Thing 23: One Last Thought

Well, I must admit, it is really nice to be done with the 23 things if I think of it as an assignment for my professional development. But, what an awesome experience this has been! I want to thank Helene Blowers for developing the 23 things and all the people who were involved in the program. I loved how we could do it at any time of the day or night, and spend as much or little time as we wanted or could. I won't lie and say "oh, it was no big deal!!" This was a huge time taker for me...many times 2 whole hours would have quickly flown by, and sometimes I'd get frustrated because I had so many other things I had to do. This was exciting though, and I plan on sharing many of these tools with my staff and students at school. Again, thank you very much for making it happen. What a great experience!

Thing 22: What did I learn today?

So, just how am I going to keep up with all these new things I've learned about? Well, ideally I would like to continue daily, with at least reading some of the RSS feeds, and checking out the new MEMO SID I added today. I am planning on doing some staff development with my staff and students about some of the new things - the delicious, flickr, big huge labs, library 2.0, etc. I know the challenge will definitely be taking time every day. But I already take plenty of time each day for email, so I think it is realistic to add something every day to looking at email. Perhaps it'll only be one thing in addition to email, but that'll be more than I have been doing. If I allow myself to say it's OK to just do little by little, then I think I can do it. I really want to thank the people who put 23 things together. It has been a very educational experience. Thanks to you all!

Thing 21: Beyond Myspace/other social networks

Well, it was very interesting to see all the social networks that are out there. I only tried a few and started to take up TONS of my precious time, so I had to stop. But I did join a few. I joined playlist.com, Webjunction and the Ning 23 Things on a stick group and Teacher Librarian Ning. To be honest, I'm not sure how often I will have time to visit these social networks. I have had some fun with facebook, but once again, it was taking so much time! I can see how great it is though, to join these and have other people with like interests to communicate with each other. I suppose it might be fun to create a school group that I could use with my teachers at school - but then again, I'm not sure how much time teachers could dedicate to it. Everyone is so swamped all the time. Any other opionions on this out there?

Thing 20: Social Networking

WEll, I finally joined facebook.com. It was kind of bittersweet for me because it has been tough for me to watch my own daughters using facebook, worrying that they were giving away too much personal information and that it may come back to haunt them someday. But I can really see how it has been a great communication tool for them and they will probably continue to use it throughout their life, regardless of what mom thinks! I did add 2 friends and joined the librarianfacebook group. I'm looking forward to hearing what the group has to say. Even though I really dragged my feet on this thing, I really do think if we librarians are going to be "with it", we must move forward with technology, not drag our feet!

Thing 19: Podcasts

I listened to Minnesota Public Radio and the Directory of MN Produced Podcasts. I immediately recognized the voices of the MPR morning program guys on their podcast, which was fun! I even created my own, short little podcast over the phone with Gcast, which was very very easy. I prefer the lay out of the Yahoo podcast directory. I can see how using podcasts could be beneficial at school, giving directions on how to do something for students, and also for family - recording a message for family members overseas when there is no phone access, but is computer access!
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Thing 18: YouTube

Thing 17: ELM Productivity tools

OH MY GOODNESS. OK, I have spent the last hour and 1/2 on this thing! But yes, it was worth it. I really enjoyed creating the web page - but I have a question for you fellow librarians out there...can you post this page on the web for free? Don't you have to have a hosting site? or is it actually ELM that would do this for you? That's pretty cool. I did try to put an image on mine, but couldn't understand the directions how to make the image appear. That's when I really starting feeling inadequate on this one.
Once again, since I teach elementary kids, the academic search premier, netlibrary and proquest all seemed too advanced for them to use. But I most certainly would like to share these free databases for my staff! Some of them would really use it for their own professional growth, while others would give up and say they didn't have the time. It truly is wonderful that all Minnesotans can take advantage of these free resources. Thanks for making them available.

Thing 16: Student 2.0 tools

WOW, now this is a really cool thing for anyone who is doing research! I liked how each step of the way gave good questions to be asking yourself to help with the research process. I work in an elementary school, so I don't think it would be quite appropriate. But for the middle, high school, college and adult, this would be a great tool to use. I find that sometimes students just don't know where to begin and what questions to be asking themselves. This looks very promising. I'm happy to know about it.

