Thing 20:

I had so much fun looking on YouTube and TeacherTube. I have seen several of the videos I found from my own teenagers who share fun things with me. I found this video on TeacherTube and was hit with my own musings about the generation of kids that we are teaching now. I have read a book called Generations (Howe & Strauss, 1991) which shows that in the United States has 4 distinct archetypes of generations that repeat themselves in a cycle. This generation is another Civic generation. The last Civic generation fought in WWII. They follow rules and do what is expected of them by the last older Idealist generation. The Baby Boomers are the most recent Idealist generation and this video is very clearly a new Civic generation. They are all doing this together (reading and singing) at the encouragement of their teachers and the Idealist generation beliefs. It does warm the cockels of my heart to see all these junior high students reading books and singing together. Flashback to the Coca-cola commercials singing "I would like to teach the world to sing"

Thing 19:

I chose to research LuLu. This is a self-publishing website that helps you publish, sell and market world-wide if you desire. It is a little overwhelming to me, but I know students and have a daughter who aspires to be published someday. This is a great way to encourage would be authors to just try it out. You can even order an ISBN so that you can sell to bookstores and libraries. Books are not the only venue. Music cds, artwork, photo books and perhaps even dvds are out there to create. They have a network of people to help you along the way as well.

Thing 18:

Google docs is far superior to Open Office in my opinion. Google docs is online and can be used from any computer vs. Open Office has to be downloaded to each computer you may be on. Google docs can be used to create presentations with slides, vectored drawings, spreadsheets, rich text documents. You can embed images, you can design web forms which allows you to store information. My son is the webmaster for his Boy Scout troop and uses these forms for camp sign up. You can upload any type of file at all.
Lastly you have the ability to truly collaborate and edit these Google docs in real time. This would be a boon for teachers planning together or students working on a project.

Thing 17:

Rollyo is very helpful. I rolled my own search engine titled "collaboration". I couldn't help but adding several of the ready made scroll rolls offered. Travel, books and authors, armchair scientist, you get the idea. Wait until you check out the collaboration search engine. I got over 4000 hits when I entered "librarian teacher". My rollbar is linked for your perusal. Oops when I tried to link to my rollbar, I got this message from rollyo: Hmm.

The link you came here on appears to be from a 'link spammer' trying to promote their site through Rollyo. These links are a nuisance to the community, a nuisance to our site, and ultimately not very nice. If you think you are getting this page in error, drop us a line and we'll try to get to the bottom of it.

I will follow up and see if I can fix it.

Thing 16:

Wikis are wonderful things. They are useful planning arenas for teachers, departments, schools, or even districts. For example, all Biology teachers in Katy ISD could participate and add comments, lessons, webquests, musings, etc. It would be a wonderful way to get together and collaborate besides the random horizontal team meeting once a year. We could even invite all of our librarians on our campuses to join and collaboration may finally begin in science. I feel this could be the start of something great and a wiki is just the tool needed to facilitate it. On a personal note I would like to have a Lambert Home wiki. I have 3 teenagers and a husband. We could plan outings for the summer, a camping trip, next year's vacation, household painting projects, sleepovers, menus, and whatever else pops up.

Thing 15:

It is an exciting time to become a librarian. There is so much information about how things should be or are becoming. I relate to Rick Anderson's ideas about navigating our library around the icebergs. We truly must rethink the services we provide and how accessible they are to our patrons, our teachers and students. This is a snowball getting bigger and bigger and there is a lot more hill to go. By collaborating with teachers and keeping our finger on the pulse of other librarians, we can get through this and keep evolving to meet the information demands to come.

Thing 14

Technorati is an interesting company. I enjoyed "meeting" the staff and hearing how they got started. When I searched for "school library learning 2.0" on this site, I did not find a hit under blog posts, tags, or blogs. I was disappointed and double checked it because I thought there would be something out there. Also the the popular section is currently unavailable. Tagging your blog and comments on others blog would be helpful for you to find things again and to lead others to these places so they can share what you have found. We are all in this together but it is OK to lead and/or follow at different points along the way.