Thing 23 - Reflections

Ta Da! Yay! I'm pleased to have completed all 23 Things!

My favorite has been creating the blog. I'm looking forward to creating one for my library. I also loved the image applications. There really were just so many fun ones!

A huge thanks to you, Kathy, for leading us through these 23 Things and helping us be better librarians!

Thing 22 - Share

Glogster looks like SO much fun! I would love to teach kids how to do this. What a great group project this would be. I can really see our 5th Grade Science teachers using this because they often have their students work together in groups to create posters/science boards. Going on my list of stuff to try for sure!!

As for my share...just a fun little application that I found called Ta-Da List. It's a great way to create a to do list! It's super easy to register and create lists. Once you complete a task on your list, you can check it off and that item goes to the bottom of the list. You can e-mail, print or share your lists.

Thing 21 - Podcasts

I enjoyed listening to several podcasts from the Education Podcast Network that were part of a series called the Who Said Literature Game where you listen to a character speech from a novel and then guess the character, novel, and author. Wouldn't that be a fun thing to do?! I could read an excerpt from a book and have the kids guess who the character, title, and/or author is. Wouldn't that be great? I get so excited when I think aobut doing things like this, but then I immediately feel like a balloon that's been popped because then I start worrying about how I'll be able to fit it in. I have GOT to figure out a way to get some help to do the clerical part of my job so that I'll have more time to do the cool stuff that will get kids excited about reading!!

Thing 20 - You Tube

I love You Tube! I've used it a lot to learn how to do new things - lay laminate flooring, juggling. I actually used it in a presentation to our faculty on a chapter in Marzano's book about the importance of practice. I found some great videos on You Tube showing the steps involved in juggling and we all watched the videos and practiced each step.

One time this year I was googling different ways to have students respond, and I came across Whole Brain Teaching videos on You Tube. Wow! I watched lots of them and have learned so much from them that I apply every day in my teaching.

I would love to learn to create book trailers! I think that would be a great staff development for us this summer.

Thing 19 - Blackboard and Wikis

I've had two different experiences with Blackboard. The first was while I was in library school during an online course. I found it to be a wonderful tool to organize and manage course objectives, assignments, and discussions. Blackboard created a virtual classroom environment. My other experience with Blackboard was this year. Unfortunately the experience wasn't a positive one for me. I think mostly it is because I didn't feel adequately trained. I'm really not quite sure how I would use this in my library. I know that it was meant to be a place for us to post lessons and so the intent was good, but it hasn't been a resource that I've used. Maybe a wiki would be a better way for us to gather links, resources, lesson ideas, etc. I think mostly I wish that we would figure out the best way to gather all of the great ideas, resources, lessons, that we as a group can come up with.

Thing 18 - Library Worm

The first thing I did was look at School Libraries under Feed Categories. I saw the feeds from Huntingtown High School and it sure piqued my interest! I guess that's the whole purpose. Let subscribers know what's going on! I've always thought of RSS feeds from news and weather sources, but not from my library! It makes it seem like there's something exciting going on and I'd love to figure out how to make that happen! I'm still kind of unsure about it all, but I looked at a couple of articles like this one called How Do I Subscribe to an RSS Feed by Dave Taylor, and it's making a little more sense. I get how to subscribe to one and how it would help me stay "in the know," but I'm more interested in letting customers (students/parents) get the latest from our website (library) without having to visit the site. So now I'm wondering how to do that, and can we even do that? I guess I'll ask Jason @ Ingen if that's something we can do. It would be fun for running contests, etc...

Thing 17 - LibraryThing

I discovered LibraryThing this past summer. On more than one occasion my dad commented that if his daughter was a librarian then she would help him organize his extensive library of mostly nonfiction books so that he'd have a record of what he had and be able to find them more easily. He was an avid reader, mostly of biography, history, science, math, government, and golf. So, last summer I set out to find a way to "catalog" what he had and that's when I found LibraryThing. I opened an account, added some books, and played around with it some and determined that it was just "the thing" for our project. Unfortunately, it was a project that never got started because dad didn't ever get well enough for us to work on it. So...when I saw that LibraryThing was next on the list, I stopped working on my 23 Things. A bit of guilt, a lot of sadness...I know that Dad would have liked it. He would have thought it was kind a nifty application.

So...how to use it at school. I think it would be so cool for a class to use it to keep track of the books that they've read. Another thing to try before the school year ends.

A Thing I Borrowed

This is a "thing" I borrowed from my daughter's blog. She made it using Photo Collage . These are pictures of us at a cooking class at Central Market last weekend. I think this is a good thing!