BONUS…….Summarize….Crossing the Finish Line!!!!

Wow!!! I made it!…The Home Stretch! There is so much to learn about Web 2.0. I think I understand now….It’s all about sharing and collaborating via the web. We share photographs, movies, knowledge, collaborate on spreadsheets and other documents, blog our dreams, ideas, and inspire others. We bounce ideas off each other and “make the world pretty” with mashups and other graphics applications while we do all of this.

It’s a big shift in how we share information so learning about it is very exciting. Even copyright has started a shift from everything being only “all rights reserved” to “some rights reserved” giving way to collaboration as we start to share creative wealth. That’s one of the things I enjoyed learning the most because collaborating with teachers is very important in my job as a librarian and seeing all of this emerging technology being shared by people all over the world makes more sense now. Life-long learning takes on a whole new meaning now. Keeping up with new technology truly will be a life-long quest.

I have found many of the exercises to be challenging and very time consuming. There was no way that I could do any of this during school time. I had to work at home because I’m the type of learner who has to have uninterrupted time to think and experiment. In fact, I did the majority of my exercises during Christmas break. I found this to be somewhat of a surprise because I thought I would be able to do some of the exercises during my lunchtime.

When I was first introduced to many of the websites I could not see myself using them with my students. As I progressed through each step and learned more and more, my feelings about how I could use them changed. I started to see myself forging ahead and even thinking of ways I could try blogs or wikis with my research classes.
Hopefully, my enthusiasm will be contagious and our teachers will want to learn to use some of these great tools also.