#23 Reflection-

This was an incredible experience. It was fun and very worthwhile.
My most favorite thing was creating a Wiki. I didn't know anything about Wikis or how to create one but it was interesting to see the heirarchy of the pages. My least favorite thing was Instant Messaging because I just used my Yahoo account but no one was on the computer when I was to instant message. I think most of the students use texting instead.

The most challenging thing was Facebook. It was the most time consuming thing for me and I feel like I have only scraped the surface to maneuvering around it. However for me it was a worthwhile experience because I really needed to get my page set up and this gave me an excuse to do it.

I learned that if I have the time, I can pretty much figure out what to do on all of these things but the real test comes in using the 2.0 tool. This really boosted my self esteem and I was exposed to many tools such as Ning and Library Thing that I never knew existed.

I will definitely have the reading teachers in my school set up a blog for their students to post comments to. I will also use the Image generators and bookmark in Delicious more often. Now I understand RSS feeds alot better and will check my Google reader frequently. This was a worthwhile project and I will use the technology I learned.

Another aspect I really liked was having a mentor. Any time I had a question, my mentor responded very quickly so I didnot feel alone. I also enjoyed the comments posted after each thing and this sometimes provided helpful tips when completing that thing.

Thanks to all who rounded up the resources for this project and I'm sure there will be more Web 2.0 tools to come.

#22 Developing Your Own 23 Things

I have thought how I could implement this at my school. Most of the staff are not librarians but teachers so the "things" would help them implement these tools with our students. I went through the list of 23 Things and I would have them do at least 10 of the things plus I would add a book trailer thing. I would have them set up a blog just like 23 Things did and then post their projects to their blog. Our Library Director did something similar and we had 6 lessons to work through each resulting in a project. We did Google Docs, Shelfari, Animoto, Creative Commons, Delicious, and Podcasting. The projects were ones I could use with our students. I know this can be adapted to a school environment very easily. Is it possible to copy some of the 23 Things Lessons so I won't have to reinvent the wheel?

Our students are already using these Web 2.0 tools so it is very important that we as librarians become proficient in using them. Our reading teachers are wanting our students to blog their responses to books they've read. These type of assignments help engage the students and promote critical thinking. So to the teachers I day Web 2.0 ready or not, here we come.

#21 Podcasts

I listened to three podcasts.
County of Los Angeles Public Library Teen Podcasts- Volume was not loud enough. Lots of popping noises. The content was targeted to teen readers. There were book talks and recommendations. Content was great as students were doing the talking.

Boulder Public Library- Teen Webcasts- This was a news cast given by teens. Sound quality was good although there was lots of popping.This was top news stories given by teens from Boulder High School.

From Education Podcast Network, I listened to What is Romantic Love? There was a fuzzy noise in the background but sound quality was good. This was a series of podcasts based on a book.

I would not subscribe to any of these podcasts. I don't think there is a big demand for podcasts in middle school because the students would much rather watch a video than listen to a podcast. I think the application would be to let the students create a podcast for a project or possibly to do a playlist for a book.

#20 You Tube

I watched the following videos
Shout It Out For Your Library- A campaign to keep libraries open targeted to the New York City Library and sponsored by celebrities such a Bette Midler, Amy Tan, and Jeff Daniels. This video was geared more to Public Libraries but is great for advocacy.

A Vision of Students Today- The impact of technology on students today. This video gives facts about the amount of technology ie: facebook, Google Docs, cell phones, that students use every day. Does this prepare them for the future? This is an excellent video. It features college students but would be great for Academic Libraries or even to show to High School libraries.
A Vision of K-12 Students- same concept only the video uses younger students. This is a great video to show teachers in a K-12 school.

Book Trailers- I typed in YA book trailer and got alot of results. I watched Cynthia Leitch Smith's Eternal and Neil Gaiman's Graveyard. These really help promote reading to students. We can also use them as examples for students to create their own book trailer on a book they've read.

I really enjoyed this alot and found videos that I will use with my students and faculty. The videos I watched were effective and all of them can promote the use of the library either through reading books or promoting information literacy. The K-12video on technology will be perfect to show the faculty during my orientation.

You Tube is a great resource for my middle school library. I will use it more this upcoming year.

#19 Google Docs

I used Google Docs before and really like it. The purpose I use it for is to build bibliographies among my colleagues on different genres for YA Literature. This time I started a bibliography on Urban Fiction and sent it to one of my MS librarians. I will send it to more people later. I also looked at some of the templates which is a new feature. This was awesome to see some of the ways to use Google Docs. You can even search the templates.

