It was a lot of work – but worth every minute of it! Being such a hands-on course my comfort level with “technology” is so much higher – and with this comes a willingness to experiment, take risks and just figure it out.  As a Media Specialist I feel so much more equipped to support classroom teachers and help them enhance their learning environments.  I feel more informed through my newly developed habit of keeping up with Google Reader – and more comfortable blogging after writing the 23+ posts required for this course.  I am currently looking for opportunities to work with classroom teachers to create blogs and wiki’s – and to use voice thread and the sound recorder.  Several teachers are already using delicious and I am looking forward to introducing them to google docs – and sharing the docs that I have already created.  I am planning on introducing students in third – fifth grade (and my son) to quizlet.com.

Thank you to Shelley for providing such an incredible learning experience – both professionally and personally – and thank you Chris for keeping me motivated – and on track!

It will be very useful to refer to Classroom 2.0 as I begin to experiment with web 2.0 tools.  I like that you can ask questions (under Forum) and solicit input and help.  As a lower school media specialist I will not be promoting the use of social networking sites with students – but will keep my mind open to opportunities with parents and colleagues.  The article “Guidelines for educators using social networking sites” has already been helpful as I think through the use of the account I already have on Facebook.

I really enjoyed the article “Pivots for change and libraries” written on August 10th, 2009 by theunquietlibrary (I love that name!)  The article looks at Seth Grodin’s original list of Pivots of change – for the first 2 are:

• Keep the machines in your factory, but change what they make.
• Keep your customers, but change what you sell to them.

and considers how they could be applied to changes in school libraries.   It is great food for thought as I consider all that I have learned over the summer and how I am going to apply it at KRCS.  Suggestions include:

• Keep books and print materials in your library, but add and promote the formats in which their content appear (i.e.  audio books, databases,  e-books,  downloadable books (such as NetLibrary), free online versions of periodicals).
• Keep teaching evaluation of online resources, but teach students (and teachers) to apply those same principles of information to traditional sources of information—they are not immune from bias or inaccurate information, either.
• Keep teaching information literacy skills, but focus on the bigger picture of helping students devise personal learning networks that they can apply to any learning situation instead of a topic specific research task.
• Keep teaching students Internet safety principles, but also shift your focus on the concept of digital footprints and  teaching students how to create and maintain a positive online identity.

It took me awhile to grasp the concept of pageflakes – but I got it now!  There are still some things that I have not figured out how to do though – my problem seems to center around inserting URL’s – I can’t seem to get that to work. For example I tried inserting specific photos from flickr and got the message “no photo”.  I also cannot figure out how to cut and paste a specific flake from another pageflake – you are given the option to “take flake” but I don’t know what to do with the url once I take it.

I have created media center pageflakes for each of the grades – which I will share with teachers once I add more info – such as the media center schedule and our subscription databases.  I also plan to use the pageflakes to track each grades curriculum.  I made my media center – kindergarten page public – mainly (at this stage) so that I could copy it and use it as the template for the other grade pageflakes.

A great tool for both personal and professional use.  I have loaded a list of “Web 2.0 Tools” onto Google Docs – I plan on showing this list to our teachers and encouraging them to use the tools listed. I will make it a collaborative tool by encouraging teachers to add sites that they find and want to share with other teachers. I also created a presentation about the 7 1/2 Habits of Highly Effective Learners – creating it was a great review for me – and I plan to share it with the teachers at KRCS.

I love the idea of using Google Docs to poll teachers – I can use it to get input on such things as what periodicals and online databases to order.  I will also use Google Docs to request information from teachers – for example what books they plan on adopting for our annual Book Parade.

Both my children talk about and show me videos they have found on you tube (usually funny ones) so it was good to spend some time understanding the site for myself.  I did not find as much as I thought I would that was relevant for lower school – or that I did not already have access to through other resources. But I was happy to find several videos with the author Eric Carle that I will definitely use – in particular one in which Eric Carle talks about the writing and illustrating of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”

I like the idea of using Teacher Tube to create videos.  I plan on discussing this with the teacher in charge of our “Tiger TV” – perhaps we can create some “human interest stories” to include with our televised morning announcements.  I found 2 Teacher Tube videos that I plan on sharing with teachers: “Why let our students blog?” and “Animaniacs Sing the States”

The site “Tube Chop” may be another resourcs to use to access You Tube if it blocked at KRCS.

That was so much easier than expected! – well at least the simple version using the built in sound recorder – next time I would like to try using audacity.  I think it would be a great tool to use in conjunction with a unit on poetry.  Students could recite a poem of their choice – or poems they have written.  It would be a great way of teaching students how to read with expression – particularily since they get immediate feedback (listening to their own recordings) and can easily record with more expression if needed.  I may also create a podcast walking volunteers through the process for checking out books – so that there is not a problem or bottleneck if I am not available.

I had  more challenges with podcasting than most of the other “things”   My computer does not seem to like podcasting – takes a looooong time to load and fairly frequently a podcast will cause my computer to shutdown… not sure why.   I did listen to several podcasts from “Learn out Loud” – personally I enjoyed  some of the booktalks from “Slate’s audio bookclub”.  I subscribed to 2 podcasts – “Learning in hand” and “Podcasting in Education”.  I would love to have students create storybooks and narrate them – so I look forward to thing 18 and creating a podcast.

I do want to spend more time learning about and using iTunes.

I am so happy to knpw about LibraryThing!  I have already set up 2 accounts – one to track the books that I read with my book club (personal) – and one for students to use to share books that they have read.  I am hoping to use it as a resource that students can use to find books of interest to read.  I will also use it to keep track of the books that students recommend to me – so that I can tell others about them.  I obviously do this already – but I am sure that there are lots of books that I forget about.  I am planning on using the tags in LibraryThing to sort books by genre, reading level and interests.

I have so many bookmarked sites at home and at school – and now that I know about delicious I cannot wait to get them into my delicious site – and be able to find them when I need them!  Initially I will use delicious to organize my own sites and start actually using all the great ideas/information that I have stored.  Later in the year I will start sharing the information with teachers.  There is so much that I want to share with our teachers – but I want to be careful not to put anyone into information overload – or overwhelm any teachers.

I think I will also refine my tags as I go and make some changes to some of the initial ones that I created.  I also want to make sure that I go back and create some “tag bundles” – once I have more sites added.  I like the subscriptions I have in Google Reader – I am not sure what the difference would be – adding a subscription in delicious – I think I would rather keep all my subscriptions in one place?  (Google Reader)