One Last Thing

This semester has been a great adventure. I have loved all that I have learned, both from class and the 2.0 activities. Here is a little bit about what I learned:

-Week 1: Life-Long Learning

It was enlightening to pay attention to my strengths and weaknesses as I wrote about my 7 1/2 life-long learning habits. During week one, we learned about setting up a Gmail account and how to have a strong password. I discovered it is fairly difficult to make a strong password, and I have been working to make my passwords stronger.

-Week 2: Blogging

I discovered that I love blogging. It is fun to post information that someone out there will read and learn from or be affected by in some way.

-Week 3: Photos, Images

Playing with photos and images is so much fun! I love how I can upload an image onto the Internet and create a calendar, a frame or matting, a card, a pocket album. There are many fun and creative ways to use photos and images and I would love to learn more about this!

-Week 4: Wikis

There are many fun and informative wikis out there. I think it is a fun idea for a librarian to create a wiki that students can learn and get information from.  As I have created my own library wiki, I have discovered how important it is to make sure information is well organized and that links function properly. It has been fun to try to insert ideas from the learning 2.0 activities into my wiki.

-Week 5: Skype

This was actually pretty fun! I used instant messaging with a few people from our class and that was fun. I also used Skype with Anne for our Spring Break meeting, just for the experience of using Sky for something official.  Before this meeting, I wanted to make certain my Skype was working, so my sisters and I Skyped with my cousins who live in Kansas. It was so much fun. My little sister Erika, who is 6 and is in kindergarten this year, still cannot believe that we saw our cousins on the computer.

I think it would be fun to Skype with an author. This also would be less expensive than bringing an author in, but it still gives the students a chance to learn.  I also think it would be interesting to set up times with students and/or parents of my students and Skype with them if they have questions.

-Week 6: Play!

It was fun to play with the image generator and to be creative. It was also fun for me to add more books to my LibraryThing bookshelf and explore LibraryThing in a little more detail than I had before.

-Week 7: Social Bookmarking

Working with Diigo was a new experience for me. I had never heard of Diigo before this class. I think Diigo has some useful tools, but I also found that there are parts of Diigo that I don’t like. For example once people highlight something, they can’t change their mind and un-highlight it; it just stays that way. Diigo could be useful for young students working on class projects and assignments.

-Week 8: RSS, Newsreaders

Finding blogs and websites with the RSS sign and getting the feed to deposit information into my GoogleReader account was a neat experience. I spent time finding links that I thought would be beneficial to me. As a librarian, if I included an RSS link to my blog or wiki, parents, students, and teachers can subscribe to the links and be notified when I update information.

-Week 9: Twitter

Setting up a Twitter account was simple. I found places to follow, such as School Library Journal, Children’s Bookshelf, ALA Booklist Pubs, and The Horn Book, which I can use for educational purposes in my library.

-Week 10: Spring Break

-Week 11: Online Video

There are great movie clips out there that can be used for educational purposes. YouTube and TeacherTube are great places to look. Educational movie clips or instructional clips are great, both for students and teachers. I am glad to know that help for most technology issues can be found on YouTube. One problem is that YouTube is often blocked in schools. In the future, I think it would be a good idea for schools to look into allowing these types of clips to be used without a complicated process.

-Week 12: Podcasting

I found the idea of teachers using podcasting to be a fascinating idea. Librarians can record discussions and post them so students can listen to them again. I think this is a great idea. Also, I believe that discussions on different books and genres could be of use and interest to students.

-Week 13: Tag Clouds

I enjoyed the chance I had to be creative and make my own tag cloud with my own ideas. There are many topics that could be put together to make into a tag cloud.  Tag clouds seem to be popular now and quite visually appealing.

-Week 14: GoogleDocs

In GoogleDocs I was able to create a survey to attach to my blog. It was fun for me to figure out how this works and to get it posted to my blog. Also, GoogleDocs is a place where students can save their work and allow others to view and edit it without having to make a bunch of copies to e-mail back and forth. A problem with this set up is that once someone changes something in the document it is changed for everyone; the previous version is gone. This can cause frustration, so save copies before revising.

-Week 15: One Last Thing

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the 2.0 activities. I learned many ways that technology will help me as a librarian, as well as fun ideas that will help me be creative.

-Week 16: Future Exploration

I love learning, so I will continue to gain more knowledge on these topics as I continue with my education.