Final Thoughts: Thing #23

This has been one of the most fun and worthwhile inservice activities I have participated in. What made it especially good were the choices of tools to become familiar with, the timeliness of the topics, and the resource links that someone very smart put together for us! As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, I will now bring much more knowledge to all of my professional reading and my on-the-job interaction with teachers.

This inservice was a much-needed kick in the pants to get going on learning about all of these new tools! Some I will find much more useful than others, but all of them are part of the lives of the digital natives we are teaching these days, so we need to be informed about them.

I hope that other opportunities like this are offered in the future!

What Did I Learn Today?: Thing #22

I hereby resolve to keep up my personal inservice on these various 2.0 tools!!!

I agree that 15 minutes per day is not a lot to commit, and I believe it will be possible for me because my esteemed colleague, Terri Osland, uses these interactive tools on a day-to-day basis in her interaction with me and other colleagues. She regularly shares documents and spreadsheets, she maintains a blog, she is our go-to person for tips on embedding videos, subscribing to social networking communities, etc. She keeps me on my toes!

I very much appreciate having much more background knowledge about so many of the 2.0 tools that are frequently mentioned in articles in our professional journals, now that I have had a chance to try them myself. Thanks for this opportunity!

Other Social Networks: Thing #21

I believe that more-specific, career-related social networks would be more useful to me than general networks like FaceBook or MySpace.

I joined the 23 Things Ning, added the badge to my page, and left a message for Karen Christensson, whom I mentored several years ago she was finishing her media certification and I enjoy still running into at MEMO conferences.

I joined Shelfari a few weeks ago (see "bookshelf" at left!) at the recommendation of a my esteemed colleague, Terri Osland, who thought I might like to share thoughts about the books I was reading and see what other friends are reading. I find that because I'm already very busy reading books for the four book clubs in which I participate, I do not have time to share about them online, but I think it's an attractive site and an intriguing concept, particularly for people who want to share ideas for and about good books but do not belong to an physical book club.


View my page on 23 Things on a Stick

FaceBook: Thing #20

I read the blog entries and documents linked to the Thing tutorial about FaceBook, but I am creating just this "skeleton" entry at the moment because I cannot access FaceBook from school. Both FaceBook and MySpace are blocked in my school district at the request of administration, who were finding that students were nearly addicted to checking their sites for updates on their "friends" lists, reading other students' entries, etc., and teachers were wrestling with a significant classroom management issue.

The prevalence of these social networking sites, and the creative uses of music, videos, photos, etc. within them, provide a clear indication of how "digitally native" our students are. Many teachers would be amazed at the tech savvy of the young people in their classrooms. Like gaming, the use of social networking sites for library-related purposes seems to be essential if we are to truly reach the populations who are important patrons now and into the future.

Podcasts: Thing #19

Over the past couple of years I have listened to various podcasts available in the iTunes library, and Tim Wilson, who used to work in my school district and is now the director of technology for the Buffalo School District, often includes interesting podcasts on his Savvy Technologist blog. This has been a good way for him to share interviews he has conducted with various technology leaders around the country whom he has met at conferences, workshops, etc.

For this Thing, I took a look at the podcasts available through the various sources mentioned, and I particularly enjoyed the "Grammar Grater" weekly podcast available on the MPR site. As a former English teacher, I retain a big interest in correct language usage, and this series of podcasts about "English words, grammar, and usage for the Information Age" is both interesting and entertaining. I subscribed to it by adding it to my RSS links in Vienna.

YouTube: Thing #18

Searching for videos in YouTube is one of the most addictive computer activities in which I see students engaged--they seem to have direct lines of information to the latest and greatest videos, and word spreads like wildfire whenever there is a some new cool video ("cool" usually meaning funny, outrageous, satirical, etc.) that they all want to see.

We do not have YouTube blocked in our school, even through some other schools do, because even teachers have been using it to incorporate short videos into their online course materials and class presentations. Recently we started to get concerned about whether or not the widespread viewing of videos on YouTube might be slowing down our network due to it taking up an inordinate amount of bandwith, so we experimented with blocking it for an afternoon. Guess what--there was in fact no appreciable change in network traffic or speed. So, we decided to let well enough alone.

Out of curiosity, I searched for Hopkins High School in YouTube and found this video, which I practiced embedding into my blog:

ELM Productivity Tools: Thing #17

We are truly fortunate to have such an array of useful online resources provided by State funding!

