Thing #23: Congratulations

All Done

Or is this simply the end of the beginning?

A couple of my favorite activities were discovering how other school librarians were incorporating ideas and technology into their work and libraries (Joyce Valenza and the Mighty Little Librarian, to name a few), as well as the fun exercises, like making trading cards. Completing my 23 Things blog has taught me two very important lessons: 1) Exploring technology is vital to being a school librarian, since you have to expose your students to ALL emerging tools on the web, and 2) Technology and using the Internet is usually not hard, but it does take time and trial-and-error. If those are the only things I take away, I am much richer as a teacher-librarian-to-be and a teacher. I was surprised that when I started really knocking out my posts on my blog, I almost didn't want to stop. I started doing two-to-three most days in the end, but getting in the groove was the hardest for me at first. Once I did, I found blogging and exploring to be really enjoyable. In order to improve the 23 Things blogging exercise for the future students, just make sure that links are all up-to-date and add any important trends in the library world. Time permitting, I would definitely want to participate in a program like this. Having a due date does make completing it more of a priority, but I did learn so much doing this. As a librarian, continuing to blog would be something great to show prospective employers as a portfolio. However, my tongue-in-cheek humor might not always be appreciated. Describing my experience in one sentence: As a librarian, the only way to create life-long learners is to BE a life-long learner.

Now, I get to comment on my peers' blogs. I'm excited to see what they've discovered....