Carson

Carson has been right by my side through my 23 things. Any time I have the computer out at home he has to be in the chair beside me pushing any button I can't keep his hand away from. He loves the videos. As I went to other sites to visit and comment on, he recognized the green screen and wanted to play the videos. He looked for Clifford and Mickey Mouse everywhere. When we made his video he chose the pics and the music. Animoto has been a hit with our family. Both boys now have a video and Chris has used it too. He is good enough that when he placed his video on his site (txwranglers.com) he used html code to adjust to what he wanted.

Cody' Football

Children's Book Week

under the wire

Just in time, I finished. It hasn't been easy. I flip flopped on whether I was going to invest the time to finish before the deadline. (and believe me, I used every minute of it) I enjoyed it and see myself visiting and revisiting the blogs and activities to become more familiar with the tools. I have to practice for anything to stick. Some of the things that were my favorite were the Animoto site, the trading card maker, and the online image generator. I think in the long run, I will enjoy the wikis. I enjoy reading and participating in the Mockingbird one Anna created. Creating one myself will take practice and patience.

As far as the program, I loved the layout and the self pacing. (even though I took the entire time) I liked it so much that I forwarded it to other teachers on my staff and even a couple of family members. This is something that I think is worth while and is helping me become a better librarian. I think this is some of the best staff development I have experienced. I would gladly participate in a similar program.

I am not the C-tech on campus but many people turn to me with problems to trouble-shoot. I need to be as current as possible with technology and ways to apply it. My C-tech, Carla Middleton and I collaborate well together and I work with the best staff in the world. Everyone is willing to collaborate and try new things. I hope to practice over the summer and implement some things during the next school year. I have already used some of the tools and have had a positive response from teachers.

thing #23

Creative Commons is something I think I may have seen before but not have known what it was. I have seen the symbol before on image searches with Google. Now I can say I know what the symbol stands for. As I visited the site, the video helped me understand the concept better. By sharing work, people can be more productive. As I searched for topics, I liked how the results had abstracts to help me determine which results would be a best fit. I think librarians could use this to create and share research units or collaborate with teachers. It made me think of Promethean Planet where you can go search and use flip charts that other create and submit.

blog posting #17

I have opened a Zoho account. I haven't received a confirmation e-mail so I am not sure if the account is valid. We will see when I try to post this. As I have looked around in Zoho and at other people's postings, I realized that the possibilities of this are much more than I originally thought. I think one of the most useful aspects of this is that others can collaborate with you online. I like that there are so many options to create in.

• word
• excell
• power point

I understand that I am not actually in those programs but in a web based version of them but the familiar formats help with creating the documents. One thing I think I would like to try with this is a spread sheet coordinating library resources and title I resources available for teachers and students.  

thing #22

I LOVE THIS!! This is my favorite thing of all. I do yearbook on my campus so I am kind of like the school photographer. I always have pictures. This was easy to do and easy to get on my blog. That hasn't been the case with everything. I think the kids would love this as long as it could be linked to the curriculum. I can see me doing some of these with my personal pictures. Carson was with me when I did this and he enjoyed the video and liked Clifford in particular. I think we will have a lot of fun with this!

thing #21

I looked through several of the directories listed and also used my itunes to find interesting podcasts. As I looked, I noticed some of the ones I thought sounded interesting might be a year or 2 old. I also think that my attempt at creating podcasts on my campus influenced what I was most interested in. Radio Willow Web is definitely my favorite and is currently the only RSS feed in my itunes. After our podcast training earlier in the year I noticed that I had too many feeds and I wasn't keeping up with them. So I cut back. I must admit that I am much more interested in creating podcasts rather than listening to them for fun or information. We created one last year successfully and even pretty easily. This year I am currently working on 3 and that is not the case. These have been difficult to produce. I am working with 5th graders rather than 6th and I think that makes a big difference. The amount of guidance and editing has increased. I see a light at the end of the tunnel though. All 3 classes should be ready to record after Spring Break.

