Thing #23 of 23!! Summary

What were your favorite discoveries or exercises on this learning journey?
Some of my favories were Wordle, dialoging with other bloggers, and learning how to embed videos and graphics with code. Of course, creating the avatar was fun, too.

How has this program assisted or affected your lifelong learning goals?
Learning new things can be difficult if you have to figure out everything for yourself. This program has structure and specific activities that make it easy to learn new things; and, it does it in a non-threatening and cooperative & supportive way. With programs like this available, I see no reason to NOT be a life-long learner. I've done this type of learning before, while working on the MTTC certification, but doing 23 Things this summer has just remined me how much I do like to learn, share, and create things.

Were there any take-a-ways or unexpected outcomes from this program that surprised you?
I had not thought that I would care about blogging or joining nings, but once I could see that these are merely ways of communicating with other teachers and librarians, it made sense to join right in. I linked to my blog from my school web page and put some of the graphics from this course on my webpage. I think these additions to my page will demonstrate that I am "a lifelong learner."

What could we do differently to improve upon this program’s format or concept?
I really like the program like it is. I know that I've spent many more hours than 18 on these activities, but most of it was very educational and motivating. I tend to be too detailed with everything myself. Just reading others' blogs has reminded me that some people can say things so much better in fewer words.

If we offered another discovery program like this in the future, would you choose to participate?
I would definitely be interested if it is during the summer and if it covers things that I need/want to know.

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--a 24/7 Workshop in a Box

Thanks, Spring Branch, for opening this up to those of us in smaller districts. This was great!

Thing #22 Things--Nings

This quote from 7 Things About Nings is the most meaningful to me since it relates to learning:

By creating social networks around academic topics, or even about specific
projects for a course, an instructor can facilitate a strong sense of
community among the students, encouraging personal interactions that can
lead to the creation of new knowledge and collective intelligence.

I located the following video about "smart searching" on Shonda Brisco's Ning for Texas School Librarians. It was created by Naomi Bates. These are two librarians whose name I recognized from the TLC listserve.

Google Smart Search Formula - Watch more free videos

Nings combine photos, videos, blogs, forums...for a specific interest group. I wasn't particularly interested in the member list since I didn't know the members but I figure you would get to know the other members online and be able to network with others who are in similar situations. Although we get input from Texas librarians on the TLC listserve, the ning offers a way to share video book talks and ways to promote your library. These are definitely useful things to a librarian who is by nature not very creative in these areas.

I joined the Texas School Librarians Ning; here's my badge:

Visit Texas School Librarians

Thing #21 Podcasts with Photostory & Audacity

Our 8th grade advanced language arts students created PhotoStory book reviews over Holocaust books for the first time last spring. Their teacher is going to make this a tradition now that she has seen how much the students enjoyed doing this. There is a great tutorial online that she used with them which walks the user through one step at a time:

http://www.jakesonline.org/photostory.htm

I located the tutorials and went through them, but they never even needed any help from me on this. PhotoStory3 is very easy to use.

I knew about Audacity and had downloaded it but had not used it. Since I'm very visual, I like to see things best but some of the audio podcasts (especially by younger kids) can be very effective. Younger kids aren't as critical of their own voices.

Here is a Photostory3 Video I created featuring my son-in-law. He caught the largest fish of the day plus another one so I took pictures of him in our back yard and then had fun playing with the features in PhotoStory3 to give the story some colorful and crazy scenes. I thought that making the last photo go "negative" made it look like he was still standing there with his catch late into the night.

Thing #20 TeacherTube & YouTube

TeacherTube has much more than I realized. Not only does it have videos, but it has photos, powerpoints, documents, blogs, etc. in different subject areas of education. While looking at TeacherTube, I found a great periodic table for science teachers, some geometry interactive lessons, and also watched a tutorial on how to embed a movie in Moodle.


Although I have accessed it from home, YouTube IS blocked in our district, and I don't think all teachers know about TeacherTube. I'm adding a link to it from my Tech Integration website at school. The graphic embedded below is Readfaster's logo from The Literacy Company from TeacherTube (http://teachertube.com/viewPhoto.php?photo_id=1084)

Thing #19 Web 2.0 Award winners

Writeboard is listed on the Web 2.0 Award winners in the writing category. It makes it easy to...

• Write without fear of losing or overwriting
• Compare different versions of a document
• Collaborate with colleagues or fellow students on projects
• Subscribe to documents via RSS and be notified of changes
• Keep your writings organized with Backpack (which isn't free)

With the emphasis on collaboration and communication in all of the new tech standards, our teachers must start to use some of these online tools--especially the free ones. I am sharing this site with our language arts teachers at the middle school level.

