Final Posting for 23ThingsKansas

My reflections on the things I have learned from participating in 23thingsKansas:
1. Technology is not as difficult as I have made it sometimes. I need to just "jump in" and try more things more often. However, I still would like to have a mentor to discuss items with and ask questions and I am more comfortable if the mentor is someone I know.

2. My least favorite lesson was Twitter. However, after listening to the wrap-up webinar, I may have to open my mind and give it a try.

3. My personal favorite lesson just to help my own organization was week 14 - Library Thing. I am so excited about continuing to add my books to shelves this summer and getting organized.

4. Lesson that I most want to go back and redo because I am still having major problems: Week 6: Tagging and social bookmarking. I feel like this lesson has lots of potential but it is not working for me. I don't know if the problem is the school filter but I cannot get the Delicious link to stay on my webpage and my tags are not working either. My delicious link shows under "my favorites" but that is not where I want or need it to be.

5. Lesson that could have the most impact on my library may be from week 12: screencasting. I have only done the one screencast but I have ideas for several more. Hopefully, I will have time this summer to work on some of these. I am glad that the lessons will remain on the site this summer so that I can go back for review and reinforcement.

6. The lesson I have used the most is lesson 1:blogging. Once I got this established, it was kind of fun to come back each week and add my summaries. My nephew spent the spring semester in Rome, and thanks to my blog, I was able to follow his experiences. It was great!

I learned multiple things throughout the course of these lessons so in no particular order now, here are the rest of my 23 things:

7. I have used facebook for personal family information since week 2. Now I want to set up a library facebook page - challenge: get past the school filters.

8. I am becoming more comfortable with webinars. The primary advantage for me may be those that are archived since getting on during the school day is not possible.

9. Professional training may be easier to access through webinars and this may become more important for the next several years although I prefer the personal touch where I can talk to people face to face.

10. I need to get better at uploading photos into Flickr and getting them organized. Then it will be easier to use other tools like Slide Sharing.

11. I like Google Reader.

12. I subscribed to too many RSS feeds after my first lesson and became completely overwhelmed.

13. During the final webinar, someone mentioned that they don't always read everything on their RSS feeds- the example was the "Sunday paper approach." This is going to help me. I am deleting some of my initial RSS feeds, keeping several of my "essential ones."

14. I want to use "tagging" to get organized with my various school projects, presentations and resources that I have stored in too many different places.

15. I know what the "cloud" is. About one or two weeks before this session started, someone was talking about the "cloud" and being a former science teacher, I knew they weren't discussing the weather. Now I know what they meant and have attended one training session on google tools. Along with the projects from this class, I am actually a part of the "cloud" now.

16. There are still a lot of things I do not know how to do. Technology keeps changing very quicklly.

17. I have not used the instant messaging as much as I thought I might. I think I need to get several of the people I like to solicit help from on my buddy list.

18. I need a Round Two for most of the things we did this spring semester. Time went very quickly and I was doing most of them for the first time. I need more practice.

19. I like slide sharing and may actually use it more with some of my "family" projects, trips etc.

20. I need to network better with more school librarians who are doing some of these things.

21. Almost everything we did throughout this class was new to me. Perhaps the only thing I had done before was to sign in to some other professional webinars.

22. I have plenty of work to do to add some of these tools to my library to create a better learning environment for my patrons.

23. 23thingsKansas has GREAT INSTRUCTORS!!