Reflection

I admit, at the beginning of the semester I looked at this assignment and thought it would be too easy for me. I consider myself to be pretty adept at technology and a lot of the things listed I had already done before. I was very pleased to discover that no only did I manage to learn some new things, but I also got a refresher on some of the things I had done before but not for a while. I also really appreciated the opportunities I had to help my classmates out with some of the things they were struggling with. It was very satisfying to me to be able to help them solve some of the problems they were having, even when I didn't initially know how to solve them myself. I feel like this experience has given me an insight into what it might be like working with some of the teachers at a school. I have realized how much I really enjoy using technology in an educational setting and how useful it can be in regards to being a teacher librarian.

 Just to summarize I thought I would write down some of the things I plan on using once I acquire a position at a school (interview tomorrow!! cross your fingers for me!).

 Twitter: This is probably the one that has surprised me the most. I have always thought of Twitter as a facebook's more vain counterpart. It never really seemed like something that would be useful or enriching. After exploring a little I realized what a benefit it could be especially when it comes to collaborating with other librarians. I really liked discovering the #tlchat, which I plan on keeping up with as well as participating in.

 Diigo: I have already started using Diigo! I love love love being able to highlight webpages!! It is so convenient and helps me remember a lot more information. I also really like the tagging and sharing tools and it seems like that will be a great way to share information with teachers.

 Skype: The idea of using Skype to do author visits is awesome! I can't wait to try and organize something like this. What a great tool to help kids find a deeper connection with the books they read. I also really like the idea of using the group chat feature to collaborate.

 I have really enjoyed doing this project and look forward to using the skills I have gained to improve myself as a librarian.

Survey

What an awesome tool this is!! I imagine this would be incredibly useful in gauging attitudes of teachers, administrators and students in regards to the library as well as collaboration.

Analysis:

The majority of the people who responded said they liked science fiction and dystopian fiction. They gave me some good ideas of some books to read this summer!

Podcast

You can find the podcast I listened to here. The podcast I listened to was about blogging in the classroom. A junior high music teacher told about her experience using a blog to further discussion in her classroom. Ever since I read about blogging on The Mighty Little Librarian's blog I have been thinking about it and trying to find out more about it so this podcast was perfect for me. She talks about how it was a great way to continue the conversation they were having in class to another venue. She also talks about how people who won't speak up are much more willing to in a an online environment. Another thing she talks about is incentivizing the kids with extra credit points or making the blog an assignment. A great thing about this podcast was that she gives tips for implemenation at the end of it, which is kind of what I was looking for. She also gives a link to her blog so you can see what she did (you can find that here). It is really interesting to see the way the students interact with each other and how she moderates the comments. This podcast was a great way for me to see how exactly blogging could effectively be used in the classroom.

Online Video

I watched a video on 21st Century School Libraries. It was very good and would be a great way to introduce to a faculty what exactly Library teachers can do for a school. In the video a high school, junior high, and elementary school librarian all talk about the different ways they are involved in their schools. As expected each librarian regardless of the grade talked about collaborating with teachers, implementing technology, and helping kids find books to read. One of the things I really liked that the middle school librarian said was that she often times helped the kids with technology. I think a lot of the time when I think about providing technology support in a school I think of the teachers when in reality the kids will also need help using certain technologies. It was nice to be alerted to that. Another thing that I really liked that they said was the emphasis that the library was no longer a quiet zone. All of them talked about how much activity went on in their libraries and how there were always kids doing things there, that is what a library should be! The elementary school librarian talked about reinforcing what is going on in the classroom with activities in the library. We talked about this a little bit in Jadene's class and I think it is such a great way to support the teachers. This video, although not terribly informative, was fun to watch and interesting.

Wordle

I created a wordle from my book blog!

Twitter

I have to admit, I have always been skeptical about using twitter as a library tool. I completely and totally understand the ways it can be used to collaborate with teachers, administrators, and other librarians, but I have had a hard time accepting that students will willingly follow and respond to tweets from their school librarian. Pam, Brad, Craig, and I were discussing this a little at class on Tuesday. Their ideas were that if you provided some sort of incentive for following the school library's Twitter feed it would prove motivational for students to pay attention to it. I suppose that would work the same with a library Facebook page. I have started following a number of school libraries in the surrounding area as well as the twitter feeds of the blogs I added to my google reader. I have also added some of my classmates library Twitter feeds. I think that Twitter is a great way to share links and information as well as a really awesome forum for figuring out problems in your library and how to address them. One of the ways which I saw this in action was through a blog post by The Mighty Little Librarian about if doing self check outs in her library would be a good idea. She asked other librarians how it was organized and executed in their libraries and got a better idea of how it would work in her own. Another really cool thing that is going on on Twitter is #tlchat, which I assume is teacher librarian chat. Searching using this hashtag allows you to see all the posts that librarians have tagged. It appears that every week they pick a topic for discussion and then tweet about it to each other! What a great way for librarians all over the country to collaborate with each other.

