Week 9, Thing #23

I am so grateful for the opportunity to take this journey. I had heard of many of the tools that were included in the School Library Learning 2.0 course. I had also read about many of them, but I had not actually explored very many of them. This course gave me an opportunity to not only read about them, but to explore them and actually use them.

This course has helped me in my position as Program Coordinator for Professional Development for Library Services. I enjoyed the course so much that I am encouraging my librarians to take the course this year. We will do the course in nine months instead of nine weeks. I have created a blog that we will use to track their progress, help them over the rough places and celebrate their successes. At our quarterly meetings they will be given time to share what they have learned with the librarians who are not taking the course. In that way, all librarians in our district will benefit from the course.

I enjoyed all of the exercises, but Exercise 15 was probably my favorite. I was preparing for a meeting with the librarians in my district and was planning to encourage them to explore Web 2.0 through the School Library Learning 2.0 course. Putting my thoughts together for this exercise helped me with that presentation and over 25% of my librarians have expressed an interest in taking the course. I also have a librarian who has moved to Ireland and has agreed to join us on the journey.

I liked using Flikr. I was able to share pictures that I had been promising to send to family for almost a year. I also joined Joyce Valenza's Ning which was something that was on my "To Do" list, but I probably wouldn't have done if joining a Ning hadn't been part of the course. When I explored wikis, I found some wonderful information that I plan to share with my librarians.

This was a wonderful course. I spent much more time than I had anticipated, but it was time well spent. I thought the course was very well done. There were wonderful resources to read and at first, I tried to read everything. I quickly found that it was impossible to read everything. Each article had links, which had links, which had links...and before I knew it, hours had passed. I had to limit myself to how many links I could read. I thought the activities were great. At times I was frustrated because I couldn't figure out how to do what I wanted to do. I am hoping to alleviate some of that frustration by creating a blog where our librarians can help each other over the rough spots. The banner on the blog is Librarians Helping Librarians.

At the first of August, I wasn't sure if I would be able to finish the course and start school at the same time. I was determined to finish on time and I have. If another course were offered, I would definitely be ready to participate. This has been an awesome experience. That's my one word for the course: awesome! Thanks!