All atwitter about PLN’s

Making digital connections

School librarians are sometimes lonely.

We may be the only librarian in our buildings, or even the only librarian in our districts.  There’s no one with whom to share the triumphs (the kids TOTALLY saw how those two stories were related!) and frustrations (why is this book covered with snot?) of daily life in the library media center.

One of the great changes for career librarians in the last few years has been the rise of social media:  sites that not only let you share your own pictures, audio, text, and other content, but let others rate, comment on, or even change your content.  Static websites could provide information, but not much in the way of interaction.  E-mail, e-mail lists, and online forums were the next step.  Some, like the still-vigorous LM_Net, were among the first to make digital connections a reality for teacher librarians.  Then came a veritable explosion of blogs, wikis, photo-sharing, podcasting, video-sharing websites, and the virtual world was changed.

Using Twitter to communicate with a NASA teacher

Twitter is often described as a microblogging platform–a way of making tiny little 140-character blog posts, to which friends, family, and colleagues can immediately reply. I’ve written about Twitter before, when my science teacher husband showed me how NASA has been using social media to communicate with the public.  Twitter’s power lies in the brevity of the posts, and the immediacy of the feedback. My husband’s metaphor for Twitter is that it’s like walking through a huge crowd–you overhear lots of conversations, and after a while, you might venture a few words yourself.  Once you’ve met a few people, they introduce you to yet more.  (This reminds me irresistibly of the old Faberge shampoo commercials, featuring the girls who told two friends about their marvelous hair products…”and THEY’LL tell two friends, and THEY’LL tell two friends, and so on, and so on…)

Now that I am part of a network on Twitter and other social sites like VoiceThread, Flickr, Delicious, and a few other sites, I find that without expecting to be, I’m now part of a network–a Personal Learning Network–of educators who respond to my queries;  send me links to other teachers, articles and web tools;  guide me to best practices in education, and occasionally even profess to be amused by my humor.  I recently used Twitter, along with LM_Net, to gather ideas for a 15-minute conference with my new principal, and to follow the discussion at a conference I wasn’t able to attend in person.  (This is nothing like reading summaries or blog posts after the fact–I was reading comments in real time.  Pretty cool. )  I’m using a Twitter widget on my library website to keep families updated, and I’ve found some great school librarians to follow on the Twitter4Teachers wiki. I’ve met some fellow “tweachers, ” too, and contrary to public opinion about meeting “online friends,” not one of them was an axe murderer.

Thank you, PLN, I’ll never be lonely again.  Now, if you could only help me with the snot-covered book…

Tweet!

Tweet!

Originally uploaded by Ashpet

This is the “snowman” my husband and I (both twitter-addicted educators) made when playing in the snow today. ☺

This Site May Harm Your Computer…or maybe not.

Twitter was all…well…atwitter this morning about a widespread Google problem.  Everything in the search results had a little proviso stating “this site may harm your computer.”   (Oh no!  The Internet is broken!)

Google’s headache this morning looks like a great opportunity for teacher librarians.   Even after the song-and-dance many of us do touting the value of subscription databases and checking the authority of websites, Google is still the source of first and last resort for many students.  It’s so easy, so quick, so sweet… I had some third grade kids in the computer lab who decided to jump away from their approved links and search Google for information on the Ashanti people, because Google just had to be faster than the silly old online encyclopedia.   Result:  a page of links for the American singer Ashanti, and three kids with a dawning appreciation of the fact that faster does not always equal better.

Google is a superb search engine.  However, students need to understand that just because Google admits the existence of a site does not guarantee that site’s authenticity, and furthermore, that the information Google gives about websites–page rankings, security, date, and so on–may be open to question, too.  Older students need to learn about the various ways Google and other search engines can be manipulated*, for various malicious, political, or humorous reasons, in order to falsely promote some web pages to a higher place in the results.

When Google was experiencing its little migraine, I amused myself by snapping a screenshot of the results of a search for “google.com.”  I’m going to share it with young researchers in my district, to remind them of that old saying so valuable to those seeking information:  Question Authority!

*I’m citing a Wikipedia article in a blog post about questioning authority.   I am aware of a little irony here, but you know, when I googled “Spamdexing, ” it was, like, the top result…