17 of 23: This one took me a little time. I have worked with ELM before with students, but did not use all these bells and whistles. As I work with younger students, most of these are more in depth than they need, but I can see that some of them would be useful for me. The RSS feed from Gale would be helpful for a student doing a research project, especially for current events. I would like to use it for keeping current on trends within the our union and education. As for the Web Page Composer, I found it quite cumbersome. There are many easier programs than this to create a website. I do use the Proquest email capability. I take students to the U. of MN. for research on History Day. They look up articles on the on the databases and then email them back to me at the school. That way I can print them when we return home. As for the eBook, I have not used that much. I will have to take more time to see where I can take that. I know it will help the more advance researcher, but how I will use it, time will tell.

Numner 16 of 23: I have used RPC in my school for 2 years. I was introduced to it a NWSC library conference. I brought the information back to school and did staff training on it. Several of the staff are using it to teach the research process and also to help the students set short term and long term goals. On all the lessons, it recommends cooperation with the media specialist, which I greatly appreciate. I have suggested to the U. of MN. that they add a Project display as one of the final projects. This would be very beneficial for History Day students.

15 of 23: I have to admit that I am not a gamer. I do not enjoy sitting at a computer screen and interacting with fictitious characters on the screen. I did learn how to bilge and sword fight. It did take me some time, but I did find that you could not play the challenges until you read the instructions. I tried to speed up the process and skip that part, but it does not work. I know that games have their place in the school environment. Many people feel that they are a waste of time, but I believe that any game entails problem solving and all student s benefit from this. I use games as an award for my library club members. When they have completed their tasks, they are allowed to access an approved games list. They enjoy this and it motivates more students to get involved with volunteering in the library.

Number 14 of 23: Wow!!! Do I love this. I can't wait to go through all my books at home and get entered. I want to do one for the books I own and another for the ones I read from other sources. I excahnge books with other members of my books clubs all the time and now we can network and see each others collections. I love it!!!! I am going to encourage my avid student readers to start their own LibraryThing and start listing their books. I entered 6 books, the frist ones I grabbed off the shelf. As I get them all on, which will probably have to wait until this summer, I then need to get them into alpha order so they can be located easier. I also have to say that I like the Tag feature as I can create my own system of locating the book when I cannot remember the title or author. You can find my the start of my home library in my profile user my web page.

Number 13 of 23: For a lesson on online productivity, this task took me more time than any others. I have to admit, that I will not use many of these tools as they are already built into the student accounting system we have in the district and I can not see doing double the work. I did try many of them out. I, like many others, am tired of having to sign up for everything and having a different sign in and password. I try to use the same as often as possible, but each program seems to want something different. I did open a Pageflake and it looked great, but now only the top articles are filling in and the others are titles only. I don't know how to fix this. I also tired some of the calendars and thought backpack would be the one I would use. I also opened a Remember the Milk, but hit a snag when 2 of may tasks were the same, but at different dates, and the program would not accept both. Oh, well. As I said before, I will continue to use my tools at school, and of course keep my little manual date book in my purse.

12 of 23: Over half way there!! This was interesting. I read the paper newspapers and try to stay current on the information my students would probably need. These sites could be helpful. The first obstacle will be to get them removed from the CIPA block. That is sometimes easier said than done. I did get slightly frustrated when I could not get out of a site unless I closed down Internet started over. These are sites I tend not to frequent. I read an interesting, at least I thought so, political article and shared it on Mixx. I tried on Digg, but hit a Fatal error, words non of like to see. As I am in a middle school environment, I do not see my students needing these on an on-going basis. This would make teaching current events simpler for some of my staff and that is who I will share it with.

11 of 23: I do understand the concept of tagging and can see how it could simplify my finding sites that I have found interesting. As a media specialist, so often I am asked to find resources to aid a teacher in her lessons. I get frustrated when I know I bookmarked a site with a tool they could use, but am not always able to find where I filed it. These tags would help immensely. I also know that I do not have the time right now to re-organize my bookmarks. This will be a good summer project. This sounds simple on the podcast, but will take some time to finesse. I will start tagging new sites.

