#23 Reflect

I really enjoyed the experience. If you were to offer it again I would definitely participate. I learned so much and connected with a community that I learned a lot from. I have used flickr for so many things over the last 2 months. I use it to share photos of my kids, my new egress window, everything. I never knew it existed before this project. It's one of the tools that I will return to again and again, now that I know they're out there.

#22 Keep it up

I added several of the feeds to my google reader. I learned so much. I always thought of myself as being pretty web savvy but there are so many sites I didn't even know about. When looking at google I found several other tools that I could also use to help aid my learning.


I started a blog for my library that now that this project is over I will have the time to put into that. Thank you for this project.

# 21 Other Social Networking Sites

I had never heard of Ning, Gather or webjunction. I joined the 23 things group and started my own page. It was nice to see the pictures of others participating in the same group. I could see this being very positive for a teacher at the high school level developing a class with a social networking element. I am going to check tomorrow to see if any of these are blocked at the student level. We currently block MySpace and Facebook.

#20 Facebook and Myspace

I created a Facebook account when I was working on my masters. I never posted anything to it or had any friends:(. This project had me go back to it and play. I now have 36 friends, including media people in my district who are also participating in 23 things. My husband even saw how much fun I was having and now has his own facebook with 31 friends. I still win.

I think Hennepin County Library's myspace is really cool. The fact that teens will be "friends" with the library is awesome. It makes me reconsider our district's myspace policies.

#19 podcasts

Wow, there is so much out there that I didn't know about. I found some great science "enhanced" podcasts that included video with their audio. I even found some that would be good for my kids to watch on my ipod touch, on car trips. I listened to one of the grammar girl. I am going to send it to a teacher I know at the high school level.

# 18 Youtube

I love you tube for personal use and many of my teachers use it for instruction. My phy ed teacher is starting a lacrosse unit and wanted her students to understand the game more. Youtube had how to videos on lacrosse. I had an ELL teacher show a student a clip to better understand the meaning of the word "dirt bike". I have posted some of my Youtube videos to my blog. I love being able to post so distant relatives can be not so distant.

# 17 ELM tools

I use the resources available within ELM in my teaching. This was a good review of the resources. One of the things I like most is to be notified when new magazines become available. I created a request and now I am emailed when new issues become available with links to the articles. I may have to cancel my subscriptions.

#16 Student 2.0 tools

Well said. This experience has opened my eyes to everything that is out there for our students. I have looked at yahoo answers and found some misleading answers posted. One of the most important traits we can help develop in our students is to become lifelong learners. Libraries can help. I tell my students the story of my friends brother who wanted to build a cabin so he went to the library and checked out a book on home building. He built a cabin. He checked out books on electrical work, plumbing, concrete, and whatever else he needed along the way.

#15 Online Games & Libraries

Okay, so I created an avatar, "Cora Letov" on Second Life. I don't get it. So you walk around naked and can fly. I can see that being able to learn or develop mentor ships through this program may be beneficial but I though the time involved was too much. I have heard of tech companies posting job applications on Second Life to recruit tech savvy employees. I think you need to be very tech minded to enjoy the game.

#14 LibraryThing

I took the tour for Librarything for libraries. It seems very promising however it still is in the beta form. I'm wondering if anyone participating in 23 things on a stick went through the process of importing their records into their system. I am guessing their are fees involved.
Librarything reminded me of a site which I am a member of, Goodreads. You establish an account and tell it the titles of books you've read. You can rate the books, see books by the same author, see books your friends are reading and get recommendations for other books.

#13 Online Productivity Tools

All three seemed very similar to what users of MSN or a customized yahoo start page have been using for a long time. The only exception would be the ability to incorporate youtube videos and fickr pictures. However, I don't know how many times I need to see my youtube videos. I have them on my blogger site, my facebook and see them when I log into youtube. I am learning though this process that their is a 2.0 tool for everything and for many things several.

