something new to learn. I want to strive to continue to learn the newest technology to be up to date in the library field.

Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
I was surprised to learn a lot more about social networking. I thought I knew everything there was to know about Facebook, but I'm happy to know about Twitter and Nings as well.

What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?
I think it would be much less daunting to divide this 23 things exercise into smaller pieces. Just do five things here and five things there. That way, it doesn't seem so insurmountable.

If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you choose to participate?
I would like to participate in something similar because I do feel that I learned a lot of valuable tools and information. However, I would like it to be served in smaller, more bite-sized pieces :)

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?
23 things teaches valuable tools and resources for professionals in today's Library 2.0 world.

Thing 22: Nings

I viewed several Nings including the Teacher Librarian ning at http://teacherlibrarian.ning.com/ and the Texas School Librarian ning at http://txschoollibrarians.ning.com/

Nings are beneficial social networking tools similar to Twitter, My Space, and Facebook. The main educational benefit of a ning is that teachers can set these up for their students to use rather than invading their privacy by trying to carry on academic discussions on Facebook, which is considered a more private forum.

I can see how it would be very helpful to set up a ning for all librarians in my district. They could collaborate on lesson ideas, ask questions, and offer advice. Similarly, it would be helpful to set up school nings for all staff, or nings for each grade level. These tools have made collaboration so much easier without the need to sit through long meetings face to face.

Thing 21: Photostory

I created this vidcast about my recent trip to Athen using Photostory. It was very easy and the program walked me through every step. It was much simpler to use than Movie Maker.

Photostory has many applications in the library, including making book review videos, book talks, reports, and other fun and creative ideas.

Thing 20: Teacher Tube Perimeter Rap

I uploaded this video, "Perimeter Rap" off of Teacher Tube, a teacher's answer to You Tube, which is usually not blocked by most school districts.

http://www.teachertube.com/

This is a creative video made by Mrs. Burke, a teacher in North Carolina. Kudos to her for making perimeter and area fun! Teachers do so many great things to motivate their students to learn... I am constantly awed by their innovative and unique approaches to teaching! :)

It's a great resource to have access to so many educational videos that students can watch, either as a whole group, or individually online. These videos appeal to visual and auditory learners, provide a different avenue for teaching, and allow students to learn from the expertise of other educators.

Thing 19: Twitter

I chose to research Twitter, ranked #1 under social networking tools on the Web 2.0 awards.

http://www.seomoz.org/web2.0/short

Twitter works by connecting people with their friends, family, and co-workers. You receive updates on what they are doing. These updates (known as status updates on facebook) can be sent to your phone, email, or web page. They help you to feel connected to people you care about by knowing what they are doing.

A great feature of this application is that it allows the user to control when, where, and how to receive updates. It also allows you to "block out" times when you don't want to receive updates- dinner, bed time, etc.

http://twitter.com/

Thing 18: Google Docs

Google Docs rocks! :)

Who new such a cool resource existed? Gone are the days of emailing attachments to myself or toting around a flash drive. Now I can store all of my documents and photos online and have access to them whenever and wherever! I love Web 2.0 :)

Advantages of Google Docs: I don't have to save files on a computer under My Documents or on the district network. I can have total flexibility of where to work on a document- I can start it at school, then work on it at home, and finish it at grad school- all the while easily saving my changes on Google Docs. I can also invite others to collaborate on the document with me. This makes it almost like a wiki in that each collaborator can edit the document and save any changes they made.

Thing 17: Rollyo

Well, at first, Rollyo confused me. I didn't quite understand what it was supposed to do. But then, I watched the video done by one of the 23 things participants (a SBISD employee) and it helped immensely.

Bruce's Rollyo video:
http://bruce23things.blogspot.com/2008/07/rollyo-video.html

Then, I went to Rollyo (www.rollyo.com) and created my own search roll. I created a roll for the Lewis and Clark expedition. This is a research project for third graders at our school. Often, students get bogged down by all of the information when conducting online research. I chose four high quality, age appropriate websites for students to conduct their search.

Here's my Rollyo search roll for Lewis and Clark:
http://rollyo.com/brookevierling/lewis_and_clark/

This is a great resource for teachers, librarians, and parents alike... really anyone who's conducting research. It cuts down a bit on the "information overload" and pares down the results to make it more user friendly.

