Web 2.0 and School Libraries

On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, I attended the Illinois Computing Educators Conference. For anyone living close to the Chicago area, this is a great conference held every year at the end of February. After Wednesday’s session titled Web 2.0 and School Libraries, I left feeling very excited about adding more to our library’s Web site and program. The presenters of this workshop were Erin Wyatt and Katie Kirsch, library media specialists at two local middle schools. Their presentation was extremely helpful to librarians still at the initial stages of incorporating Web 2.0 tools into their program. I know many of my classmates are much more advanced in using these tools, but I thought it might be helpful to those of you like me who are just beginning. I would like to share some of the information I gained by attending this workshop. One of the best things about using these tools is that they are all free.

Setting up a blog was the first topic we investigated. Watch the Plain English video for a succinct description of what a blog is. I assume since you are reading this blog, you are familiar with the concept; however, this video and others made by CommonCraft are extremely effective in helping other teachers or students understand these new tools. Blogger, WordPress, and EduBlogs were three sites suggested for setting up a blog. I found joining Blogger to be a good choice since it ties in nicely with some of the other Web 2.0 tools available. Beyond learning how to format settings and create posts, practical tips for getting students involved with a library blog were shared. Adding a question of the week was effective in getting students to check the blog more frequently. Students especially like when polls are added. We learned how to add widgets using LibraryThing and our very own avatar created in Meez. I found you could spend hours choosing clothing, hair styles and accessories! Some image generator sites were shared. Modifying images to include on a blog or wiki can certainly make it more appealing to students. Check out Custom Sign Generator, Image Chef, and Spell with Flickr.

Another area that we learned about was setting up a reader account in order to use RSS feeds. Watch the Plain English video for a description of what RSS feeds are if you are not familiar with them. Setting up a Google Reader account was very easy. Listed below are some blogs that were suggested to be set up as RSS feeds. These feeds focus on professional topics.
• School Library Journal~ many blogs are offered as choices but Joyce Valenza’s titled the NeverEndingSearch was highly recommended. Joyce Valenza is a high school library media specialist, a technology writer and presenter at conferences across the United States.
• Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog ~ Doug Johnson has been a K-12 library media specialist, writer of books and articles in Library Media Connection and the Education World Website. His humor is not to be missed!
• Michael Stephens’s Tame the Web ~ Michael Stephens is a public librarian who is a real proponent of libraries and Web 2.0.
• Helen Blower’s Library Bytes ~ Helen Blower is Director of Digital Strategy for the Columbus Metropolitan Library (CML) in Columbus, Ohio
• David Warlick’s 2 Cents Worth ~ David Warlick focuses on instructional technology and 21st Century Literacy.
• Will Richardson ~ Will Richardson is an educator who promotes the use of read/write technologies in the K-12 classroom.
• Newspaper feeds can also be set up

Wikis were then highlighted as an effective way to set up collaborative research projects in the library. The presenters spoke about how students were asked to sign a wiki agreement which basically stated the things that were acceptable to post and asking students to not edit other groups’ pages. We set up a wiki page for free that Wikispaces offers to educators. Pathfinders could be created on wikis as well as student book reviews. Each page could represent a different genre. Some other examples of wikis that were shared are:
• Joyce Valenza’s Information Fluency
• Illinois Battle of the Books Wiki
• Copyright Friendly Wiki

The social bookmarking site Del.icio.us was introduced. There are several reasons why this site can be helpful to librarians. The use of tags will notify users of helpful sites others have tagged. As a teacher-librarian, this site is vital when instruction is done in various classrooms. Access to all of your bookmarked sites becomes critical to the success of some lessons.

LibraryThing becomes a very helpful tool for readers’ advisory. The presenters use this site to keep track of all of the books they have read. Tagging becomes very helpful when trying to suggest books to students. Rather than spending a lot of time on writing a review, tags are used to represent genre and topics. Any books that are in the middle school library where the presenters work are also tagged with the school’s mascot name. This is helpful in eliminating any books from a suggested list that students would not be able to find in their school library.

Two more sites that can help librarians learn more about Web 2.0 tools were shared at the end. These sites would help review some of the sites previously shared as well as offer information about working with images, podcasts, ebooks and much more. Library 2.0 in 15 Minutes in a Day originally was posted on Wikipedia but has since moved to a new wiki site. School Library Learning 2.0 is a tutorial of 23 “things” you should do to learn the 2.0 tools. I hope that there is something here that is new and helpful to you. Hours can consumed without notice once you begin exploring these sites!