wiki's

I am working on getting my wiki up to date. I have had the account a while but haven't really learned how to use it. It will be a work in progress for now, but I hope to learn quickly how to make it visually appealing.

Reading & Writing

An article from NCTE was discussing the issue of teens reading books. As a librarian, this is something that always concerns me. These days kids spend so much time in front of the TV or on the net that educators worry they will not be competent readers. Well, I found a web site that may help ease our fears, fanfiction.net. This site allows users to read stories or write their own. It is organized into 8 different genres. Most are short stories. The few that I previewed seem to be well written which sort of surprised me. I guess I am getting used to hearing teens talk in "IM" language!

Things in Review

Wow, it is hard to believe I haven't posted anything since January. I have my iPod and it looks just like the picture I posted. I have uploaded music and now I am working on learning about the extras it offers.

As I think back on the 23 Things I realize I am already forgetting what I learned. I plan to take time this summer and go back over the "Things" I enjoyed most. My school has a wiki that I may work on also. I created one for the library, but I'm not sure if I will keep it going since we now have one for our campus.

My iPod

Summary

I finally made it to the end! What a journey I have been on for a few months. I have enjoyed most of the assignments and feel more aware of the services the Internet has to offer. I feel more confident with my computer skills and expect to be a leader on my campus. I am going to encourage my campus to take this course as well.

I must say Animoto was by far my favorite of all. I kept going back and creating more videos. Now my daughter wants to get started. Several things that will be useful to me and my campus are wiki's, mind maps such as Gliffy, social bookmarking, and online productivity tools. It is going to take time for me to learn these new tools and become comfortable using them. I think the one assignment I had the most issues with was creating a myspace page. I just have such negative feelings about myspace. I'm sure it comes from the negative tones set by the media, so I don't know if I will keep my page.

The "things" weren't difficult and the discovery resources were easy to understand and follow. They made the assignment easier to complete. I do think it would have been helpful to meet, as a group, about halfway through the assignments. I noticed several people had not done many assignments until the holidays and several had questions or needed help. I would love to see a PFK course later that builds upon this one or that is similar. Now that I have completed this course, I will begin sharing it with my campus.

Thing 23

This "thing" is really causing me to think hard. Copyright isn't something that is always simple to understand, but I do think it is good that Creative Commons has come about. So many people create, share, edit, and remix others peoples ideas all the time. I think CC is going to finally start giving people the credit they deserve. Frequently, we borrow, change, or share others ideas without giving credit. Maybe it is out of fear of violating laws or other reasons. CC allows users to edit content and share as long as they credit the original author. I have been reading Lawrence Lessig's blog and discovered that CC comes with several attributes. I clicked on two different attributes and the page was written in layman's terms. It described what a user was allowed to do with the work and what credit must be given.

I searched for sites with CC license and I found a helpful site. http://search.creativecommons.org/# enabled me to chose from several sites items that had CC licenses. I was even able to select it to show only items that I can modify, adapt, or build upon. I chose flickr and looked for White House photos. This would be a great way for students researching American Landmarks, inventors, inventions, etc. They could import the photos into their work as a final project.

Thing 22