Thing 22 - Nings

At first, I was confused about the differences between nings and wikis, but this project helped clear this up for me. The wiki is a collaborative group of web pages like an intranet,l not meant to be static. A ning is designed around a social networking purpose, and members upload a static version of what they want to share, while allowing discussion. The extent of collaboration by participants is different in nature because the purpose of the site is different. So you would use a wiki to produce maybe a story together, or to research a topic. But you would use a ning for a classroom to allow students to upload their completed videos, etc... to share with classmates for discussion. I did create a wiki, but not a ning yet until I check with my school IT. I won't create one unless I can use it with my school population. In theory, it could make my library web page function like an interactive, collaborative, library web page.

I am in an elementary school and saw an elementary group on teacher librarian ning (which I joined primarily for professional development), but not on the Texas school librarian ning, (which I also joined because I enjoy Shonda Brisco's postings on the different listservs and my 5th grade students are almost middle school and soon need to function in middle school).

Oh, and I had to open a facebook account -- finally. My two college sons have mixed feelings about it as you can imagine. :)

Thing 19 - Web2.0 awards

What a great awards list, full of many of my new friends like del.icio.us and flickr and google documents, and many more! I looked at several, including the color blender, which was fun to use to color coordinate a website or a room, but then I settled on twitter. I have been hearing so much about it lately that I knew I'd eventually have to open an account. The overview was good, including a great commoncraft video that explained how twitter differs from email and blogs. Basically it's for little sound bytes of what you are doing or thinking, no longer than 145 words per post, complete with a handy little counter that counts down to zero as you are posting. There are fan sites and twitter etiquette sites, and it even went to Mars and was one of the first places to find out that ice was discovered on the planet. Amazing phenomenon! This tool, more than any other is hard for me to get comfortable with and it should be so easy. I think it's because it is not a productivity tool, and doesn't seem "important" enough. I can't imagine why anyone would want to know if I mowed the lawn, ate soup, drank coffee, or wasn't up to anything, just hanging around. I know so many people that are completely sold on it. That in a nutshell defines the digital divide. I still relish my privacy too much to "share" all the time.

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!