Week 7: Microblogging

I am now on Twitter! I started my Twitter account last year after attending the spring MACE conference but then didn't do much with it. Now I have people to follow, some accounts coming to me through RSS feeds, and it looks much more promising as far as my using it goes.

Currently I am following various librarians from the 23 Things Kansas website, Hall Davidson - he was one of the presenters at the spring MACE conference, and he describes himself as a hopeless ed tech geek since '73, and Elizabeth Kohut - she is a SMART certified trainer and Discovery Educator (she even does training on how to use Twitter!)

I am finding their posts helpful because they give me tech ideas. I am hoping that Tweeting with the 23 Things Kansas librarians will be helpful too. As far as uses for Twitter go, right now I see it as a way to connect with other educators worldwide. I hope to use it for personal reasons in the near future!!

Tagging and Social Bookmarking

This is my first attempt at social bookmarking and I really like the idea of being able to access my bookmarks from any computer. Setting up my account was relatively easy, but I did use all of the tutorials. I imported all of my favorites and now I have the task of organizing this information to make it more user-friendly for the public (especially fellow teachers, library colleagues, etc.) Tagging will allow me to develop a resource list for students and teachers that they can access while keeping my personal bookmarks private.

RSS and Feed Readers

RSS feeds are a new concept to me. I have heard of them before but never tried using them. For this assignment I used Google Reader because I already had a Google account. I viewed the eHow videos and then got to work. I chose to follow these three:
1.) iLearn Technology >> Smart Boards
2.) School Library Monthly Blog
3.) KASL

Want a great story starter? Pictures of teachers pets make for great topics of discussion as well as prompts for writing.

This is my dog, Chance, and I have used this picture many times with great results! The students ask all kinds of questions about him as they try to write from his perspective. Or, they will ask all about what he likes to do when they write about an adventure he had. You get the idea.

It's a great way for the teachers to show off a part of themselves (their pet) and to bond with their students (oh, and the writing part is good too!)

Online Meetings

Week 3 of 23 Things Kansas has me stretching to learn new things through the use of webinars. I recently was a part of a live webinar on Jan. 21 from Follett - it was a webinar dealing with the updates to Destiny 9.5

Just this morning I chose from a list of archived webinars from the California State Library to attend. It was titled "Finding (Legally Safe) Music and Videos for Presentations, Blogs, and Podcasts." This webinar was presented by Mary Minow and it was about an hour long.

Wow! She is a lawyer and even she had difficulty making sure that we all understood how to avoid a legal battle over using something that we don't have the rights to use. It is a complicated matter. I was pleased with the resources that she presented to us during the webinar. There were many websites given, ideas for how to locate public domain materials, and the best way to stay safe when it comes to using music or video with podcasts, presentations, or blogs.

I also appreciated the section on knowing what to ask when requesting permission from copyright owners.

I will definately use the California State Library archive webinar list more often. Most of the webinars look to be about an hour long - but I think if the topic pertains to you or something you want to learn about - an hour really isn't that long.

I saw where another librarian had mentioned something about using webinars for students to catch up or review on assignments. I also think you could turn this around and have students create a webinar to "instruct" on a topic. You know what they say - to really understand something. . .try teaching it to someone else!

Online Communities

Week 2 of 23 Things Kansas has me thinking about how to use Facebook with my library community. I don't have any problem using it to communicate with other librarians across the state and in my school district or surrounding communities. However, I do see an advantage to creating a Facebook page for my school library that students could access - especially if dealing with the upkeep of a webpage seems daunting to some librarians. This student page would be a great way to share ideas about books, projects, etc. with students and faculty with minimal technology skills. That's the beauty of Facebook - it is so easy to use.

Week One: Blogging

I was impressed with how easy it was to create a blog. Why haven't I been doing this before now? I really need to learn more about using the technology for social reasons - I am way too far over on the academic side. I look forward to adding links to other people's blogs and updating my profile. That will all be done on another day. . .