Final comments

Thank you CSLA for organizing this hands-on exploration of Web 2.0 technology. I learned a lot, reviewed some interesting 2.0 ideas that I had experimented with already and shared a wonderful summer learning experience with my colleagues. The most valuable part was the actual personal exchange that went on amongst the librarians of our district as we struggled together to learn new material. Gives one pause as to what we expect of students day in and day out! Special thanks to Carolyn for her extra support and nudging towards the end of this process.

I will look forward to the development of teacher-librarian blogs in Piedmont. Carolyn and Laura are going to lead the way as I understand it. I will be along for the ride, gals!

Week 9…

#22) When we bought Destiny, we received ebooks from Follett for free. I hadn’t really explored them very much until this evening when I downloaded the Follett Digital Reader and opened Tom Sawyer. I can’t quite imagine why I would want to read Tom Sawyer in this format as opposed to the lovely annotated version that I have in the library. But now I do know what an ebook looks like and that we have the capacity to access the ones that Follett gave us. Unfortunately, most of that collection is not appropriate for elementary school students.

Week 9…

#20) Although Youtube is fun and intriguing, for school I find it a time sink.
I did enjoy the librarian drill team performances though!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8vropwOUkc

#21) We have been experimenting with podcasts this past year at Beach. One of our first attempts were public service announcements made by 5th graders in conjunction with the study of the human body. We have recorded poetry with 2nd graders as well as a script on how to podcast. This work was all done in the computer lab, although library materials and reference was used to develop the human body pieces.
http://web.me.com/beachschool/Beach_School/Welcome.html

Week 8…

# 19) Check out my California Young Reader Medal chapter book shelf at The Library Thing
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/preml

Week 8…

#18) Using Google Docs at work occasionally and at home is a pleasure. Friends have collaborated on recipes with much success as people tweak them in different fashions and then note the changes in the Google Doc. Our bookclub uses a Google Doc to keep track of what we have read over time. Last year when planning my daughter’s class Baccalaureate, the calendar proved quite useful as we set and changed deadlines over the course of year long planning with students.

Week 7…

#17) Reviewing the Learning 2.0 SandBox wiki and adding an entry was interesting and easy. Reading other people’s ideas for implementing Web 2.0 is inspiring.

Have you tried bing, the new search engine designed by microsoft?

www.bing.com

Week 7…

#16) This is the one Web 2.0 tool that I have some experience with. We have been using Wikispaces at school with varied success. I manage our teacher bookclub announcements, discussion and suggestions via a page; we also collaborated about the revue via the wiki. Last year a group of 5th grade teachers, Steph and I worked on revising a set of lesson on the human body via the wiki rather successfully. Steph posts our faculty meeting notes. I created a wiki page when we adopted Destiny as our online catalog. I created a wiki page to help sort out Calkins books for the writing program using Wildwood’s idea as a launching zone, but thus far only one teacher has added to the page.

Though we have modeled usage, the wiki concept is off to a very slow start in our learning community. Steph and I have talked a lot about why…but we still have yet to hit upon a way to increase usage. I really like the idea of using the wiki though.

Week 6…

#13) I love the idea of having a single set of bookmarks that you can access from any computer. That seems to be the simple beauty of del.icio.us to me.

#14) Technorati is a search engine to sift through blogs and organize the ones that you are interested in following. The tags give access via authority levels which I hadn’t noticed elsewhere… When I tried the Discovery exercise, I mostly encountered others who were working on exploring Technorati in our School Library 2.0 cohort. My results were very different than some of the previous bloggers that I have been following. Why would that be?

#15) I read the section in the Horizon Report on Collaboration Webs (pg 13) and I was struck by how rapidly all this technology has come to the forefront. No wonder I feel completely overwhelmed at how little I know and how quickly the technology uses are changing. I took a peek at pageflakes, which was mentioned along side of Ning in the
Horizon Report, with examples of collaborative projects.

Come fall, I would like to try out some of these Web 2.0 ideas with teachers. I know that having Steph as a collaborator is key!

Discovered another amazing web site…http://www.wdl.org/en/ …the World Digital Library , which is brimming with primary source materials in a global context.