Week 9 Activity 23 Boo Hoo

I am not ready for this to be over! My one word that best describes this learning experience is...

transformational.

I am a life-long learner and SLL2.0 has been a motivational guide this summer. My favorite discoveries are using avatars and graphic captioners because they are fun and my students will love them. The most difficult tool for me to grasp was tagging using del.icio.us and now I can't imagine how I functioned without it.

I am anxious to get back to school to see how much access our district allows to blogs and wikkis. If we are able to use them with students, I will have lots of suggestions for how they can improve the research projects my collaborators traditionally do each year. And I have tagged some excellent podcasts and videos that will demonstrate to teachers the power of these tools.

I am sorry to have reached the end of this course, but of course, it is just the beginning of my new journey into the world of Web 2.0.Thank you, thank you, thank you to the creators and faciliators of the course. And another thank you to fellow participants who have made comments and suggestions to me and whose clever, creative blogs gave me ideas for my own.

Week 9 Activity 22 eBooks & Audio eBooks

I tagged all three sites explored in the exercise. While I would not enjoy reading a book on my computer, students may think it is just great. And I would not want them to print a free eBook using my library printer, they may not mind doing that from home. I can see great advantages to having these titles freely available to anyone who wants them.

I especially enjoyed the audio eBooks. I listened to parts of Walking by Henry David Thoreau and parts of "Jude" from the Bible.

Finally, the free books site is an excellent resource. I will explore this further with the language arts department in my school. We are always looking for ways to get more books into the hands of the students.

Week 9 Activity 21 Podcasts

Podcasts were my least favorite of the online tools I have learned this summer. I see many uses for the video podcasts used at tutorials, but I did not find any of those in the directories I explored.

I chose to search travel podcasts and was disappointed to only listen to information about places I might want to visit. The Yahoo directory did not offer travel as a category. Perhaps they agree with me that if you want to explore places, you might do better with a video.

I do see educational uses for podcasts and there are a few student podcast projects going on in my school. I hope to learn to create podcasts like those presented in Library 2.0 where there is a PowerPoint presentation, narrated, and posted online for others to view.

Bypass School, College, Myspace Censors Filters Firewall

Week 9 Activity 20 YouTube Experience

I learned that there was a video contest regarding school libraries and many of the videos posted were clever advertisements. I also found a very funny video advertising a Library Workout that made me laugh out loud.

But I selected a video teaching viewers how to bypass school, college and business filters because I learned more from it than from any of the advertisements. This video by Jimmy.com has been viewed more than 28,000 times! There were several videos of this sort to choose from. The one I selected to post wasn't particularly entertaining, but very informative, offering several options for people wanting to view MySpace from a school computer, rather than just one. It was clearly narrated, while others just showed the screens and typing, but no narration. As educators, we have a lot to learn from YouTube.


I was actually a little disappointed in the quality of videos I found on TeacherTube. Most of the library videos were made by someone whose sense of humor just did not appeal to me. And their videos buffer, causing a little viewer frustration. I wonder if the buffering would show up if the video was posted to a blog?

Week 8 Activity 19 LibraryThing

I toured this site again and registered. I entered the books my book club has selected to read this year and found that most were quite popular with other members. However, one book, The Enigma Woman, is owned by only three other members. I was surprised I would actually see who those three members are and could have left a comment for them had I chosen.

I was gratified to see that my favorite YA book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, is wildly popular and considered a classic.

Week 8 Activity 18 Online Applications

I typed this entry in Zoho Writer. It looks very similar to Word. I can see some excellent advantages of students using an online word processor because so often they come to school with an assignment saved to a flash drive or a disc, but cannot open it because the Word converter does not recognize the software they used to create their document. I imagine there are a lot more advantages to such online tools, such as collaboration and being able to find your work from various locations.

My concern for using this at school is that our AUP forbids students from opening accounts, even free ones, because they are not allowed to give any personal information online. All of the accounts I have opened during this summer course have required me to give my email address. Perhaps it would be okay to open the account from home and then log into it from school. I will check into this. I wonder if my district is a lot stricter than others?

Week 7Activity 17 Learning 2.0 Sndbox

I enjoyed reading the curriculum ideas participants suggested for the various tools we have been learning. My suggestion is #33 under Wikis.

I also need to thank Cardinal Reader for sharing with me how to change my Avatar one more time. :)

Week 7 Activity 16 Wikis

I've been waiting all summer to learn about wikis, and it wasn't in vain. I think the use of wikis could dramatically change class research projects. I tagged the site Controversial Issues Wiki because the 7th grade GATE teacher does a six month project on social issues and this would be an excellent addition to how we teach the students to find and record their information.

I also tagged Wiki: A Beginner's Guide as a way to teach interested teachers how wikis work.

The only disappointment in this week's lesson is that I haven't found where to start my own wiki and what is entailed. I expect to learn that before the end of this course.

Week 6 Activity 15

According to Wikipedia, "Proponents of this concept expect that ultimately the Library 2.0 model for service will replace traditional, one-directional service offerings that have characterized libraries for centuries."

Rick Anderson from University of Nevada outlines three library practices we will have to examine and change for the next generation of librarianship. I agree with his assessment in regard to collection of print sources, if he is referring strictly to nonfiction and reference. However, in school libraries I do not see the reading of fiction decreasing at all. And ebooks have not been wildly successful, at least not yet. I would love to decrease my nonfiction collection and have more shelf space for fiction.

His second suggestion is that we cannot rely on librarians to train individual users, but rather libraries need to provide the easiest to use and most reliable sources for their users. He cites his ratio of one librarian per 680 users. That actually sounds good to many school librarians! And we are teachers, so I believe our emphasis on teaching large groups, small groups and individuals to find the most reliable information and employ the web2.0 tools to use that information creatively will continue. We will most likely be teaching the teachers along with the students.

He then proposes that libraries need to change the "come to us" model of the past. And this is largely true for all types of libraries as we advocate availability of resources 24/7.

Michael Stephen, presumably a public librarian, takes the last concept to heart when he reports that he meets his clients online to build new services. But he cautions against purchasing new technology for technology's sake. It must further the mission of the institution.

The Wikipedia article on Li bray2.0 concludes with, "The concept of radical trust appears to be at the heart of much of the issue. While librarians are learning about Web 2.0 tools to facilitate discussion so that their internal business can evolve to enterprise 2.0, involving external users appears to be (sic) face some opposition." This statement calls to mind the opposition we Library Media Teachers often face from our technology departments who control what the students can and cannot access on the Internet.

This is a GREAT learning community!

Thank you! I have spent two days viewing the fabulous blogs being created by the participants in this class. I have learned a lot from you while I waited for the del.icio.us tutorial to work again. Someone very kindly emailed me the tutorial and I still didn't quite understand. Today, I found the link was working again and watched it a second time. It took previewing the SJLibrary2.0 delicious page and reading the ALA article on tagging to understand the powerful tool this is. I immediately registered for a delicious account and tagged the sites I have been bookmarking during this summer course.