Although I have used these resources often in my work and promote them and train staff and students in their use, I had never used the "create a web page" feature to store and share search results. This will be a great way to send teachers the results of information searches they on occasion request me to perform for them, and individual students can easily e-mail to themselves the list of articles they would like to "save" for further viewing when outside school.

My school subscribes to ProQuest Platinum, which I find superior to the EBSCO products, and my hope is that I will continue to be able to afford it. All of these online periodical databases keep getting better and better. It is truly amazing how much outstanding information is available to students and staff doing research than there was even ten years ago!

Student 2.0 Tools: Thing #16

I think it's terrific that the Research Project Calculator was developed, and I attended a session about it at MEMO and have shared it with the Language Arts teachers at my school who assign research papers. I think that it not only lays out a reasonable set of steps with reasonable deadlines, but it also has built-in help sheets that are useful for the teachers as well as the students! There is no perfect way to teach the process of preparing a research paper or project, and our teachers continue to fine-tune their approach every year, but having this tool available gives particularly beginning teachers a definite head start. In addition, the fact that it includes timelines and helpful tips for presentations and videos is wonderful, since many teachers, even though they feel familiar with the basic steps involved in doing a research paper, often just assign a presentation or video to their students without much guidance for a reasonable step-by-step process for how to create it in a high-quality way.

Libraries and Gaming: Thing #15

I've been compiling a large file of information and articles about computer gaming, particularly about how gaming relates to building thinking skills and the potential applications of gaming to the world of libraries, and I believe that gaming is another very popular 2.0 activity that we library media professionals need to figure out ways to incorporate into how we help people connect with information.

I chose to explore Second Life for this Thing, since I have been intrigued by this online multi-player "game" for several years, particularly since participating in a fascinating session about it at a MEMO conference, and since my all-time favorite library media hero, Doug Johnson, said in a recent post on his Blue Skunk blog that he will be giving a presentation on Info Island. It's time to get on board!!! I installed it, I have gone through the basic orientation helps, and I am looking forward to getting back to it in the near future so I can fine-tune my avatar and get a better idea of the interesting places there are to visit.

LibraryThing: Thing #14

The LibraryThing tool is quite intriguing! I opened an account and started to add books, and I decided I will focus primarily on listing the books that I have read with my various book clubs and indicating what rating I gave them. This will be a convenient place to keep an up-to-date list of many outstanding books!

I have tried another somewhat similar tool called Shelfari that allows a user to maintain a "bookshelf" and ratings and alerts you when someone else has added the same book to his or her bookshelf, but I found it to be a little more cumbersome that LibraryThing.

I am in four book clubs, so I have PLENTY of opportunities to share ideas about books and get suggestions for good books to read, but I can see where someone who is not participating in any "live" book clubs could get lots of good food for thought by interacting with other book-lovers through LibraryThing. The social possibilities of this site are endless!

Here's a link to my LibraryThing so far:

Productivity Tools: Thing #13

I like the interface of iGoogle the best of the three personalized home page options. It seems easy to move around, and the option of adding a "theme" backdrop is nice. There were so many to pick from--yikes! I customized my homepage and will use it as my regular homepage in Firefox from now on.

I used to be teased by my co-workers for having so many little yellow post-it notes all around my computer screen, but several months ago I started using the electronic version of sticky notes that comes with Macs. It's great! I now keep my computer screen much cleaner, and I can open them, close them, add to them, delete them, color-code them, etc., as I wish!

Zamzar is another product mentioned in this Thing that has been a lifesaver for us in the Media Dept. We have many students in our school who have already converted to (or purchased) the newest version of Microsoft Office, which creates documents and PowerPoints that are not backwards compatible with the earlier version we have at school, so we have been teaching them how to use Zamzar to easily convert their .docx documents to .doc documents, and .pptx PowerPoints to .ppt Powerpoints. Slick!

I'm not sure creating an on-line "to do" list is useful enough for me. I am having pretty good luck with my un-2.0 method!

Do You Digg?: Thing #12

My goodness, there are a lot of possibilities for sharing favorite news items and seeing what other people have shared that resulted in items becoming "popular." Of the four tools listed, I thought Digg and Reddit were cluttered and unattractive, Mixx and Newsvine less so.

I find it interesting that The New York Times online version, which I go to frequently, builds in a capability of sharing articles via Mixx, Digg, etc. I typically share links to articles via e-mail to people I think would find an article interesting, and I haven't given much thought to "sharing" them in a much broader way.