Thing 15: Online games

I tried this at home and it required such a large download that I didn't want to wait so long for the download. I tried it at work and the site was blocked. This is one particular thing that I have no interest in pursuing any further because I believe that the on-line gaming has taken so many skills away from the need for socialization in our country. Kids are gaming so much these days that they forget how to interact with people and they are not always aware of what is real and not real. Students are not getting the physical exercise they need and are not learning the socialization skills they need because of gaming. Some day I may try the games myself. I prefer to not dive in - I am afraid that it'll take WAY too much of my precious time, and I might even get hooked! Then where would I be? I'd be a part of the trouble that society is in right now, which I do not want to be a part of. Is there anyone out there who agrees with me? I don't think I'm alone on this one.

Thing 14: Library Thing

OOOH, this is the site I've been waiting for! A place to list all my favorite titles. I can hardly wait to share this with staff at school. Ultimately, I would love to have a site that staff could all access to add their favorite titles. This might even be fun to add a link to our school's website that students could enter their favorite titles.

Thing 13: Online Productivity Tools

I started my page with igoogle and loved the ease of setting it up. It was so easy to just click the ones I wanted to have on my page, then I could click and drag them where I wanted. The tool that I found and liked the most and that I didn't know existed, was the PDF converter tool. Oh my, I can think of numerous times at school that I need to convert a Word doc. to PDF and couldn't do it because I didn't have adobe. I sure wish I knew about this free converter. I tried it, and it worked so slick. It was very easy and only took a minute or two.
The on-line calendars are nice too, but I don't know if I'd use it. It would probably work for a family planning events or something. I guess I could try to figure out how I could use it at school for scheduling the library and/or computer lab, but I think the spaces would not be big enough. Currently I use a spreadsheet for staff to sign up on our local server, which works fine. The to-do lists are kind of fun, but realistically, I probably will just write my list on a piece of paper...unless I'm feeling especially drawn to the computer to check my list! Backpack looked REALLY impressive, but the fee you'd have to pay turned me off. The thing I would've used is the calendar, and that doesn't come with the free version. Cool stuff, really cool stuff!

Thing 12: Do you digg?

I read a couple articles on Obama and viewed some YouTube videos as well. What impressed me was how recent the articles were! One of them was only 23 minutes ago! Talk about news hot off the press, here it is! The value of this is of course because of the timing manner in which it is presented. It's a wonder why people still subscribe to the daily paper. The news is old the minute it gets to your home. What I don't like about this is merely that the news is on-line. I guess I am old fashioned in that I still enjoy sitting back with my feet up, reading the paper. I get tired of sitting in front of the computer, especially since I do that so much at work every day. It is also valuable in that, it'll help you read what other people consider the top news, and so you'll feel "in the know" for the latest news. Will I use this? Probably not, but it is good to find out how to digg.

Thing 11: Tagging and Del.icio.us

I still don't understand how tagging can be beneficial to me...
I did create a del.icio.us account however and see how wonderfully useful that could be. Now I don't have to have separate bookmarks at school and at home! This would be a great place to create a page of bookmarks for a class project, so that students could access them from home and at school! I can see another staff development idea pressing on me now. I wonder how many of the teachers at my school even know about del.icio.us?

Thing 10: Wikis

I went to the 23 Things Wiki and had some fun changing the colors of the title letters. I thought that would do no harm. I also added an entry on the Content Suggestion page in red: keeping up with the 23 things. My biggest suggestion to new users was to allow for time to learn these new things! I can see great value in wikis - especially after watching the Common Craft video on creating a wiki for organizing a camping trip. This is truely a one stop shop for all viewers. An entire staff at a school could wiki about a new project coming up or a new idea that needs everyone's input. I would imagine that you just give the wiki url to everyone you want input from. More fun than I realized! Since users can edit wikis, I do wonder about the validity for students to use during research. Yes, others can add important information, but what if some troubled users edit it just to confuse others? I can see hacker type people really wanting to cause trouble that way too, so I am more hesitant to use it for research. But for collaboration on a project, by all means, go for it!

Thing 9: Online collaboration tools

I personally liked using google docs better than using zoho writer, only because it was much easier to import the URL into google docs. It seemed to work just like zoho writer however. I was able to publish it to my blog, but I don't see it on my blog now, so I am wondering what step I am missing? I think that this is WAY cool to be able to edit a famous doc on line. I can imagine how easy this would be to post a document that I wanted feedback from teachers on - then they could make changes and everyone else could already see what changes had been made! Now I wonder if more than one person can make changes at a time? Will it say "this file is read only or locked for editing" or something like that? Anyone else have comments about this, please send me a comment!

