Thing 22: Developing Your Own 23 Things for Your Library

Although the entire staff at my elementary school did not participate in the 23 Things, several of the librarians in my district got together and decided to take the course this summer. Our plan is to get together this fall and use the ideas that we've learned to create a staff development workshop that we will present at one of our in-service days. I would definitely recommend this course to both teachers and other librarians in the district - in fact, I think anyone at all would benefit from this type of course. One of the librarians in my district made a good point, and that is that at the elementary level, perhaps we should concentrate on training the staff on Web 2.0 technologies rather than focusing on the students. Many of our students do not have access to computers at home, and using some of the technologies to enhance learning and research would be a wonderful use of this course.

I think that we could teach staff how to use tools such as RSS feeds, Ning, and Flickr to search for information and ideas that they can use in their teaching. We have already started a Wiki to share library information, and hopefully we can fully utilize it in the fall. Right now, we just introduced the idea. Facebook is wonderful for networking and sharing ideas. As far as presentations to students, I would like to use book trailers from YouTube and experiment with Flickr Mashups and Image Generators. I think that we can pool our ideas and create a training workshop to share all the exciting new ideas we have learned.