Thing 16 - wikis

Wiki's have eenormous potential, especially for today's student who wants high tech, high touch learning. It is something I am seriously going to try to implement in the library this year. I never really took off with my web page the way I wanted to, and Edline is too restrictive, so I am going all out for a wiki through pb wiki. Ad free is the real selling point with me and with parents at our private school. I'll try to remember to add a link here when I have my page set up. I hope it will generate a database of student book reviews, give access to my calendar for all parents to see and teachers to update as necessary, allow student research log-type feedback, in short, do everything I wanted my web page to do, but interactively.

I think it will be an important tool for our younger students as well, those who typically do not have email. Here is a way to contribute to the discussion on any computer, with just a user name and password. I think it will make parents feel safer and allow more access by the students. I saw a cute 4th grade classroom wiki at Edington House School via a link from Vicki Davis' blog A Library by any Other Name.

Found a new wiki entry to star as a favortie NECClibrarians08 seminar. It's almost like being there!

Thing 15 - Library 2.0 and beyond

Many new discoveries in this exercise. One exciting find was a wiki WebTools4u2use, as well as a wonderful list of blogs broken down by categories that specifically deal with Library 2.0 called socialnetworking4teachers. So, of course, I had to add a few of those to my Google Reader. Since those finds were wickis, I am sure I'll be visiting them again in future blog postings. I did see one project for elementary school students on the list called The Flat World 1001 Tales which may bear looking into.

In terms of ideas about using Web2.0 as a teacher I have a long way to go and I need to see how much of this will be allowed by our tech department and/or school administration. Encouraging elementary school students to have their say on blogs and wickis involves many more people than the traditional library services and certainly involves more advance planning. This goes beyond lesson plans and teacher collaboration to include IT cooperation, parental permissions, registering for accounts, technical reliabilities, comfort on my part, etc... I think we'll be able to do this through our school's secure Edline account, but I think parents are the only ones with logins at the moment. I'm ready to tackle it this year, but it wasn't fair of Dr. Wendy Schultz to be talking about Library 3.0 and Library 4.0 already when I'm still getting my mind wrapped around the potential of 2.0!