10 of 23: I have worked with wiki's in school. We did a collaboration with a school in Texas. Both school read the book "Walk Two Moons." Then each student chose a idea from the book to develop into a short report. The Texas students posted their reports, and then my students chose a Texas partner. My students then added more information, or wrote their won report and shared. Both classes seem to enjoy the process and the interaction.
I was considering a book review blog, but I think a wiki would be a better choice. i could read and review books, the students could add their comments or post their own reviews. It would also be able to monitor for any abuse as I can look up the posts and changes.
I reviewed all the blogs listed. Some I found confusing, like the SJCPL Subject Guide. I suppose that is because I am thinking for uses for my middle school and that was for more sophisticated users. I have added the Library Success wiki to my resource list for future use. I find many of the wikis were more pathfinders to other information than actual posting.

9 of 23: I am excitied about this tool. I have been working with a group of teachers on creating curriculum that embeds a Minnesota History unit into thier Language Arts. This would be very helpful for our process as each person could edit and comment on the documents.

I used the Google Docs because I alreadu have a Google account and it seemed the easiest for me to use. I had to play some to understand how to share the information with my cohorts, but I think I have it figured out. I will know for sure when I get back to school on Monday and try it out with them.

As for the Founding Fathers, I don't think would be a concern to them. We all know copyright law, correct? That means that we cannot change a published document unless we have premission. This is just another

Number 8 of 23: I feel like I am losing my mind. There are so many tools out there that it is mind boggling. I played with some of the photo tools and had some fun. I have to admit, I got frustrated at times with the directions and the steps, but I know that my students will work through these quite easily. I thought of several uses for the slide shows. I would like to link a slide show of new books to my media center web site. Students would be able to access this at home or in class and then know what new and exciting materials are available. Another use I can see is for class presentations. Students could create their own slide shows and then by posting them on the web, classmates and family members could view them at any computer. This would be ideal for our technology class.
I tried Thunbstacks and found it quite easy to navigate. It does not have all the bells and whistles, but it did what I needed. I think this would be an easy one to teach in the middle grades and advance them to the more complicated ones as they progress through grades.
I recently completed grad classes in media technology. We each had to create and post an e-folio. I took this back to our technology instructor and now our 8th grade students are using it as one of their projects in their career investigation unit. Students have enjoyed this program and it great to see that they are beginning to understand that the steps needed to obtain employment; education, resume, portfolio.

Number 7 of 23: Email is a god-send. It has made it much easier to connect with my staff members with news of new books, scheduled events and general media information. I post a staff media newletter by attaching through email. That way, I never hear "I didn't get one." It also lets me correspond with staff members when I have time. They know that can email me and they will get an answer. If they walk into the media center, I might be with a class and the are not even able to ask me the questions. It is an essential tool of my job.
I wish we could use an online reference tool. As most of the questions would come after school hours, we do not have the funds to offer this service. As for during school hours, I am seldom at my desk, so it would not be a "live" conversation. I beleive this should be an essential tool for the college research libray or the help desk at the public library, but at this time, I cannot see it being used in my school site.
I have started a new service for my students. They can put holds on materials that are not available. As soon as they material is returned, my system notifies me of the hold. I then let the students know either through email or text messaging. I give the students the choice as some do not have access to one form of equipment or another.
I did not attend any of the webinars as I am quite familiar with them. I have done training on them in several venues. When we installed our new library system, a majority of the training was through webinar sessions. I have also participated in webinars through United Streaming. These helped me become familiar with the resources on United Streaming and I have used them to help train other staff members. I enjoy Webinars because they can be set up at convenient times that work into the schedule of the participants. Also, like the ones offered through Minitex, you as a user can decide what you want to partiicpate in and go for it.

Number 6 of 23: Now this was interesting. I enjoyed building these cards. The layout can get a little tedious as the tab keys do not work and the final product does not look like the typed input, but with a little patience, this can be worked out. I can see the students using this in many formats. A good example would be the current study of the voyageurs currently being taught at our school. The students could create their own characters and trade and collect sets. Knowing our students, they would also come up with a game that puts a value on each card. My first step will probably be with the tech department and allow this site to be accessible. I hope you enjoy my cards.

Number 5 of 23:

It's been awhile since I have been able to work on my "23 Things." Life seems to intervene with our time. But I am now back to it and ready to roll. I have to admit, I erad about all the "fun things" you can do on Flickr, but it was confusing to me. I did try some of them. I enjoyed the writing with pictures, but could not figure out how to load it to my blog. I then tried the puzzle and enjoyed that. I saved the puzzle as a picture and then uploaded that to this site. Then I realized that I could have entered the URL of either the picture or the words into the add imagfe screen and would have accomplished the same. So now I will try and see if it works for the letters. I do not know how I will use this in my school, but it was fun experimenting. Oh well, I can't get the Spelling with Flickr to load to this page, so I will just end for now.