I also checked out .Docstoc and downloaded some Kidspiration graphics on education topics. We are always looking for more images to use with interactive whiteboards and software such as Kidspiration and Inspiration. I had to register but it did not cost anything to download. This site also had downloadable Powerpoint jeopardy quizzes for math and science plus lots of other educational resources.

CareerBuilder is an employment / job site that shows jobs available with 30 / 50 / ? miles of your location. After looking at it, I think that our career education teachers might make use of such a practical site to demonstrate to our students where the jobs are in our area right now.

I was surprised to see how many jobs were available just 17 miles from our school at one of the local hospitals.

Thing #18 Online productivity tools

We have Open Office on our library circulation PC. It just wasn't cost effective to install MS Office on it when it is mostly used for running Follett Destiny. I have used it a few times for creating a quick sign or document, but it does not have graphics readily available from within the program. If all you need is limited word processing, then Open Office (free software) works OK. We haven't really tried to use it for shared documents, though, so I'm not positive it is always compatible with Word. It has a much simpler interface than Word 2007--though fewer features.

I'm just beginning to use Google docs. I've created a spreadsheet, a presentation, and a word processing document. I think this might be a solution for students who are always needing work at home and at school. We'll have to see if this would work for research papers and homework assignments. It would be safer than carrying flash drives around. I think we will discover several uses for it now that we know how easy it is to use (with a Google account).

Thing #17 Rollyo

I created a Rollyo account for our school to search for current events news. I added it to my blog page as an html gadget. I'm not sure I even remember how I did it, but it seems to be working.
I used some pre-existing searchrolls to create my current events roll--Top News, News & Media, etc. However, I have it also searching my blog for news and I didn't really intend to do that. I haven't been able to figure out how to get that off.

Using the gadget on my blog page, I entered a search term and experimented with the results depending on the drop down menu choices. When I searched the whole web, I got hits from Wikipedia and other non-expert sites. When I chose to limit to Top News sites, I got CNN, etc. but no Wikipedia articles. I see possibilities for this kind of filtered searching.

Thing #16 Wikis

I knew about wikis and had even visited some wiki sites, but I guess I just hadn't thought about what a versatile tool these could be. I visited the St. Joseph subject guides link and explored out to find some usable sites for our new American history teacher, additional web resources for our Career Investigation teachers, and possibly some new ways to stay abreast of current events for UIL students. I would have not thought about these being wikis, though, unless I accessed them from 23 Things. I should have been able to realize this, I guess, because these sites do have the option to be edited by others.

There are 116 tutorials on wikis on Atomic Learning (43 if you limit it to PCs). Since I am interested in learning to use Moodle, I was glad to be reminded that you can create wiki pages within Moodle for a cooperative class project that can be edited by multiple users. I also watched several of the tutorial movies on wikis in the Web. 2.0 section. I'll have to go back to that later.


In thinking about what use I could make for a wiki in my school, I've thought about a wiki for our technology committee and also a wiki for student book reviews. Another idea for a wiki might be scheduling the library, the library lab, and the laptop cart. That would make the schedule instantly available to all teachers even if they didn't have time to run down to the library. (I think I'll email this idea to myself right now!)

I copied and pasted an idea into the Spring Branch sandbox. Wikis can be used in endless ways.

Thing #15 Web 2.0 & Library 2.0

"In Web 2.0, the Web becomes the center of a new digital lifestyle that changes our culture and touches every aspect of our lives. The Web moves from simply being sites and search engines to a shared network space that drives work, research, education, entertainment and social activities—essentially everything people do."--This quote from Tom Storey in the OCLC newsletter both challenges me and scares me. I like the connectivity, but I think we're moving way too fast to make some down-to-earth decisions about what is best for education. We are letting young people drive how we approach teaching & learning and I'm not sure they are experienced enough to know what is best. So....I think we should adapt these new technologies as they are proven to really be teaching something worth learning. There is still a need to study the past and learn from past mistakes. There is a need for old-fashioned values and stability. Somehow, we've got to update and upgrade without crashing the existing system.

A link from Tom Storey's article brought up this quote by Rick Anderson, "No profession can survive if it throws its core principles and values overboard in response to every shift in the zeitgeist. However, it can be equally disastrous when a profession fails to acknowledge and adapt to radical, fundamental change in the marketplace it serves." This is kind of what I was trying to say in paragraph 1 above. I think we need to change, have to change, will change--but I hope it happens because librarians are aware of the needs of their communities.

