Thing 12

I joined myspace and facebook months ago because I wanted to see what my youngest niece and nephew were getting up to online. They're such great kids they let me be a friend. Once I saw that what they were getting up to seemed innocent and fun I backed off. I've been reacquainting myself with both these sites. Educators need to know how students are communicating. Surely in the future, teachers and librarians will make use of this type of communication. However, our kids at school are blocked but there are a lot of good ways to use these sites. I know some colleges are communicating with students through facebook. You can link to my facebook page. As librarians, we can set up our book club on myspace. Here's my myspace page. It seems high school students use myspace and college kids use facebook. What I dislike about both these sites is that it's not always easy to locate a person. I searched both sites for my favorite mystery authors and came up empty. I also don't care to trawl through 400+ individuals named Elizabeth George to see if I can find the one who's a mystery writer. And I know site content is not always wholesome. The type of site I've never heard of before is the one I really liked: Ning. Doing these assignments makes me feel like I did when I was taking library certification courses from UNT. I always felt I was learning about stuff on the "cutting edge." Last Wednesday during staff development, I asked Sandy to repeat the word Ning because I wasn't sure what I was hearing. Now I'm loving the Ning! I especially like the Teacher-Librarian . There's a group called YA Lit in the Library that looked very interesting. There was a post about using Twitter to communicate about books and there's something else I need to investigate. The other two I like are Texas School Librarians and Mesquite Librarians & Friends. These sites are ones that I would most like to use. They are of specific interest without a lot of the silliness you see on myspace or facebook.