Method 12

"A Dozen Ways to Two-Step: Essential 2.0 Training for Texas Librarians" turned out to be useful to me on many levels. On the personal level, I learned about Google Docs, where I have access to my documents from any computer, and I will definitely use this tool. I also learned and will use the many additional features of Flickr, beyond the basic one of just posting photographs.

My greatest discoveries during this course, however, were those I will use on a professional level. For example, I have set up a wiki to collaborate with teachers on library units and on book/media selection for their subject areas. For future booktalks, I was thrilled to learn how to embed a video so that I will be able to embed book trailers, rather than having to click on a link during a presentation and hoping it works. Another tool I will use for reading promotion is podcasts, which I plan to put on the library website.

The program's format and concept worked well for me. I like self-paced workshops where I can read, process what I've read, and then practice. While I took longer than twelve hours to complete the program, that was mostly because I became interested in a topic and looked at all of the examples, read all of the articles, and/or spent extra time working with the method being discussed.

I would definitely participate in other discovery programs of this type if offered in the future. In my job as a libarian, I do my best to keep up with and incorporate new technology, and this course has been really helpful.

Method 11

Most of us have heard the messages about the availability of podcasts at the end of radio programs on stations such as NPR. You can subscribe to podcasts through My YaHoo! iTunes, or you can download to any MP3 device.

As part of this module, I was happy to learn of several additional sources for podcasts, and I listened to podcasts about young adult books on two sites. One site, however, required that an aggregator be downloaded, which I did not do.

In the past, I have used short podcasts I've found of authors reading passages from their books in booktalks I've given to students. I've also listened to quite a few booktalk podcasts to keep up with young adult literature. Now I'm thinking that creating and posting my own podcasts of booktalks on our library website sounds like another good way to reach students and to advertise our collection.

Method 10

Wikis were part of a technology session I recently attended, and the "In Plain English" tutorial was the introduction to the class. These tutorials do such a good job of demystifying and simplifying technology. Part of the session was to set up our own wiki. I haven't used it yet, but I think it would work well to use it with teachers to collaborate on library research projects.

The wiki examples were interesting. In fact, when looking at the ALA wikis, I saw under a YALSA wiki a list of YA authors by state and plan to contact some of the authors about perhaps being a guest author.

Since so many people had left Naomi Bates' blog and other book blogs I read regularly on the "Favorite Blogs" page, I left the google blog, one of several tech blogs I read.

Method 9

Chatting and instant messaging are not regular features of my online experience... I'm more comfortable with email and texting. I have instant messaged with my family in the past, and I like the fact that it is a quick way to keep in touch, but instant messaging doesn't allow me to hear nuance, inflection, etc. Another drawback is that if we had not set up something in advance (in which case we would have just spoken on the telphone anyway), we had to catch each other online at the same time. I still prefer to actually hear the person's voice, but I do recognise that we live in a busy world.

The library webpage has recently added a librarian's blog, and adding the Meebo box would be a good way to dialog with the students. Two considerations would be staff time involved in answering students' questions and publicizing the feature so students will know it's available.

Method 8

While I do not have a Facebook or MySpace page, I have visited both sites and know several people, inclucing family members, who have pages on these sites. Privacy concerns have kept me from signing up, and, while I hear from my friends and colleagues about their advantages, so far, the disadvantages are prevailing.

As educators, I feel it is important to let students know the dangers of posting personal information, photographs, etc., on these social networking sites. This information can come back to haunt students when they apply to colleges or begin searching for a job. The three articles on online privacy I read for this module offer a great deal of cautionary material. The fact that Facebook retains a person's personal data, even if he elects to drop the service, should be communicated to all students. In addition, Facebook's latest proposal to simplify its privacy settings is giving rise to concern about a person's profile being accessible by default to anyone with access to the Internet.

That being said, our school has recently added a Facebook page, in addition to the school's website. I saw some excellent examples of libary Facebook pages in the material with this module, and I can see where a Facebook page, set up under a school and not a personal profile, would be another good tool for marketing the library's services.

Method 7

The social bookmarking site delicious.com was not new to me, but I enjoyed taking an in-depth look at it and deciding how it would work for students and teachers at my high school. The article, "Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us" from Library Journal hits the nail on the head with the observation that librarians are so careful about the books we select and the databases we teach but that we sometimes watch dumbfounded as some students use google to locate "ill-founded, unedited, and repetitive single-page resources."

I have a list of suggested Internet sites, grouped by subject area, on our school library website to augment the wide array of databases we offer students for research assignments. Delicious.com, with its tags and its ability to locate other sites using those tags would be a more powerful way to locate and organize these resources.

On a personal level, this site would be useful for me because I have both a school laptop computer, which I often use to do school work on at home, and a home computer. Both computers have organized lists of bookmarks, but at times the site I need is bookmarked on the other computer. An account on delicious.com would solve that problem.

Method 6

This YouTube video book trailer of Mary E. Pearson's The Adoration of Jenna Fox is one I have used in book talks at my school. I like to use a few book trailers along with my regular book talks for variety. I have found some excellent ones on both TeacherTube and YouTube. Since neither site is blocked at my school, I am able to easily access the videos when I need them.

Embedding a video was new to me before beginning this unit, but it is really easy to do. I will be utilizing this new skill in a school book blog.