thing #20

This was my choice of video to post. I love the funny stuff. My husband Chris visits YouTube so I was familiar with it and already had some favorite videos. My son likes the martial arts stuff and Chris also checks out the football stuff. We mainly have watched videos for entertainment but I noticed some informational videos on other people's blogs. Something new to me was the embedding of the video on my blog. I didn't know you could do that and was surprised that it was so easy.

thing #19

This is my bubble map to help me organize my weeding priorities. I am sure I could use this for many other things, I just need to think of them. It took me a minute to get used to this but I reminds me of inspiration. I think this would be very useful for teachers in the classroom or for projects in the computer lab. We are implementing thinking maps on our campus and this might could used for that. I also like that people can collaborate on a document.







This is my flowchart. I made it with Gliffy. I tried the other one first but could never get a confirmation e-mail to start off. Gliffy was easy to get started with. I guess the main draw back would be that you can only do 5 documents free.

thing #18

In perusing the Web 2.0 awards list I chose to view the short list. I am glad I did because even that seemed extensive to me. I was suprised, even thought I shouldn't have been, to see so many catagories. Sometimes I forget that the web is large and diverse as it is. Since I knew that YouTube was an upcoming thing I visited it. I am familar with it because Chris has shown me videos from it before. I visited Craigslist from the Classifieds and Directories list, Yelp from the Cities and Guides list and Farecast from the Travel list. These sites I visited just for curiousity and pleasure. (I don't do that very often, I am not much of a web surfer.) I enjoyed the list because I don't surf the web often and it was an easy way to look at some of the best sites out there. (According to the experts)

thing #17

I got this out of order because I couldn't figure out how to post my Zoho document. Thanks to Mary I got it to post but it is now out of order.

thing #16

Again, visiting the sandbox wiki was made easier because I visited Anna's Mockingbird wiki first. Contributing was easier once I decided what I would like to add. I enjoyed going through the entries on this wiki. Sometimes I am not the most creative thinker when it comes to implementing all the new things I am learning. Reading other's ideas was great and it helped me think of ways I might like to use some of these tools. I like some of the podcasting ideas. I didn't think of me generating a podcast as an instructional tool. All of my efforts have been in creating student generated ones as a way of teaching science concepts and writing skills.

thing #15

I think wikis are a great way to collaborate with colleagues and students. I see many ways to use them to communicate and share ideas. I appreciate Anna for providing the Mockingbird wiki and I used it to help with this post. Once I realized that the invite key word was case sensitive, it was no problem getting in and contributing. I wasn't as creative as most (like changing the color of the text) but I was able to contribute successfully. I enjoyed reading others contributions and building on some of them. I see many possibilities for wikis in schools. I think the way I might like to use it is to perhaps give teachers a way to collaborate and maybe coordinate projects with other special classes or with our title I teachers. The draw back to this is that it relies upon other people participating to be successful. I believe that means the creator of the wiki would need to continuously promote the wiki to the other participants. I think in the long run this may be one of the more useful tools in this training.

thing #14

This is all very new too me and before starting our 23 things, I don't think I had ever heard of Web 2.0, Business 2.0 or Library 2.0. Based upon my experience and reading so far, Library 2.0 means, to me anyway, taking the tools out there available on the Web and looking for creative ways to use them in my library program to better serve my patrons. Being an elementary public school library means that I have a distinct population to serve, and maybe everything out there is not a specific fit for my campus. I think what this means in regards to public school libraries is that information is moving at an incredible speed these days and we must keep up with it in a way that is beneficial and safe to our students and staff.

thing #13

I think this is one of my favorite tools. I book mark so many things and my bar is always a mess. I also switch from my laptop at home to PC at work so I think I will use this all the time. To set it up and add the bookmarks was so easy and it was neat to see how many other people has those sites marked too. Using the list developed for the 23 things was easy too. I can see where this would be easier than using Filamentality to make hotlists for the website. Since all of the computers are now linked to the server, I am making hotlists in Word and posting them to the server for classes instead of posting them on the website. I think this may ever be easier.