#12 Do you Digg?

I checked out all 4 sites. Digg had an onscreen tutorial which was helpful in explaining how the site works. I watched the video tour on Mixx which explained how to set up an account and how the site works. Both Digg and Mixx include news and pictures. Reddit seemed the most basic and not as visually appealing as the other 2. I think I would be most likely to use newsvine which seems most newspaper like. I check the startribune online everyday and prefer its format to a traditional newspaper. This was more like that, where the others seemed to be more google like.

#11 Tagging & De.li.cious

This one is a no brainer. Our teachers create bookmarks for personal and educational use. Instead of saving them to our network, we should have each teacher create a De.li.cious account. It will even create a button to make it easier. This will help a teacher be able to access their bookmarks from home and also make it easier when we refresh a teachers' computer. Teachers can also create accounts that their students can access with links to help them complete assignments.

#10 Wikis

I had the privilege of presenting at the last TIES conference. Each presenter had to create a WIKI where we posted our handouts, web links and could discuss our topics with conference attendees. I have created a wiki for the FO media center however I don't have anything posted on it at the moment. I am thinking that I could use this for my Techie Tuesdays or Tech Friendly Friday messages and handouts.

# 9 Online Collaboration Tools

I used Google docs when I worked on a district level collaborative team. We were working on our districts strategic plan and each team member was assigned a task. It was helpful to have the document on Google docs. You could work on the task from anywhere with Internet access. However we did find that several people should not be editing the document at the same time. It would get frustrating having to find your paragraph again and again. When it refreshed it would take you back to the top of the document.

# 8 Share my creations

I added the slide show below and am trying to make the mosaic but it is not working for me at the moment. I have to upload some more pictures to flickr and try again.

# 7 Online Communication Tools

I just used meet-o-matic to schedule our technology committee meeting. We needed to pick a new day for the meeting so this worked great. It was easy to set up, it only took a couple of minutes. I have seen Doodle used in the past and found it a little more confusing however it appears that you can collect a little more information.

Webinars
These are pretty slick. I like being able to email out the links to my staff.

# 6 Online Image Generators

I used hairmixer.com to try out a new look. What do you think? If I were single I could use this to meet a man..... I will have to play around with it a little more to figure out how to use it for school. I'm sure playing with your pictures would make for a fun creative writing illustration.

#5 Fun with Flicker (mash-ups)

I found a site that allowed me to create a photo album or slide show and put it into HTML code. It was very easy to use. I could see this being put on a library, school or classroom website. I used it below to show the pictures of my daughter's new dance costume. There were many other mashups. One allowed you to put a picture on a google map. This too would be nice for a school website. You could put a picture of the school on the map.

#5 Fun with Flicker

#4 Flicker

I know that I will soon run into the password problem. I have different passwords for all of these great tools. Some need numbers others do not.
Flicker was neat. I hadn't seen it before. I could see value in having the pro version for students to use. It seemed very user friendly. I have used shutterfly in the past and thought this was going to be very similar but there were differences in how you edit your photos.

#3 RSS feeds

I added an RSS feed to my blog. I like the idea of having new content on your page without having to write it. Another LMS suggested having blogs about children's lit on their library page.
Adding the feed was a little tricky. I got a little confused and distracted in google reader. Once I figured it out I could do it again without problems.

# 2 Library 2.0

The term Library 2.0 was new to me. I think the Minneapolis public library does a good job of this. I have also heard of some libraries having myspace pages. The key point was not to get stuck doing things the way we have done in the past. Somewhere it said to reach out to our future tax payers, so they become library users and find our services valuable. I found that to be a powerful statement.

#1 Created Blog

Seemed simple enough. I even got my avatar on my page. I'm excited to learn new things.
Some of the media specialists in my district have created library blogs. This is more for high school and middle school populations. I need to figure out how to use this for an elementary school. Perhaps for parents or teachers to become more involved.