Thing 16: Wikis

Wikis are great! We're already using them in our school to compile information. They are much easier to coordinate between groups of people than old fashioned email. At our elementary school, we use wikis to create lists of teacher's needs, list student district assessment scores, etc. One use for a wiki in my life would be for party planning :) The example given on the Common Craft show (Teacher Tube- Wikis in Plain English) where the group plans a camping trip is an excellent illustration of how wikis can make communication and collaboration so much easier.

Wikis in Plain English:
http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=51aeb480ecbd988cd8cc

Often, I plan trips for my girlfriends and I to take. Using a wiki, we can collaborate together on the itinerary, lodging, and sites to see.

Thing 15: Library 2.0

I read the article, "Into a New World of Librarianship" in the OCLC newsletter written by Michael Stephens. I liked many of his ideas for bringing our libraries into modern time. He believes that Library 2.0 means that we need to design our services with the patron in mind. We need to think about their needs and then arrange our services and resources to meet their needs. We also need to bring our resources into their space- using tools like a library web page, online OPAC, My Space or Facebook account, email and instant messenging. We shouldn't start adding new technology just for the sake of "technolust," but should really think about which new technology tools will work best to meet our patrons' needs.

Into a New World of Librarianship:
http://www.oclc.org/nextspace/002/3.htm

The concept of Library 2.0 is a two way street. No longer does information flow only from the library to the patron. Now, information flows both ways.

Thing 14: Technorati

I don't know if I just don't get it, or if Technorati is just not my thing. I don't really get the point. I mean, I understand that it searches blogs by organizing them into subject areas using tags- I guess it's just not relevant to me in my life right now. I'd much rather find blogs that are respected and authoritative in library land rather than spend time searching on my own.

I watched the You Tube video about Technorati and agree with the girl that spoke about the Top 100 blogs being the Top 100 crazy people who post 20 times a day and respond to each other. This just doesn't seem relevant to those of us who are more normal and just want to include a select few blogs in our "circle of wisdom."

I chose not to register my blog on Technorati because I'm not sure if it's something I'll keep up with posting on after this assignment is complete. I would much rather post on Facebook than blogger.com at this point.

I do think tagging information is valuable. I found the tags on Flickr to be very helpful in locating photos. Tags on Del.icio.us help to organize and find information. Tags on facebook help to identify people and connect them together. Overall, tags are great time savers that help people find the information they are looking for.

Thing 13: Del.icio.us

I had never heard of a social bookmarking tool before I watched the Common Craft tutorial on Del.icio.us on Teacher Tube. It makes sense to have a place that saves all of your bookmarks online rather than the "old fashioned" way to bookmark websites on a personal computer.

The Common Craft explanation gave a wonderful example of how this tool could help teachers. He gives the example of algebra teachers who need to get lesson plans online. If they share all of their bookmarks, they'll continue to discover new and useful sites for lesson planning.

Librarians can also use this site. They can share webpages on any range of things from book reviews, lesson plan ideas, blogs, etc.

Thing 12: Blog Posting

Many of the pieces of advice given about commenting on blogs seemed very common sense to me. But then again, I have seen people be very rude to each other on the internet, rudely correcting grammatical errors and making mean personal attacks.

Two good pieces of advice:
1. If you want to encourage readers to comment on your blog, be humble, be inviting, and be controversial. Keep things open ended so others feel inclined to add in their own two cents.
2. If you feel inclined to criticize someone, first think if it will make a difference. Will it contribute to the overall discussion? If so, always criticize kindly.

I followed my own advice when commenting on blogs. I commented on five Library2Play blogs and then chose two other blogs. I google searched blogs about the library. I commented on one blog post about prescription medications- wondering why parents don't medicate their children who have SEVERE issues. I really empathized with the blogger's frustration on this issue! I also commented on another blog post on the Librarian Philosopher blog about incorporating Facebook into instruction.

Thing 11: LibraryThing

LibraryThing is pretty cool. It's very similar to other applications on facebook (Like Visual Bookshelf) where you share books you're reading with friends. I actually like the facebook application better because it's sent directly to all of my friends on something they read every day, rather than another tool they have to log into.

I checked out some of the groups including Harry Potter fans and Twilight fans. I also read some posts under the Librarians group. The most helpful post for me was the Book Nudgers group that gave great intros for book talks that really might get kids motivated to read certain books.

I would be interested to see a site like this that is geared toward students sharing books and their ratings with each other.