Well, I said that Tom Storey both challenged and scared me--that was before I read Dr. Wendy Shultz's predictions of Library 3.0 and Library 4.0 further into that newsletter! 3D libraries and knowledge spas....I will probably be retired by then!

One last quote here, from Christopher Harris, SLJ May '06, "As previously mentioned, school libraries need to extend services beyond the four walls of the media center. One thing I see for the digitally re-shifted library is moving into nontraditional educational spaces. In my organization, we are creating libraries for two educational centers to support career and technical and alternative education programs....We are looking to create something akin to an information commons, which will feature a print and audio fiction collection and primarily digital reference and nonfiction resources." This idea of print/audio fiction and digital reference and nonfiction has definitely crossed my mind during this last year. I personally do not like to read fiction on a computer screen, or an iPhone, or whatever. I like a book. And, in some cases, I still want a book for nonfiction if I plan to read the whole book. But for just looking something up, digital is great.

Thing #14Technorati

The videos made Technorati sound easy to use and talked about a Discover section. I could never find that Discover section (which I especially wanted to do because it listed News as a topic and I was interested to see what was there). I was thinking that Technorati might help our UIL current events students. Maybe somebody can tell me exactly how to make it easy for the UIL sponsor to collect news each day--maybe just a Google alert or Google reader?

I do like tags. They make so much sense to me because they are like an index but instead of being alphabetical they are topical and tag clouds really do show quickly what the major tags are. In searching Technorati School Library 2.0, I came up with 244 posts, 0 tags, and 57 blogs. Definitely different results.

Thing #13 Delicious Bookmarks, etc.

I already had a Delicious account (hadn't been using it, though). I didn't really know enough about it to make it useful until today. Here are a few things I've done in the last hour:

• Took virtual tours of the Coliseum, Great Wall of China, and 5 more wonders (these were linked from the popular list in Delicious)
• Watched a video of a Berkely professor who opened a hat box and held a human brain in her hand
• Re-discovered how to log in to my Delicious acct.
• Added a feed to the top 10 most popular sites in education from Delicious
• Followed some other links about teaching social networking
• Looked at tag clouds to see current popular tags

Yet another way to keep up with topics that I am currently researching. I don't think there is any way to stay up with what I've set up lately (feeds, bookmarks, etc.) but over time I will see what works best for me and use it to make me a better technology media specialist.

I have not yet figured out how to share my Delicious bookmarks. I'll have to go back and figure that out and pick out a few of my favorite tags to share. OK--I'm back now. Here is a link to an eHow site that explains how to share D. bookmarks:

http://www.ehow.com/how_2019685_sharing-bookmarks-delicious.html

Thing #12 To Comment or Not to Comment

I liked the term "culture of sharing" in Meredith Farkas' blog. Although I don't like for people to act like know-it-all's most of the time, I do appreciate good advice when I need it (actually BEFORE I need it).

I also liked Drape's Takes:Edublogger Etiquette in which it was stated "there are multiple ways to respond to a post's comments - giving your readers a sense of validation, building a deeper relationship of your readers, and actively participating in the discursive field we call the blogosphere..."

After searching for blogs about Moodle and also about Interwrite Workspace I am now following two more blogs. I commented on THE Journal regarding electronic textbooks and Gov. Perry's signing of the new bill although that wasn't actually the reason I joined that blog.

Thing #11 Library Thing

My Library Thing

This link is the permanent link to my Libray Thing site where I cataloged 16 books (mostly Jan Karon's Mitford series because I could look them up easily without getting out of my chair). I checked out two other users who had some of these books in their list. This is an interesting concept that I had seen before but had not taken the time to examine closely. I'm thinking of several uses for it right now--our ladies' Bible study group, our small church library, my sister-in-law's extensive collection, etc.

I did add a feed to a YA group (although I didn't actually join the group) and I discovered that you can spend hours just looking through comments and clicking on the topic and reading the whole thread. And then you see a book that sounds good and you click on its cover and off you go to another page. That's my problem--one thing leads to another and I forget what I was doing originally. But I still learned something on my journey. I had not heard of a series that boys will like called Cherub--doesn't really sound like a boy "thing" does it. Then there was a neat idea mentioned by someone in a middle school where they asked the boys to check out girl-type books (like Twilight) and girls to check out boy-type books (like sports or adventure) and then have some class discussions. That sounded kind of fun (although sexist I guess). In fact, there were lots of boys that were interested in the Twilight books in my library.

Thing #10 Image Tools

Ok--I really, really like ImageChef. I did this Sing mosaic, made a customized baseball shirt, and did a couple more mosaics with a cat shape and a heart shape for a little 8-year old friend of mine. I also tried out the poster maker there and did one for my library page.