Thing 14 Blogs

I had a lot of fun exploring the different library blogs on the different blog lists. The first blog I decided to follow is called Mighty Little Librarian . This middle school librarian does all sorts of awesome things in her library and documents them on her very thorough blog. Some of the things I noticed that she blogs about are book reviews , library programs, and collaboration. She has some really awesome ideas for how to get kids coming to the library and how to work with teachers. I loved her "Who is your book crush" display in her library for valentines day. The second blog I decided to follow is called Venn Librarian: Reflections about the intersection of schools, library, and technology. She talks a lot about the implications technology has on school libraries as well as education. There also seem s to be a lot of professional development resources on her blog which I really like. One of the blog posts that stood out to me was about learning commons, which was very helpful as I am in the final stages of creating my virtual learning commons for Stillwater library. There are some really great ideas on her blog, one of which is a mother daughter book club. I am interviewing for a middle school librarian job on Monday and it is relatively close to the school my mom works at, I think having our schools do a mother daughter book club together would be so much fun! I guess I never thought of library blogs being a good resource and this has opened my eyes to the idea that following blogs is a great way to not only keep up on recent news but also get great ideas for library programs and collaboration.

School Library 2.0

I really liked some of the ideas presented in this article. Specifically I thought the idea of moving library resources into easily accesible spaces was particularly relevant. When I think about what I want to do with my own library, I often take this into consideration. How can I provide the resources students and teachers need outside of school hours? Here are a few ideas I have had: most certainly I would include a link to my catalogue on my website, similarly I would provide various book lists and pathfinders Another way which I can make accessing information outside the library's physical space easier would be to educate the students and teachers at my school about the resources available through the Pioneer Library. It seems to me that although many people know about this resource, they struggle to find ways to use it to their advantage. I would want to provide some sort of staff and student training on the tools available to them. I also really like the idea of moving conversations about books to the web. I know for me as a student I was often hesitant to express my opinions about the things that I read, but when I went to college and was able to post things on discussion boards I was much more willing to participate. There comes a certain freedom with posting things online that reduces the anxiety you feel about voicing your thoughts and opinions. Although I think this is a wonderful tool, it could prove to be problematic, specifically if there is anonymity within the forum you are posting. I really like the idea of the library providing resources for classes outside the core curriculum.

Technorati

I have never done anything on Technorati, so this was a good experience for me. I noticed that although all the categories had  over 10,000 links, the entertainment blogs were definitely the most represented among the categories. I was surprised to see that the science category had some of the lower numbers, it also seemed odd to me that the science category wasn't broken down into smaller sub categories, which is what I would expect.

I like that you can search blogs or blog posts but i think that searching through blog posts is much more effective as sometimes blog names don't correlate with their subject matter.  For instance, I wanted to read more about the silk road which is a drug trafficking site available only by using TOR and going into the deep web ( have no fear Anne, I am not looking to purchase any opium, it is just very interesting to me). When I searched silk road using the blog search I got zero results, but when I changed to posts I was able to find some posts that related to what I was interested in knowing more about.

Technorati definitely seems like a great way to keep up with some more popular blogs as well as a great way to discover new blogs.

Diigo

Diigo seems like a really awesome tool. I definitely have always wanted a tool to be able to highlight and annotate the information that I consume on the internet, it has been frustrating to not be able to do that because I end up losing information or not remembering some of the things that I have found. I really like the tagging that is available on Diigo, it seems like a much more efficient way to organize book mark. I also think it is awesome that you can mark things as unread and keep of list of them ready to access. Tagging also seems like a great way to be able to collaborate with other educators. I found the tag edchat to be really interesting and useful. Similarly, the ability to tag and share those tags would be great for compiling links for teachers, for instance if a history teacher asked you to help her find some primary sources for WWII, you could easily find and tag websites that have that content and then direct her to the tag.

I also think Diigo is a great professional development tool. While I browsed I found evidence of so many educator related tags and articles. It is a wealth of information that is easily accessed and categorized.

I will definitely be using Diigo's annotation tools and tagging tools and look forward to using it to share links with teachers when I have a library of my own.

Library Thing

I really like Library Thing, many moons ago I had a Library Thing account and I couldn't seem to find it to revive it. It is too bad because it might be fun to go sort through some of the books I was reading back then. That is one of the coolest things about Library Thing, I don't know about you but I have a really hard time keeping track of all of the books I have read. Just the other week I borrowed a book from my mom's library, started reading it only to realize that I had read it already! Library Thing is a great tool for remembering what you read as well as keeping track of what you read. I think it is a great idea to put a widget like this on your school blog so that your students know what you have been reading.

