- Tuition: $2,790.00
- Textbook: $36.00 on Amazon
- Gas for the week: $50.00 at the corner station
- Learning to navigate the world of Web 2.0: Priceless.
Each of my classes here at Post has been worthwhile and enlightening; but for sheer volume of useful information delivered and explained, this one has no equal. There is no doubt that this course is invaluable, or priceless, in preparing students for 21st century librarianship. Not only does it provide them with a multitude of tools to use in the library and the classroom, but they are also given the means to stay on top of it all by creating their own personal learning networks.
After taking this course and completing the assignments, I feel like a different person than the one who responded to the Unquiet Librarian blog post (except that "sheer" seems to be my word of the month). Even though I knew our textbook would be a useful resource, it was a slow read, since so much of the information was new to me. But sure enough, I found myself consulting it while completing the final project and lo! And behold - it wasn't difficult to understand at all! But that is not the only thing that has changed. I have to admit that I approached this class with a fair amount of trepidation, feeling somewhat like an outsider due to my lack of expertise. Over the last two weeks, however, I have gained confidence and am actually looking forward to the beginning of school so that I can share some of what I have learned. Glogster, LiveBinder and Wordle are three of my favorites - depending on the classrooms I'm assigned to, I plan to introduce them to the students and their teachers.
We learned about so many social networking tools - I am finding Nings such as TeacherLibrarian and wikis such as Doug Johnson's to be of particular interest right now. Joining LibraryThing and Shelfari is also on my "to-do" list, as is keeping current with Delicious. These will assist me as I continue to learn how to take advantage of all the web has to offer. But the beauty of all these tools is that they can change as I need them to - when (not if) I'm a school librarian, I'll want to collaborate with teachers and students, and they will become teaching tools as well. Imagine the excitement when students discover, using a ClustrMap, that someone half the world away has looked in on their wiki! Or commented on their VoiceThread, or... the possibilities are endless. An outsider no more, I look forward to navigating Web 2.0 (and whatever follows).