As far as uses go, I can see where keeping tabs on "most popular" news items would be a good heads-up for possible reference questions (and even my personal e-mail provider, Comcast, has started putting links to popular news items on the opening e-mail screen), but I have to admit that I'm not necessarily otherwise interested in what the general population has made "popular." Judging by the very unimportant items that can easily pop up in "most shared" lists just because of their novelty, and the inane YouTube videos that are often the most popular, the taste of the masses does not always match my own! I also tend to feel that many people clog up their lives and minds with nonessential information, while important issues of the world sink below the radar. With SO MUCH information on SO MANY topics, having ways to tailor the "feed" to my personal preferences would be helpful, but I'm sure I will continue to rely on The New York Times and other sites with readers like myself for a more trustworthy gauge.

Tagging and del.icio.us: Thing #11

I tagged a blog entry, set up a del.icio.us account, and tagged and stored some of my favorite sites for book research when I am working on orders and cataloging.

I believe there is potential for this tool in the uses I mentioned above--it will save time when I want to quickly get to my favorite bookstore inventory sites to find out whether a copy of a book I need is on the shelf. This is something I do frequently when students request a particular book and, before I run over to Borders or Barnes and Noble by Ridgedale to buy a copy, I want to make sure there's actually a copy available on the shelf in one of those stores. In addition, when I'm doing original cataloging it's often helpful to double-check some subject headings or classifications that the Hennepin County library uses, and going to "my del.icio.us" would give me a quick link there as well.

I can imagine that the tags would help categorize these various favorite sites in a helpful way. I will be retiring soon, and putting my favorite helpful sites into categories would even be a useful tool to share with whoever has my position next!

Wikis: Thing #10

I enjoyed the entry on Wikis, which are a quick and easy way to collaborate. The little video on planning a camping trip was great--my own camping group could have used that tool when we first started planning an annual camping weekend, although we've been doing it far longer than Wikis have been around!

I was sorry to see that some of the example Wikis are no longer active, particularly the one on library best practices. However, I think that shows that Wikis are particularly useful for collaboration on a specific, focused activity or topic, rather than perhaps having them just go on and on. I made an entry on the "23 Things" Wiki, and I noticed that someone has suggested a focus topic on strategies for marketing books, which provided a good focus for sharing.

Pooled knowledge can be very useful, particularly when one knows and trusts the people in the pool. That's one of the problems with Wikipedia, which isn't banned as a resource at my school, but any information that students find in Wikipedia they are asked to verify in another source. I've read articles comparing entries in Wikipedia with entries in Britannica Online, and several of the Wikipedia articles were found to be more complete, especially about topics in popular culture about which there is lots of information out there that might never be considered important enough for a serious encyclopedia like Britannica. In other words, there are topics about which Wikipedia is likely to be an excellent source, so the idea of banning it entirely seems short-sighted.

Online Collaboration Tools: Thing #9

GoogleDocs has proven useful in recent months as a way to share documents with Media colleagues in my district. The most recent example is a room-by-room inventory of all tech equipment in each school that was compiled by my colleague Terri Osland and then shared with the other Media Specialists for their review. Compiling this inventory is a first step in getting a handle on exactly "what's where" as we try to move forward in a more planful way with technology purchases. Part of Terri's contract is Media at Hopkins High School, and the other part is coordinating technology integration throughout the district, so having a way to easily share documents has been a big help to her and to all of us.

Another interesting use of GoogleDocs in my school has been as a way to have students store documents created at home that they need to open at school. Now that many of our students have a newer version of Microsoft Office on their home computers than the one we use at school, there have been compatibility problems. We try to remind students to save their documents in an earlier version, and we have some computers at school on which they can open them and convert them, and we also tell them about the zamzar.com free conversion site, but sometimes it's easier for students to just use GoogleDocs and avoid having to use any of those other steps, even though they don't need to "share" those documents with anyone but themselves in other settings.

GoogleDocs will be a good way to share my draft of my goals report this spring. Every fall I set several goals for the year (which I communicate to my principals and district-level coordinators), and then in the spring I prepare a report on the progress I made on those goals, along with a bunch of statistical information, of course. I invite my department colleagues to contribute notes to my draft, and rather than e-mailing the document as an attachment, this year I will use GoogleDocs.