 Another really good way to use Library Thing is to see what other librarians are reading that maybe you haven't been introduced to yet. It is a minor form of collaboration if you think about it, through the review function you can figure out what sort of content is in it as well as if it is a good book or not.

You can find my Library Thing account here.

Image Generator

This is the image that I created, because I love to read! 

Skype

I have to admit, I was a little skeptical about what exactly Skype could do for a librarian. After reading 50 Interesting Ways to Use Skype in the Classroom, my mind has been changed. Initially my thoughts were that a great use of Skype would be for author visits. A lot of author's will have a Skype talk with students for free and this is a great way to foster interest in an author's work, without having to shell out the big bucks to get them to your school. Another way I thought of to use Skype is for collaboration with other librarians. Skype has a great feature that allows you to add multiple users to a chat or video call. This lets people interact with one another without having to travel to one place, or have to send hundreds of e mails to each other.

    Some of the things that I read in the article that I would like to use in my own library are:

Meeting with other classrooms: this seems like a great supplement to a geography or language arts class. If the students are learning about a certain culture it would be awesome for them to talk with some kids from that culture to make it more personal and relatable.

Poetry collaboration: I really like the idea of writing and sharing poetry with other classrooms, what a fun way to get kids excited about writing poetry!

Meet with librarians, or advisors: Skype is a great way to easily communicate with people you might see very often. Having this technology allows us to hold question and answer sessions in real time with people who aren't around all the time. Similar to this, I like the idea of doing tutoring over Skype or holding office hours over Skype. It seems very convenient and I think that some students might prefer to ask questions over text instead of face to face.

There are a lot of really cool ideas to use Skype in school and I am excited to try some of them!

Wikis

Wikis are wonderful tools for a school librarian! Wikis allow multiple people to edit and add information into a document that everyone can see. This allows users to compile and exchange information in a manner that is both efficient and useful. Wikis can be great tools for librarians because they make it very easy for librarians, teachers, administrators and students to collaborate with each other. I think that wikis are awesome tools to communicate with other people. The downside to wikis is that anyone can edit one. Although this is the very thing that makes wikis amazing, it can cause problems. For instance, a number of years ago I had been thinking about some things and I wanted to remind myself of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. I went to the wikipedia page and much to my dismay someone had edited to have the word "fart" about every five words. Even though the content was still there, an experience like that definitely made me question the validity of wikipedia as a source, even for background information.

    One wiki that I think is really awesome is my Mom's wiki for the Albion Middle School Library . It has some really interesting and awesome links that would be helpful for both teachers and students. Some of those include booklists, book trailers, educational games, links to flash cards for various subjects, and common core information.

Big Huge Labs Experiment

I was going to put the year of your birth, but I have no clue how old you are.

Flickr Picture

Library, a photo by Filippo Venturi on Flickr.

Flickr photo
Jyll was having a bit of trouble getting a picture on her blog, It was good because I figured out how to really easily add a Flickr picture to my blog if I want to. I also got to explain what HTML was, which I have never had to do before! I really liked this picture I found on Flickr, I love the smell and feel of old books and I adore perusing libraries and used book stores. This image makes me think of all the old books I have had the pleasure of handling.

Life Long Learning

I have always really liked the idea of life long learning. I grew up in a family where learning was a very important part of our lives. As long as I can remember I have watched my mom take classes for fun or to help her in her professional life. Similarly, my dad is always reading something to help him understand how the world works. Because of their example I feel like I have an appreciation for learning for the sake of learning.

     I really enjoyed the 7 1/2 habits of life long learners, although I think I have a number of the habits down there are a few that I really need to work on. I definitely need to adjust my habits to reflect habit one. I have a hard time when I am in the thick of things why exactly I am doing them. I get so overwhelmed and worried about the task at hand I forget what the point of it all is. I think one way that I can better develop this habit is to create concrete short term goals that directly relate to my long term goals. That way, when I complete my short term goals I will see where exactly it is taking me.

    Habit three is another one that I probably need some work on. As mentioned above, sometimes I get overwhelmed with learning. Being able to view problems as challenges will allow me to not feel quite so anxious about the things that I am doing.

   I also have a hard time with habit number 4. Having confidence in myself is something that permeates many aspects of my life. I need to remind myself that if I work hard and put time into learning eventually I will understand and excel at the things that I am learning.

I definitely feel like I have a solid understanding and am good at executing the rest of the habits. I certainly have developed my tool box for learning by taking the time to figure out how I best learn. Having that knowledge has made studying and learning so much easier. Likewise, using technology to my advantage has never been a problem for me. The internet and computers allow access to some amazing information and programs that help with learning. Teaching or mentoring others has always been a big part of my learning. Often times during my undergraduate years I would ask my roommates if I could explain concepts that I was learning about because I knew it would give me a better understanding of those things. The last habit, play, is also currently part of my habits. I really like being able to mess around with new technology or ideas and get a lot of pleasure from thinking about and doing new things.