I would like to see some examples of how to use the form since I have never used this document before. I have also been a collaborator on a presentation. This is a way cool 2.0 tool!

#18 Wikis

I really enjoyed creating a wiki and now can get a feel for the difference between a website and a wiki. I looked at the New Moon Movie article on Wikipedia and could see the revisions and history. I think it is very exciting that there can be more than one editor. When creating my wiki, I accidentally added 3 pages by mistake and then could not change the title to say what I wanted. Other than that it was very easy. I never knew I could actually make a Wiki. This was way cool!

#17 LibWorm

I really enjoyed this thing. LibWorm is a very handy search tool to find library RSS Feeds. By keyword, I searched Urban Fiction and Young Adult Literature. I got thousands of results. I then searched by Feed Categories and found School Libraries on the list. I found a very interesting MTV Blog that informed me that President Barack Obama's daughters are reading the Twilight series. When I searched videos under the subjects I found the same MTV blog. There are cross postings betweem topics.

When I used "faculty collaboration" in the exact phrase search, I got a lot of results and read a very informative blog on how to incorporate lessons with teachers. I enjoyed using all of these different methods to search but liked keyword the best.

I know I will use this tool again to find resources and I may possibly subscribe to a feed with my Google Reader.

#16 Library Thing

First I took the tour which was very short and simple but very informative. At first I thought it was like Shelfari but it is so much more. I added 2 titles from my home library and it was neat to see other people who owned the same books as well as comments and reccomendations. I loved the idea of pulling up your home collection while browsing your local bookstore and comparing titles.

I read all of the articles and find the I See Dead People's Books the most intersting just to browse the personal collections of famous people. The Marc and ISBN features sounded intersting but I do very little cataloging at my library (It's done at another location) so I probably would not use these features.

I think I may use this in my library just as a resource if nothing else. The groups that are available to join would certainly benefit with networking and collaborating. Right now I will stick with my free membership and forgo the upgrade.

#15 Digg

For this thing, I opted to just browse Digg to see what exciting news I could find.
I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the News, Images, Videos Most Recent Posts. The top news story was changing right before my eyes every 5 minutes. How cool was that. It went from Paula Abdul quitting Idol to Ling being released from N. Korea. I feel like these are the stories that the people really are interested in reading rather than the news posts on Yahoo that the company wants me to read. I will definitely look at this more often.

The next thing I did was look at the top story in a subject category and read the comments. It was neat to see all the people who dugg the article and made comments on it. The article I read was on organic food and the readers had alot of opinions on this subject. I learned alot from the comments. This is truly a people's news forum. I really dig Digg!

#14 Delicious

I created a Delicious account a few years ago and really never used it. I didn't know about the different buttons and now that I have the Bookmark on Delicious button I will use this Web 2.0 tool alot more. Now when I want to bookmark a website I can bookmark it in both my Favorites and Delicious at the same time. This is awesome.

This time, I imported a folder and added 3 bookmarks to my Delicious Account.I really like the concept and plan to try and use it more diligently. I really think we are moving to a Digital Desktop concept and this is just part of it. Plus I like having accesss to my bookmarks on more than one computer.

Here is the link to my Delicious page



http://delicious.com/hkrum

#13 Tagging

My first experience with tagging was with Delicious and I was just feeling uncomfortable about the entire concept. After all how could people just pull words out of the air and attach meaning to a website??? I like a controlled vocabulary for many different reasons such as authority control, stemming etc.

Now when I post new messages to blogs, I see there is a place to enter tags so tagging is really the rule for 2.0. I am still shy about doing it but I have entered a few tags in my books reviews for Shelfari.

As far as using it in my library, I think its going to happen no matter what. We are incorporating blogs with the students and advocating Shelfari to the reading classes so students will just be adding tags in a matter of time. I get a little fearful about that to be honest. How do you think an 8th grader would tag a book review he/she wrote on the Graveyard by Neil Gaiman. You might get "scary" or "spooky" certainly not "horror" or "mystery". I just need to overcome my fears as a librarian and learn to embrace the positive aspects of it which is creating a community of users who want to share their subject labels on various web content.

#12 Twitter

I created a Twitter account, selected my background and imported my picture. I then found that I already had a follower. How exciting! I immediately started searching for people and groups to follow. That was tons of fun because I found Neil
Gaimen in the list and began to follow him. I am enjoying the learning curve for this. I sent a direct message to my follower.

