Empty Nester

When I decided to participate in this course I was wondering how I would get on. Like many others I considered myself a novice.  However I knew that I had to give it a go as part of my professional development. I found it challenging to begin with, but with perseverence, help and encouragement from Leslie I got over the hiccups. Thank you for that.

I visited Canberra during the holidays and picked up a flyer advertising a light show that was to be projected onto the War Memorial and at the bottom it said all photos would be available on “flickr ” and encouraged people to post their own shots to share. I turned to my husband and said ” six weeks ago it would have meant nothing to me.” I  got a real buzz out of knowing what that meant and then proceeded to explain it to him !!

Some aspects covered I know will be useful and I will give a go, others although interesting don’t have a lot of interest for me. I liked being able to move at my own pace and the tracking log was great for satisfaction!! I really did enjoy the challenge and feel much better equipped to cope with what is happening out there. ! It certainly is mindboggling but a least I know what people are talking about now ! Again, thanks for giving me the opportunity.

As a long time infant teacher and then librarian I’m not real fussed on the idea of e-books. For me it just isn’t the same! The audio books however are great, especially for reluctant readers as well as the   therapuetic value for those children who often need a bit of calming down. I find listening is a skill that many children have difficulty with these days and audiobooks can assist with this as well.

I looked at the information provided and recall Westley Fields showing this at the Sibya Signs Web 2 course. I was blown away with this at the course and actually seeing him interacting with a student back at his school when he wanted to illustrate how this worked. This was an opportunity to spend a bit more time trying to absorb it. I could see how students would love it. I can’t see this happening in my primary school at all. We just don’t have the expertise and we are not very far along the technology continuum when we see this sort of thing happening.

I had a look around at these and found so many it became quite confusing. Actually found many a waste of time, don’t know how kids can spend so much time on YouTube. I did find a couple of feeds from the library site which I thought I would add to the blog as an RSS feed, however I experienced the same difficulty as earlier in the course which was an error message with regard to the url. After numerous attempts I gave up.  I don’t know why it won’t let me do that. I think the podcasts have real value, however I don’t know how I would go about actually creating my own for my students work. Obviously still a lot to learn here. Probaby only need to ask a couple of students and the problem would be solved!

When I read this name it reminded me straight away of a lolly and I don’t like lollies. Much the same feeling when looking at this. I much prefererred del.icio.us. and will use it in preference to this. Went through the motions but that was all it was, sorry. 

It was interesting to learn what a wiki actually is. I had only really heard of it in terms of wikipedia. I am quite excited about this as I have been at our computer co-ordinator for eighteen months to help me set up a link to the library on the web as a means of informing students and parents of the happenings in our library. I particularly want to promote boys literature, materials for reluctant readers and allow students to share their reading intersts with their peers. A wiki would also allow the parent body the chance to have issues addressed that concern them. I now feel I can do this myself.  I also like the idea of  developing a wiki to present research tasks. It is a great way to encourage ownership of work, to make students value not only their work but the work of others.   

This was a lot of heavy reading and I am not sure I really understand how this is supposed to work. After reading about Betaware it doesn’t sound as if this software has all its problems sorted out yet. I’m not sure how one guarantees the general principals “embrace radical trust” and “level of control”. Im not sure allowing the catalogue to be altered is a good thing at all. When I think how many hours I put into cataloguing when studying and now we are going to invite any “jo-blow” to get in and make changes because they think their idea  will be more user friendly .

I actually stumbled upon this very early in the course when trying to upload on to the blog and saw it in the widgets, but at the time it didn’t really make a lot of sense. Played around with it and now have several items bookmarked. Also introduced a lot of tags, earlier I wasn’t too sure what their significance was. I can see that this will be very useful in the library and a lot of the searching out of good sites for research has already been done by others. It is really easy to use.

This was such fun ! I don’t know if my confidence has improved or you have left the easy activities till last, but things don’t seem as daunting as when I first began. Heaps less frustration. I really loved igoogle, having everything at your fingertips. It is like having your own personalised desktop. It was good to be able to incorporate all the other activities we have looked at and put them together and be able to access them easily in the one spot. I added gadgets which I felt would be useful to me. What a selection, personally I thought some were ridiculous. One criticism would be that it is a tad “Americanised” but that is to be expected.  As for working for google, no thank you !! It was too “holiday camp” twenty four hours a day. I can see that it would appeal to the young people entering the workforce today who have grown up in a “must have razzle dazzle world”. I can also see that google is trying to promote the interests of its workers and therefore happy workers produces better results. However, not for me.

I thought this could be a useful way of creating a balanced collection by looking at what is available in the various genre. It could also get around entertaining the hoards of booksellers, perhaps just send them a list ! I also thought it would be a good way to build bibliographies. I also like the fact that it told you the libraries that actually had this book in their collection. This would be useful for students and parents when they are having difficulty finding a resource which is perhaps in high demand at school or if they wish to access further works by a given author. I particularly like biographies and searched for biographies of rugby players. I didn’t realise how many I actually had read and were sitting on my bookshelf.