11.5 Thing # 3

Must confess that I had heard of Skype before. Even saw it in action once, a movie or commercial I think. My daughter has an Apple laptop and she Ichats constantly. Her best friend traveled to Europe last summer and they kept in touch through their laptops. They chatted all through Europe. Pretty cool huh?
Skype has the ability to allow students to communicate with other students all over the world. Home bound students can video stream their lessons and communicate with all of their teachers as well as fellow students. The blog post about Skype based reference in the library was very interesting. I already have my email on our library's main page but adding Skype would be an interesting twist. Looked through the other apps for web based calling or conferencing, for the most part they seem to work very similar. My next big purchase will be an IPhone and am looking forward to paying the $0.99 for some of the applications I read about.

11.5 Thing # 2

Wordle is an excellent tool and so very easy to work with. If you pay close attention to advertising, word clouds are widely used. What an excellent tool to use in all subject areas. How about a Biology class listing all of the parts of an animal or plant cell?
Wordsift is just amazing. Again, how about putting all of the parts of a cell in the space provided and watch the images and links show up. Can't wait to share this with my teachers.
Will have to explore Glogster further. I want to look closely at all of the videos and try my hand at creating. Would like to use Glogster in the library setting as a way for me to display new titles. Right now my students are reading anything supernatural and are always asking for new titles. Here is a way for me to post new titles as they arrive. Animoto and Voki are old friends. I have created quite a few videos using Animoto and have presented to classes. Students have made quite a few book trailers using this great tool. My teachers love it.

11.5 Thing # 1

I had so much fun with 23 Things the first go round, I decided to participate with ESC 1 when 23 Things was offered. Now Spring Branch ISD has 11.5 Things and here we go again. This time I will skip the registration process and will participate as a lurker.
As I watched the video I was once again fascinated by the amount of information and Web 2.0 tools that are available. From Google Scholar to all of the free podcast that are easily accessible to anyone who wants the information it is truly mind boggling. As a librarian it is so easy to see my role as a facilitator to these information gatherers. We are always here to guide patrons to sites, teach how to gleam fact from opinion or propaganda and how to sort and process the information. Even now our roles as teachers and librarians are not shrinking but rather evolving as we guide our students/patrons to become efficient information users.