Thing 23 Evaluation

I can't believe I am done. It feels good. This was an intensive course. Being unfamiliar with almost everything, it took longer than I thought. It feels good to be more familiar with the terms I have heard, and to know how to use some very good tools. I'm looking forward to sharing some of the things with my staff. I also want to talk to the other media people who took this course and find out what works well for them. There are a lot of possibilities. I'm making notes as to what to share with staff. I think I'll begin with iGoogle - it was fun and easy. Flickr, Delicious, and mashups would be fun and also easy to use right away. Then there are blogs, wikis, YouTube. I'm sure the staff will have great ideas on how these can be useful. My word to describe this experience - Very Worthwhile!
Thanks to everyone to helped put this together and keep it going.

Thing 22 Staying current

What a project! The next step for me is to go back and look at what I could easily share with staff - some of the things that are useful and or/fun. Each of the items took me longer than I thought they would, so I want to make sure I can make the explanations simple. Maybe I can do 2 a month. I have 2 schools so it's a little harder to even find the time for a meeting. But I feel like I know a little more of what people are talking about. We have a district wide technology specialist group so maybe some of these tools can be shared there. This will help solidify my learning.
I am very interested to see how others - especially those in elementary - see the possible uses of some of these things.
I like the idea of 15 minutes a day. It's overwhelming to try and learn all of these tools in depth, but I certainly can take 15 min. to revisit and get used to a few select tools. Then it would be easier to branch out.

Thing 21

I didn't get the badge into one post - but it did work. To continue from the other post, I looked at Flixster because I enjoy movies. It would be a great way to find movies of a certain type, a specific actor or director and then what others thought about those movies. Then I looked at Teacher Librarian Ning. I liked the sharing of ideas and the access to School Library Journal. I also like posting a question and see what others do. I have been a media specialist for over 30 years but am always looking for better ways to teach lessons.

View my page on 23 Things on a Stick

Thing 21

Visit Library 2.0
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I'm not sure how I would use this in the elementary library. I can see that personally it would be good to talk with others that have the same interests - mysteries, string stories, tatting etc. I did leave a comment for someone. There are so many options on web 2.0 that it would be necessary to choose a few things and work on those. Otherwise you would be on the computer all day.

Thing 20 Facebook and MySpace

I have never used either of these programs and my children were older when they began, so the only reference I have are the stories of the negative aspects. Looking at the Denver Library and Hennepin County Library's MySpace pages I can see that teens would probably rather go there than a regular web page. Those library systems must feel it works. Each had a lot of friends. I like the connections to the authors - they seem more like real people that in turn understand them. That is what we all want (especially teenagers) - to be understood. There was an ad for meeting married women on one page - not good.

It would be interesting to have more connections to book lists and author sites. These could be put on our media center web page. As an elementary school, I don't see the need to go to Facebook and MySpace. We'll have to see how this evolves. It will be interesting to see if any of the media centers in our district use these programs.

Thing 19 Podcasts

I'm not sure how useful the audio podcasts would be in school. The ones I looked at were interviews with people, parts of radio shows, or articles about podcasts. Personally I might listen to some of the MPR podcasts, or some interviews with authors, or some of the political material. One of our administrators did talk about making podcasts of math concepts. I could see that as very useful - but it would need to be visual as well as audio. If students were having trouble remembering how to do the math in their homework, they could watch the podcast. This would help parents also.

Thing 18 YouTube

At the end of the year I teach 4th and 5th graders a string story. They learn how to make a string figure and the story that goes with it. I searched "string figures" and it was interesting to see the videos people have made. If I selected certain videos, students could watch and learn new figures. Unfortunately the child that did the best job of explaining the figure, had the html code disabled, so I couldn't put it on the blog. I still could show students.

In this video, the child does a good job of showing how to do Jacob's Ladder. The volume is very low, but the visual is good.