Thing 3 RSS (or who has time to read all this)

I tried to do RSS last summer with bloglines and i don't see the point. There is too much too read and not enough time to do it. the literature websites i wanted didn't have feeds at the time. This year since i have an igoogle home page (thanks to Claude) i decided to try google reader and add it to my already existing page. So easy, and the site i like to check now comes to me. i might like this!

Thing 2 Web 2.0 (the focus)

Thing 2 has taken the longest time to get my hands around. What is Web 2.0 and how are we going to keep up and provide services to our students, staff and parents.

An article on the OCLC site, Web 2.0 Where will it take libraries?
Rick Anderson Director of Resource Acquisition, University of Nevada, Reno Libraries

"We need to focus our efforts not on teaching research skills but on eliminating the barriers that exist between patrons and the information they need, so they can spend as little time as possible wrestling with lousy search interfaces and as much time as possible actually reading and learning."

questions for us to answer; what services do we have, what will the interface to those services look like and how do we teach those services to our patrons.
Here is a beginning list;

What services do we offer?

· Electronic Databases for research

o World Book

o Grolier

o Tumble Readables

o Many more….

· Electronic Devices

o 7 MP3 players

o 9 IPods

o Digital Cameras

o Video Cameras

· Computers

o Wireless mobile lab (27 laptops)

o Research lab in media center (17 desktops)

o 2 multimedia labs, (30 desktops, 27 desktops)

· Cyber Café

o Afterschool gathering spot

· Gathering for meetings, large groups, author visits

What to work on!

· How do we provide services so our patrons can’t live without us!

o Be more visible

o Promote services

o Customer services motto

I think this is a good starting point.

Thing 1 ( is this a dr. seuss book?)

After taking the Blogs, Wiki's and Podcasts last summer i think i can do this. what i need to refine is how people will use it more. I am on the Steering committee of IRA Teacher Choices Project. i set up a wiki last year for teachers who read the selected books and could post their thought about how they would use the books in their classroom. Posting the books and writing a short synopsis was easy but to get them to write more in a blog didn't work. this year i will try and get a classroom to participate and see how that works. here is the blog http://teacherchoicesproject.blogspot.com/

i also taught summer school last year and the students loved writing on the blog, which makes me think that students might be good at showing teachers how to do it. here is the blog.
http://aliteralepidemic.blogspot.com/