week 9, Thing 23: thoughts

Whew! What a learning curve for me. In thinking about the questions regarding what I learned, etc., I think I have pretty well covered my experiences and my new knowledge (pretty much everything!) in my blogs. I realize my blog is very boring right now because it is only about 23 Things, but I hope to do better shortly. It has been a crunch with other work related deadlines to complete 23 Things itself.
This experience has led to interesting conversations in the workspace, the sharing of tips for accomplishing tasks, debates about some of the sites and the useful of some of the tools and software. Recently, we also had a lot of laughter at a staff meeting as we shared some interesting and possible X-rated snafus while we searching in various areas, such as blogs themselves, technorati and Youtube. We also did have serious discussions about how we are sharing information, how different staff members are utilizing the information to organize and facilitate their work and the realization that it really took a community for most of us to work with the technology that was new to us. I think that these experiences alone are amazing in a workplace.
I think my utube video sums up my sense that there is so much out there and change will be so quick that I wonder how I will keep up. There is also a question I raised in blog about the library's role, if any, in helping teachers keep up so they can help their students to not just use these sites and tools to find the latest crazy video, but also other information that will be important for school, jobs, life. Hearing stories from my daughters and having the help of one daughter with this project has made me realize they really are in a very different place from myself in availing themselves of technology, willingness to experiement and experience in computer and technology use. However, even this dinosaur has been helpful to my teacher daughter as she has learned new things along with me. She just told me that as she now knows about RSS, she has added some feeds to her school webpage that will be helpful to her students and will be using some of the other tools also. YEA! There is still hope for me and I need to find time to play and use what I've learned and set up!

Week 9, Thing 22; Overdrive

I have been a slacker about investigating audio books or ebooks because almost all my pleasure reading is done in bed late at night as I deal with my insomnia. However, this may be a new adventure for me. I signed up for an Overdrive account and have downloaded the necessary software so I am ready to roll. Browsing under suspense and mystery titles by several options I did find some new titles in a series by James Patterson that I was not familiar with yet. May give it a try.

Did you know?

Week 9, Thing 21: Podcast

Podcasts that have been linked to the learning activities throughout 2.0 have for the most part been very helpful. However, going to the podcast sites to find library related items, I found somewhat frustrataing as I tried to find appropriate key words to search. There seemed to be a lot of misleading podcasts that popped up on the directory list for certain searches, even for education. However, I finally hit on some good key words--duh--in Podcast Alley. I subscribed to the site and then uploaded a library related series of podcasts, called "Library Vibes" which seemed to be timely updates on news in the library world. And--the podcast for August 30 actually included mention of a children's book about penguins--how appropriate. Library Vibes is now linked on my bloglines and it should be fun to give them a quick listen.

Week 9, Thing 20: UTube

I have not been to YouTube before and it was an interesting experience. Just surfing what people are viewing at the moment, got me hooked on some other videos, especially since the first one I viewed was of a horrendous big air skateboard crash. I found many of them to be superfluous or totally non-interesting to me. Did have fun looking at some possibilities for my blog under the key word search children reading--I really wanted to post one of Miss Francis of Ding Dong School reading poetry--times have changed! For one thing most of us don't wear pearls in storytime. However, I heard about the video "did you know" and thought it was very relevant to the whole exercise of 23 Things and how fast education and technology will happen----especially put in terms of statistics for the world today. Hope you will enjoy looking at and thinking about this video.

Week 8, Thing 19; Web 2.0 list

So much to choose from and so little time. It was cool to see things we have visited, signed up for and worked with and where they were ranked on the current award list.
I went to the book site that was listed as first place--Lulu. I was surprised to see it is a book publishing site as I had assumed ( I know never to do that) it would be some kind of book list. And actually it did have an extensive list of self-published books. This is a fascinating concept that writers can just go on line and publish and sell their own books. As far as usefulness in a library setting, it could be a stretch, but maybe people who can't find exactly what they are looking for in the catalog, might want to see (and hear about) self published books on a subject. You'd have to be sure they realized what the site was about, but it could be of help. It could also be of interest to those patrons who want to get a book published, but haven't been accepted by a publisher. Who knows--

Week 8, Thing 18; online productivity

Again, a new world of possibilities is opened. This really could solve some problems as I switch between computers with different software installed. I joined Googledocs since I already had a Google account to use Blogger. I created a word document for an upcoming project and am happy that it will be easy to access as I continue to edit and add to that document. It took a little while to learn a few ways of working with a different tool bar, but so far so good.
I was very impressed with the list of resource tools for spreadsheets, etc. that are now available on the web. I got excited when I saw the calendar program "30 boxes" as it had been mentioned in one of the wiki sites. I wanted to know more about it and decided it will be a great help to me, not only with personal calendar organization like birthdays, but also to be able to see and print monthly calendars with work schedules. My palm pilot is great, but downloading the calendar is no longer available with my home computer, so 30 Boxes will solve my problem of seeing the month or more at a time.
These web tools could really be magic as we learn more about them.