I did a search for #ALA2009 and found some tweets on the conference. I did not find the Advanced Search feature it mentions.

I selected several groups to follow including the White House. I am excited to read the tweets that come to me and develop more courage to send tweets. I had fun doing this thing.

As far as the application to my middle school library, I am not sure of all of the possibilities yet.

#11 Instant Messenging

I have a Yahoo account so I went right to the chat feature and added some friends but no luck in getting a chat together. It's kind of hit and miss if people are at their computer. I used to chat quite a bit but found that texting via cell phones has become more popular with the students and my own family.

I noticed that Yahoo Messenger does have a couple of new features where you can chat on your Mobile phone and you can save a history of your chat messages which is cool.

We are not allowed to text at school but I think this would be a great feature for faculty to be able to text me when they needed something immediately. I will definitely bring this to the attention of my library director.

As far as the list of shortcuts, well it was exhausting! Don't think I will spend alot of time studying it but it's nice to know there is such a large list.

I have chosen not to give my Yahoo User ID here on this blog for privacy reasons.

#10 Ning

This was a fun experience. I went to the ALA network and watched the Open Source video but what I liked better was the "I've Been Everywhere" video with Johnny Cash's song in the background. What a hoot! I loved seeing all of those ALA bulletins and journal covers throughout the years.

I also found a TWU SLIS group which led me to an Alumni group for TWU SLIS graduates. This was totally cool as I couldn't find anything like this on Facebook. So Ning has social networks that Facebook doesn't and vice versa. I also liked that you could look at the network without joining Ning.

I did a search for women's health and found a few good networks for women's fittness over 40 which was neat. I had no idea anything like this existed in the 2.0 world.

The Ning tutorial was pretty informative and I really think the content on Ning is very user friendly. I opted out of joining Ning this time as I think Facebook will be enough for me to keep track as far as time is concerned.

#9 More Facebook

Well, I enjoyed this alot more than I thought however it was soooo time consuming and I have only just begun to utilize all of the various functions of facebook. I joined 3 groups TLA, ALA, and a Young Adult Literature Group and became a fan of the Dallas Cowboys. This could be addictive! I added my Web Face that I created in Thing 4. I added Peggy Sharp's book recomendation list and a favorite movie link. It was easy to add friends because I had a lot of friends requesting me. I can tell this is going to be time consuming however I am so glad I did this.

#8 Facebook

This took the most time so far just to get my Facebook page set up. After I set up my page I began to get Friend requests immediately. How could this be?, I was wondering. It truly is a social network. I am just beginning to understand all of the applications of this. I am not certain how I would use this with my library yet. Still thinking.....But what fun!

#7 RSS Feed

I found a website with an RSS feed (School Library Journal) and added it to my Google Reader. I will continue to add feeds as I find those of interest to me. I find the concept of the news/information coming to the reader as very cool.I never understood how to organize RSS feeds without cluttering my email inbox so I am excited to see how this works for me.

#6 Blog Readers

I always wondered how all of these blogs could be organized. I am glad there are blog readers to help with this. I never knew this kind of thing existed. I will continue to monitor this to see if it is something that will help organize the ocean of information presented to us everyday. Sometimes I am doing well to just check my email. But I have not used a Blog reader so I am excited to see how it works for me. I entered my blog url and the North Texas Blog just for starts.

Image Generators #5

I never knew all of these image generators existed. I decided to do a fun word mosaic because my students love word grafitti and this reminded me of just that. I also thought this might be something I could put on my blog or website. This was so much fun. I will defintely use this website Image Chef to create lots of fun word mosaics. I think it would be a blast for Poetry Month.

More Flickr #4

I do not have a photo of myself so I decided to do a web face. I downloaded the websearch toolbar and that gave me access to myWebFace. What a hoot! There were alot of choices in creating this webface and I really tried to have the result look like me. I enjoyed this alot and would love to explore more mashups. Here is my webface.

Flickr #3

I had a great time learning how to share photos. This is a great tool to use for the library events. I posted a few photos I had on my computer. This was my first time using Flickr and I loved it.


http://www.flickr.com/photos/40010971@N06/

I'm on the saddle!

I think this is going to be a wild and crazy ride with Web. 2.0 but I am ready. I hope to be able to find a use for all of these gadgets in my library. You know really find a purpose. Let's get going.