Catching Up

Goodness! I don't really think that anyone is out there reading this, but I did had the idea that I would keep up posting on this blog after I completed the tutorial, just as a way of reminding myself of new ideas, new tools I learn about, and goals I have. It's been almost three months now.

Well, it's been a very busy fall at work, but I have managed to take advantage of some of the new tools I learned about and experimented with, and have plans to use more. Here's some of what I've done:

• I've gone wiki crazy!
• The first one was a tutorial for Eighth Grade students doing History Day research. That one also included experimenting with my first Google Custom search engine. (I liked Rollo, but think students are more into the "brand name" and I also like not having any ads.)
• I created another very simple wiki as a pathfinder/links page. I have various links pages on my school website created with Dreamweaver, but decided that a wiki one would be easier and more flexible (updatable online, not just on my home computer that has Dreamweaver, and available for collaboration with teachers if they are interested.)
• I created yet another wiki after I got inspired at AASL to organize my professional life and keep track of conference handouts, links, etc. in an easy-to-access way. I invite anyone who might read this to contribute to it. The password is libraries.
• I created a wiki for my co-region rep and I to use to plan the presentations for the CSLA Southern Section Workshop in March.
• And finally, I just created a wiki for my library book club.
• I used some ImageChef images in my library brochure.
• I added a www.slide.com slideshow to my library website.
• I've started using Google Calendar for my library schedule as well as for the school calendar I maintain for the school website.
• I created a Google group for the librarians in my district to keep track of our emails and archival-type documents. (We talked about either a wiki or a blog, but it seemed like a goup would allow for both the email saving and doc saving options we wanted.)

While at AASL in October, I got a lot of additional inspiration to take advantage of more technology to enhance my library program. I have been wanting to create some online book talks, and decided to try voicethread.com, which I learned about from Joyce Valenza's session, for them. I just added the first one to my library webpage, and plan to create more and have students create more for CYRM books and other books they like.

Unfortunately, I had to leave the CSLA conference early Friday morning when my husband got ill, so I missed most of the conference. Since I was poster sessions chair, I did get to see and benefit from all those outstanding ideas as they were being set up on Thursday (see my slide show of the posters), and I've also been reading CALIB emails with links to some of the session presentations. One by Miranda Doyle especially inspired me to make my library web page more interactive. I am working on a list of items I want to add to it. So far, I added my first voicethread book talk, a poll, and I have plans to add changing book images with LibraryThing (as I have already added to this blog), to embed the library news blog (instead of just linking to it), and a few other items.