The image below was created in Wordle using words from my home page at school. I guess you can tell that I really like WORD images and BLUE.

I am still in the process of trying some of the other image generators but I wanted to post this before I fogot what I had done on these two.

I used Dumpr to make a Rubic's Cube photo for my school weg page last year. It is on my home page at http://jimned.region14.net/webs/lcross/home.htm





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Thing #9 Useful library related blogs and feeds

"Twitterature"--this is a new term that I ran across while checking out Technorati. There is a book by this name in which two college students are trying to take great literature and pare it down to 140 characters--thus Twitterature. I did not really like Technorati--it was too busy and I just didn't have time to figure it out.

I liked Syndic8.com because it showed categories like the 10 most popular or 10 most visited. This lead me to add a feed to Teen Reads to my blog.

I plan to access the Atomic Learning tutorials later to help me with this "feed" concept. I am reluctant to add more online "reading" to my schedule right now since I barely have time to keep up with my emails!

Thing #8 RSS feeds and readers

I had subscribed to an RSS feed before but had kind of forgotten about it.
So I started at the beginning. I created a Google Reader and now have 5 RSS feeds. One thing I am researching is interactive lessons and activities for our teachers who have interactive whiteboards. The first thing I discovered was that eInstruction is starting a new teacher community for our Interwrite boards and Workspace software on June 28th. I might not have known about that as quickly without the RSS feed. I also joined 4 library blogs. This will help keep me posted on several topics at one location. I can see this being extremely useful to all teachers trying to keep up with a topic. This is a concept that we definitely need to show our teachers in staff development in the fall. I bookmarked my Google Reader site to make it easy to get to because my brain is overwhelmed right now with all of the new stuff I'm trying to do!

Thing #7 Google Docs and More

I created this Google presentation in about 5 min. It contains a video from the Google site that shows how easy it is to create a Google presentation. Click on the blue tab to Start Presentation once you go to this link:
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=ddshxpdm_0dw9tk8f7

I also read about Google Education Edition for schools (email, calendars, etc.) I don't think we will change over to that, but there was an interesting explanation about seamless integration with Outlook using Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook. Does anyone use any Google apps at your school?

Last year I creatd an iGoogle page and it was fun for a while, but I didn't have time to keep up with all of the gadgets that I put on mine. I haven't used it in quite a while.

Thing #4 Registering

It bothers me not to have a Thing #4 post so I just created this one to say that I have officially registered and intend to finish 23 Things this summer.

Thing #6 Mashups

I created a mosaic of birds that was very colorful using the mosaic mashup. I wanted to use the picture here but I could not get the accompanying code to copy over correctly so that I could give credit for the pictures. I really liked the way this mashup let you choose a layout and then just enter a Flickr tag to gather in the photos. This would be a great way for our 6th grade students to create an unusual graphic for their "animals" project. I also created a trading card, which I'm including in this post. It was fun to choose my icons.

Thing #5 Flickr & Creative Commons

This photo of a cocker spaniel puppy sleeping on a book is from the Creative Commons section of Flickr.

It is from the section that only requires recognizing the source; in this case Paul Keleher: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pkeleher/1127378375/

I just love cocker spaniels--especially puppies, and we have a black and white one named Buster. Since this one is sleeping on a book, it makes it appropriate for my blog.

Thing #3 Create a blog with an avatar

Seems like the hardest part of creating a blog was trying to decide what to call it. I can't remember if I've seen the word "techbrarian" anywhere else but it is a word that I think describes those of us who are involved in both technology and libraries. So I decided to do a blog where people who use technology and like books could share thoughts about either or both of those things. Creating the avatar was fun. I didn't have any trouble with the face or the attire, but it took me a while to find the background that I wanted--a computer lab. At first, the only school-related setting I could find was a school cafeteria--definitely not the place I want to be.

Thing #2--Habits of Lifelong Learners Revised ed.

I just read about the 7 1/2 Habits of Lifelong Learners, and it was easy for me to pick out which one is the hardest for me--playing! All of the others sounded just like me, but if I have to pick the easiest one for me I would say that it is teaching and mentoring others. I created this blog for librarians that like to use technology and/or for technology people who like to read books. I'm kind of in the middle on this topic, but the two people I work most closely with are a librarian who is becoming more technological and a tech specialist who loves to read. I hope to continue being a lifetime learner through the use of both books and technology.

Thing #1 Read a Blog

I have read blogs before but I have never done one myself. I think this is one of those things that you just have to learn by doing.