Thing #17: Ning

Ning

Teacher LibrarianNing Homepage

Ning is like a professional Facebook. It allows people in a certain field to create a circle of "friends" (Ning refers to this as a community) in order to share ideas, photos, videos, tutorials, and web postings. I personally chose Teacher LibrarianNing, because it gives me a great glimpse of what I could use Ning for in the future. Hosting a site comes at a cost on Ning; the basic price of a monthly Ning membership is $25. Wow! Ummm... even with online administrative support, what ordinary teacher librarian could afford that? However, joining Ning is free, so I was able to sign up easily. I plan to use Ning to gain lots of ideas. As a librarian, you are almost always the only one in your school doing your job. You might have a few collaboration meetings within your district between librarians, but that might not be enough to form a working relationship to answer your questions. Ning allows this working collaboration to be formed and allows you to ask questions, such as how to collaborate with teachers effectively, in a safe manner. Now, onto more Ning exploring...