Thing 10: Image Generators

I made this Trading Card using an online trading card maker on Big Huge Labs:
http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/deck.php

I also played around with some other image generators including a comic strip generator and a custom sign generator.

http://www.comicstripgenerator.com/

http://www.customsigngenerator.com/

These image generators are easy and fun to use. They are great tools for students to use when creating presentations, projects, and websites. They're also good for teachers to use for the same purposes. Librarians can make lots of signs to post informing students of library procedures, and also can use these image generators to highlight new books or to supplement a book talk.

Thing 9

I looked at many sites for searching blog postings including Google Blog Search, Edublog's Award Winners, Blogline's search tool, and Technorati. I really didn't like any of these sites. I found the blogs that were posted to be uninteresting and not pertinent to me at all. The best blog search feature was on Google Reader. When I typed in library in the search field, it came up with several interesting Library blogs including Unshelved, a comic strip about a library.

http://www.unshelved.com/

Thing 8: RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are helpful to those who read various online blogs and news sources each day. (This is NOT me at this point in my life since I seem to be so incredibly busy and don't have time for such things)... However, as a librarian I feel that it will be my professional responsibility to read blogs about all things pertaining to the library. I know that as a Reading Specialist, I should be reading blogs about that as well. I'll work to do this more often in order to improve as a professional. RSS feeds are helpful because they send email alerts when new news items have been posted. These stories are emailed as text only and don't include the format of the websites, advertisements, images, etc. It's a great time saver since the user doesn't have to visit various web sites to gather information. Instead, the information comes straight to the user's email inbox! As a librarian, I'll be able to keep up to date on various library blog postings without visiting numerous sites daily.

Thing 7: Google Tools

Today, I learned some very nifty features that Google offers. I signed up for an iGoogle page, which is just a fancy, personalized home page. I was able to add a background, links to pages I'm interested in, and other applications such as local weather, joke of the day, and National Geographic photo of the day. There's even a "To do" list that I can update each day. Very cool.

Here's a link to my iGoogle page:http://www.google.com/ig?hl=en

The other tool I explored is Google Notebook. It's a feature that allows the user to copy and paste text, links, and pictures from the web into an electronic "notebook." This is a great tool for students to use when conducting online research. One of the many uses includes having students keep track of their resources by copying each web address into their Google Notebook as they conduct their research.

Thing 6: Mashups

Before today, I never knew what mashups were, but now that I know, I think they're pretty cool. Basically, mashups are programs that combine features from two different applications. A really neat mashup was Mappr, which took photos from Flickr and placed them on a map according to location information in each picture's tag.As a librarian, there are many mashups I could use. One of the most intriguing mashups I came across was on Big Huge Lab's FD's Flickr Toys. The mashup uses photos from Flickr to create motivational posters. Someone with a bit of creativity and a bit of time could use these posters to promote new books. There are so many other neat applications on the FD Toys site. Many of these ideas could be great for the library!

Thing 5: Flickr

I found this really neat photo under the Creative Commons section of Flickr, a photo sharing website. This picture of the Athens Erechtheion was taken by roblisameehan and posted under an attribution license on Flickr.

I think this photo is amazing and am very surprised that it has not been edited. I had the pleasure of visiting Athens this summer and really enjoyed hiking up to the top of the Acropolis and visiting the Erechtheion. My favorite part of this structure are the Carytids, the women who serve as columns on the porch.

Avatar Ordeal

Well, I had an easy time setting up my blog account, writing my first post, and designing my avatar. However, I had a nearly impossible time trying to insert my avatar's HTML code into my blog. The avatar wouldn't show up, and then there were all sorts of technical problems with the code. In the end, my husband Dan saved the day by googling HTML code, changing the code, and entering the new HTML code into my blog. Too complicated for me. I'd rather have just uploaded a picture of myself rather than an avatar of what I wished I looked like! :) Maybe I will upload some photos of myself traveling anyway...

Lifelong Learning

I think it's interesting that as teachers, we are taught to educate our students using many "old school" methods that don't teach our pupils the skills necessary for becoming lifelong learners. As educators, we need to start thinking outside of the box to give our students the resources to become information literate so they may learn throughout the rest of their lives.

When reading the 7 1/2 Habits of Lifelong Learners, I realized that I find it most difficult to view problems as challenges. It is true that when life hands you lemons, you should make lemonade. I understand that we learn the most and gain the most strength when facing the adversity that life hands to us. However, when problems start to pile up, it becomes easy to feel overwhelmed. It's a great reminder to sit back and view each problem that arises as a challenge: How can I best handle this situation?


The easiest habit for me is to play. My favorite forms of lifelong learning come from those activities that bring me pleasure: scrap booking, reading, writing, and traveling.