Thing 8: Share your collections

OK, I tried to sign up for a membership with Picture Trail and Flick and they both seemed to require me to purchase a book that I didn't want, so I went no further with signing up. I did sign up for a Mixx account though, and that seemed pretty easy. I suppose I could use this with my friends or even better, my librarian/media specialist friends as a good networking tool. It actually seems kind of like the delicious accounts that you can share your favorite links? I haven't learned about the delicious accounts too much yet, but that's what it appears to be. So for that reason, I do think it may be helpful to share good links with other people in my profession. I am looking forward to thing #9!

Thing 7: Web 2.0 Communication Tools

We are big time users of email in my school district. It is the first thing I check when I go into work. It is something that I leave on all day and continuously check for new emails from staff throughout the day. Sometimes it's as simple as clarifying what time a class is expected in the library or computer lab and other times it may be some collaborative planning for a lesson, just minutes before the lesson begins. And of course, an email might be notification of s announcements of school issues or even district wide issues/notifications.
I have attended various webinars from Minitex on the use of Kids Infobits and most recently one on Play Attention (not minitex). They are valuable tools because I can attend them when the time works for me, and I can even do it in the comfort of my own home! I also like the feature that participants can send a message (hey, that's probably one time I really like IM!) if they have a question. I usually find that I can learn a lot from other's questions too.
Text messenging, I have begun to do with my own children. I have found out that if I want to keep up with staying in touch with them, I'd best send them a text message! It seems like that is thee way of teens in communication these days.
The tool of IM has not really appealed to me yet because I guess I'm just an old fuddy duddy on that one. When my email and cell phone/text messaging works perfectly well, why use IM? It's just one more account that has to be set up. That's just my opinion of course!

Thing 6: Online Image Generators

WOW, now that was much more fun and easy to do! If you know how to browse to find your photos, you can add a trade card or banner to your flickR site, which is what I did. I am relieved that this one was an easier one than Thing 5. I can see how this would be fun for staff and students to create some fun things on their flickR page, while building their individual creativity. Oh my this can be so much fun, but very time consuming! It was really fun to create a calendar too. So easy! It amazes me how many free web resources are out there for the public to use!

Thing 5: More fun with FlickR

OK, I am really very frustrated. I want to put some "spell with flickR" words on my blog but I cannot figure out how to do it! I can see how time consuming this can be. I've gone to the http://metaatem.net/words/music site to spell some words, but I cannot find any directions to post them on my blog. Is there someone out there who can direct me? I do think this would be fun for students and teachers to do to add creativity to their page. That's all I have to say about Thing 5. I would like to hear if anyone else has had some of the same frustrations.

Thing 4: Flickr

WOW! What a fun idea to post pictures to the web so several family members or class members can easily see them! I was thinking that this might be a fantastic thing to do with our 2nd or 3rd grade classes that read Flat Stanley. They usually send a Flat Stanley paper character home with family, relatives or friends so that they can take pictures of Flat Stanley in a different part of the country or world. Pictures are send via the postal service back to the classroom so they can be hung up on a bulletin board. Why not use Flickr? That way the students, parents and relatives could see the pictures right away!
I also like the idea that St. Ben's college is doing, but who the heck would have time to create all those tags on the pictures/??? Not me, that's for sure. But what a great idea!

Thing 3: RSS feeds

Good grief! There has been so much to read on RSS feeds. I can easily see how it takes way more than 15 min. a day! But now that I have set up some feeds in bloglines, hopefully that'll help condense the time it takes to read them. I can see how this would be a great time saver for the elementary staff at my school. They might be frustrated at first in how long it would take to set up and read through many of the "top 1000 feeds", but in the end, it would be a time saver for them. Teachers are so swamped these days just with the everyday tasks of teaching,ut this is a new and exciting venue to teach them. We'll see what happens now at our next in service day!

Thing 2: Library 2.0

Oh my, I have read several of the Library Technology Reports articles in volume 43, issue#5 and I am amazed at the information out there on Library 2.0! As much as I think it is easy to continue helping teachers and students at school with all the things we help them with - researching information, learning how to use reference sources, recommending good books to read, etc. - I definitely see the need to keep up with all the newer technology tools. This is vital for our profession! It makes me wonder how many of my staff at school are blogging and how many have tried some of these other 23 things. I am curious now to start inquiring more with them to see what kind of staff in services I can or need to provide. The library information world is most certainly changing in a BIG way and if I want to keep "with it" I need to plunge ahead and keep myself abreast of what is happening in Library 2.0.
I am very grateful that this was presented at the MEMO midwinter conference to give it a jump start.

Thing1

I appreciate the step by step to set up my first blog. It was great to hear these directions at the Memo Midwinter conference this morning. Thanks for all the information.