Thing 23: Summin' It Up

Woo hoo! I made it, an especially sweet thing since this is my second attempt at this. :)

Library2Play and the 23 Things has been a marvelous learning experience. I know I won't incorporate EVERYTHING into my repertoire right away, but the opportunity to become familiar with all the tools has been priceless. My favorites are podcasts, YouTube/TeacherTube, Rollyo, blogging, Google reader, wikis, and the wide world of mashups. There a couple that I think are awesome, but I've found it more difficult to internalize their use. Del.icio.us, for example. I see the potential, and I know it's really easy to use, but for some reason it hasn't become part of the "way I do things" yet. I'm confident it will, though. It will just take more repeated use for it to become second nature to me. I can't wait to get the students involved in podcasts and online image generators and wikis. Actually, the entire faculty!

What I think is great about all this 2.0 stuff is that it's in its infancy. New applications are being developed by brilliant people everyday, meaning that there will always be something new for people like me to learn. I never want to be the "oldster" who's out of touch. I guess that means the kickball captains will have to host new "games" on the "playground" each year! I wanna play! I wanna play!

(And the anthropologist in me is fascinated by the way our world is changing...how our social interactions are changing, etc.)

I'm going to keep working on commenting more. For some reason, it was hard for me to do. And as I try all these great, new Things with my students this year, I'm going to post my experiences here on this blog.

Keep "Two-point-oh-ing," everyone!

(photo courtesy of Emile! at Flickr)

Thing 22: Nings

As a novice librarian (I only have one year under my belt), the TeacherLibrarianNing is awesome! It's a great place to ask questions and solicit advice. With "back-to-school" right around the corner, I was particularly interested in the discussion thread about how to "jazz up" the beginning of the year, or what kinds of activities make great school-year starters. I signed up a long time ago, but confess that I haven't ever really utilized it. Duh.

Thing #21: Podcasts

Confession: I've been dreading this one. I've been worried about what my podcast would be about, what equipment I needed to do it, and hearing my own voice. Ugh! Now that I've done it, though, I'm thinking, "Wow! That was fun! I want to do another one!" I guess what I put together is considered a vidcast? Do I HAVE to make that distinction? I used PhotoStory 3 to make a booktalk photostory of this year's Texas Bluebonnet Award Nominees. I got the covers of the books and the book descriptions from www.amazon.com.



Sorry about the extraneous noise. I ended up doing the audio on this some place other than home, where my microphone was, so I just used the built-in microphone on the laptop. If you listen closely to the narration for Marvelous Mattie, you'll hear my sister's golden retriever in the background yelping as she has a bad dream. Hehe... I plan to go back and redo this so it's more professional, but I wanted to get what I have up on this blog for 23 Things. Also...*ducks sheepishly*...I got tired before making it to every book, so after Lawn Boy, there's no narration.

(It IS taking a while to process the video.)

Thing #20: YouTube and TeacherTube

I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE YouTube! I've been a fan of it for a while now, but never really thought of using it for teaching purposes. I used to teach 8th graders, so I heard about YouTube and MySpace before they became household words. I can spend hours looking up cool stuff, most of it music related or humorous. There are some really talented people out there, and how wonderful that they now have an avenue to publish their work. Makes it easier for those of us who AREN'T talented, too, because now we don't have to try to reinvent the wheel when we aren't inventors!

I searched YouTube for librarians and found some funny stuff. I particulary liked a video of "The Librarian Song," but I couldn't get it embedded because for some reason the entire code wouldn't paste into blogger. Grrrrr.... If you want to see it, go to YouTube and search "librarian song."

I'd like to see YouTube opened up in the district. Yes, there's inappropriate material that kids can access, and it will require more diligence from us, but really, shouldn't we be teaching kids to be responsible internet consumers?


TeacherTube is fabulous. I plan to use it often this year. Here's a photostory that shows the life cycle of a butterfly. I like it because it's simple, colorful, and of good graphic quality. I chose to embed it with the TeacherTube search bar.

Thing #19: Web 2.0 Awards

I really enjoyed checking out the list of Web 2.0 award winners. I saw names I recognized and a bunch I didn't. Over the course of the next months, I plan to investigate even more of them, but for this "assignment" I chose to check out Twitter, which won first place in the Social Networking Mainstays category. First, I'd read about it in several other library professionals' blogs or seen links to their Twitter pages, but what really caught my attention is that it came in first place over Facebook and MySpace, which seemed like quite a feat to me since those names are immensely popular, verging on eponymous with social networking. I wanted to see what Twitter had over them.

If I had to describe Twitter in one sentence, it would be, "It's a social network where people post 'updates,' little blurbs of 140 characters or less about where they are or what they're doing, or their latest observations about life, etc.) as often as they like that other people can sign up to follow and vice verse."

I signed up, posted a tweet (what folks call the updates about their lives), and thought, "Now what?" The directions page said the whole point was to tell people what you're doing at any given moment. That's what it's all about. I thought it was all rather anticlimactic. Just a few days earlier, I'd set up a MySpace page, which was a whole lot more fun since I got to write a few paragraphs "about me" and choose music and a skin and embed other cool widgets.

I spent some time looking for friends on Twitter, but I didn't find anyone I knew. I wasn't keeping up with anyone else and no one else was keeping up with me. It seemed rather pointless, and I was disappointed.

Then, I was reading the Houston Chronicle online, and a headline caught my eye: The tweet life is all about the social. How timely! It was an article about Twitter! After reading this article, it all makes much more sense now. The part that was missing for me was the most essential: the networking! Duh.

Now the question is, How does this benefit me professionally? I can see it as a great way for librarians and/or teachers to let others know about successes they've experienced. On those days when I've facilitated a lesson that went well...beyond expectation...and I'm riding the high that comes with it, I want to share it with others. Not just my emotions, but how it all worked, what caused it to go so well, even what could be done better next time. In the past, this sharing usually took place via impromptu chats with other teachers in the hallway after school. That was great, but I see Twitter as an opportunity to share with even more people. And now that I'm a librarian, and a "one-of-a-kind" on my campus, I don't have the opportunity for hallway chat with colleagues (meaning other librarians...of course I still chat with the teachers). Blogs are a wonderful way to share, but sometimes I don't feel the energy or committment to a blog. There's a feeling that blog entries should be longer, more in depth. With Twitter, I can jot off a few sentences and not feel the pressure of the "fully-loaded" blog entry. Twitter is like the sticky-note version. Likewise, I can see what successes and frustrations my fellow librarians are experiencing. And the best things is that it's asynchronous, so we don't all have to be in the same place at the same time to offer each other support.

Anybody else on Twitter? Let me know so I can add you!