Web 2.0 Summer Blog

This has been an incredible course. It has been easy to lose hours on end delving into various new tools and experimenting. In the interest of time, I have had to stop some of my investigations before I was ready to and I look forward to going back to explore even more. There is so much information out there! It is hard sometimes to figure out how to manage time on all these new technologies, but it is very exciting. I would love to do it all, but I guess there is only so much time in a day.  Thank you, Shelley, for all the time you have invested in preparing this class for us.  I know you have put in a lot more time than us – I have learned a lot!

I found some interesting blogs while browsing through Classroom 2.0 and Niing. It is easy to spend lots of time here, but I have to admit that there wasn’t as much information for media specialists as for other teachers. I did find a great blog from Cold Spring Library that I will try to keep tabs on. I didn’t think it was as easy to navigate through the Social Networking sites as it has been with some of the other tools I have used, but I’m glad to find a few new resources. I would love to find a social network for media specialists/librarians. I’m not sure I’m quite ready to start one on my own….

I found a new RSS feed while reviewing my TechLearning feed. It is Cool Cat Teacher Blog and it had some interesting tips on starting the school year out right. I immediately added it to my feeds. She actually broke it down into 3 segments, all of which had interesting information. It was a nice reflection to start thinking about the start of school, which is right around the corner!

I really enjoyed playing in Pageflakes. I can see some great library applications for research projects. It will be a great way to pull together the latest and greatest information on any topic I can think of. Immediate ideas include research projects on the Industrial Revolution and Endangered Species, as well as Biographical projects. I’m very excited about this tool. I can also see using it as my personal home page. There are so many fabulous things to include, that it will be tough deciding which one works best. I can see creating one for my sons who enjoy sports – especially baseball – and setting up lots of RSS feeds that will interest them.

So much potential! I can see a lot of different applications for this tool. First of all, I can see creating our Library Newsletter with this tool and publishing it as a website – that will save a lot of paper! Not only will it save paper, but coordinating between my assistant and myself gets confusing sometimes on the revisions, so this is a great option. I can also see collaborating research lessons with classroom teachers, especially when it involves more than 1 teacher. Last year I put together a research project for all five 5th grade classes, and while I worked with 1 of the teachers in depth, I never felt like I had a total “buy-in” from the other 4. This would allow all 5 to collaborate on the project! As another application, I could also put the library schedule online so teachers would know when the library was available to schedule extra classes. I can also see applications for scheduling equipment from the library. I’m very excited about using this tool!

I really enjoyed watching the videos. I found a couple of examples of visits to the Library of Congress on YouTube that were very informative. The following link was the best one that I visited..

Library of Congress visit on YouTube

I thought it would be interesting for students to see what the biggest library in the country looks like while sitting in our own library.

I also saw many interesting examples of videos on TeacherTube. There were videos on Plagiarism as well as videos on recycling and book reviews. There are so many opportunities out there to encourage and challenge students – they love getting in front of a camera.

I have done a podcast in the past where I used GarageBand on the Mac, so I used the same thing again. I created a podcast on how to find books in the library. It was simple to do and our school has a podcast library where teachers can publish their own podcast. I also created a podcast when we had an author, Eric Kimmel, visit our school. I had the students ask several questions of the visiting author and published the podcast for all to enjoy. I have a link to both podcasts. I hope you enjoy the interview!

I found some interesting Podcasts from other elementary schools. There were some great projects. One project was from a 5th grade class that had the students read 3 facts about the states they researched. After introducing themselves, they read 3 interesting facts about their state and then gave the microphone to the next student. It was a great little project and a fun way to end a research project. I can see myself doing a project like this with our third graders after they research the states. A lot more fun than writing a paper!

LibraryThing is a fun tool. I played around with it and set up an account with some of my personal collection of books. Not only does it catalog the books, but I can see other books that are recommended in the same genre by readers that have enjoyed the same books that I have. I’m not sure whether I can use it to catalog books in my school collection since I have other cataloging programs that I use, but it will very fun to use for my home collection and to get new ideas for books that I might really like. I’ll definitely use it in the future.

I absolutely love Del.icio.us. I have been using it for about a year and don’t bookmark websites any other way now. I have about 80 bookmarks at this point (I will be adding several more after this class) and love the way I can organize them. It makes finding a particular website so easy! The tags are so important – especially for finding things later. I am definitely hooked!