thing #12

I looked around these sites and created a Facebook profile. I am so uncomfortable with this and I am quite sure I am not giving it a fair chance. I know I should become knowledgeable about this because the kids are so into this, but I have some very strong preconceived ideas. Last year one of our PTA programs was with the Mesquite Police department and the officer stated how dangerous these site were in no uncertain terms. I am so leery of putting any personal information on the web. I joined the Dallas/FTW network then quit the network within minutes because of things that made me uncomfortable. I canceled the Facebook profile then created one in Ning. I liked Ning so much better. It did ask me for e-mail address and password the way Facebook did. (One of the reasons I canceled the Facebook profile soon after I created it.) I really can't think of a use for this for my campus or library program but that is not to say there couldn't be one.

thing #11

I like the idea of Library Thing and would have really loved it before I had kids. I used to have an extensive personal library. Now I have limited my personal library and use the district and public libraries more. We have a ton of children's books in our house but those belong to Cody and Carson, and I think that would be overwhelming to try to register. I tried to create a link to my Library Thing collection but have not been successful yet. I will update this post when I figure out what went wrong.

thing #10

This was fun I just wish I was more creative with my words. My favorite image generator site was the custom sign generator. I liked the fact that it had many links to different image generating sites. I also like the fact that when you scrolled across the link it gave an example of what the image would look like. This helped me choose the sites I would be more interested in before I went to the link. My favorite sites were the Comic Strip Generators, the Post It Note Generator,and the Safe for Kids site.

Some of the ways I might use these would be images for the website, a bulletin board or maybe to create a special bookmark for a particular reason. I haven't thought of a great way to use them with students yet but I am sure I will find a ton of uses once I read everybody's postings on thing #10.

Here are some of the images I created.

thing #9

I hate to admit this about myself but I find that I am not much of a blogger. Out of these tools I found that I like to use the Edublog Award winners. I think the reason I liked this was because it was pretty simple and straight forward. I wasn't randomly searching. It had categories and several choices to compare within the category. Most of the others I found somewhat confusing or just not worth the effort. Another thing that I found interesting and annoying at the same time is that the internet is world wide and I may be reading something that is going on or relevant on the other side of the world instead of my world. As of right now, I like the Google Alerts much better. If I were to search out individuals to converse with professionally, I would use e-mail because I honestly believe that there is no other school district out there doing things better than Mesquite.

thing #8

I am adding to this post because I have now had time to enjoy or be annoyed by some of my feeds. I love my Willow Web feed. I am using this as a model for podcasts in my library program. It is helpful to give the kids an example of what I want them to produce. I found that I don't really like all the news feeds I subscribed to. I found that I had too many and they were more annoying rather than informative. I did like the one daily summary feed though so I kept it. Google Reader made it simple to change my subscriptions as I discovered what I liked and disliked.

When learning about RSS feeds, I chose to work with Google Reader. I am trying to keep things as streamlined as possible so that the tools I am learning to work with do not become too overwhelming. In doing so I decided to revisit a previous task (thing #7) and create a home page in iGoogle. I love the idea of the RSS feed. We are all so busy and having one place where I can go to check for updates is so easy. I added more subscriptions than I thought I would.

As far as feeds go, my next goal is to learn how to make a website feed to subscribers. I am working with three 5th grade Science classes on podcasts. Once they are ready to post, I would like people to be able to subscribe.

thing #7

This will be an ongoing post. I just set up my calendar, created a google alert and downloaded the Picasa web album. I did set up an album and I hope this will be useful as I go between my PC at work and my laptop. I do the yearbook for my campus and I do most of it from my laptop because I like to work with iphoto. I had a little trouble last year doing everything from the laptop. Studio Works seemed easier to work with on the PC. I hope using Picasa and the web albums it will be easier to work from both computers. I also hope that I can use the albums in connection with my library website.

As for the calendar, Chris already has one and has urged me to use it. I am glad this has pushed me to go ahead and create one. I think it will take practice to develop the habit of using it. Creating and using are two different things and I will have to continue to make myself use it until it becomes a habit.

I will update this post as I continue to practice using these tools.