Final Reflection

            Digital Technology for School Librarians: that alone made me terrified.  The use of technology was never my strongest area and to think that I had to complete an entire course scared me to the point that I almost gave up.  I mentioned before in my previous blogs that I would have to take every assignment one step at a time.  I had to remind myself that as long as I could follow directions, I would be okay.  Throughout the course, there were various assignments using different methods that I’d never even heard of.  I took the leap and decided to work one assignment at a time and one step at a time.  I had to convince myself that I could do it. 

            What I found tedious was creating social media accounts.  I didn’t see the need for them until I actually decided to pay attention to those people I was following.  I found useful articles, great pictures, and exciting news that was coming our way as librarians.  I already had a Facebook account, so following others was easy enough.  Twitter and Instagram was more foreign to me, but easy enough to find my way. 

            What I actually enjoyed working on were Infographics.  This opened a new world to me for working on presentations for work and school.  I was fairly familiar with them, but didn’t really create them frequently.  I had more time to explore the different formats and use what I liked. 

            I also enjoyed creating accounts for the online book communities which I had no idea existed.  My eyes were opened to a whole new world of possibilities and although I felt a bit exposed, I was glad I had that experience.  My absolute favorite assignment to complete was using Animoto.  I was able to play around with that for my class and for my students.  My students loved it!  They became so interested that they asked if they could start using it.  Of course I said yes.  We're in the process of creating some fun reading activities for the holidays.  

            Another fun technology based site we enjoyed as a class was creating comics and cartoons.  I was able to use this for lessons regarding behavior and discipline and had great success with it.  The students became excited and worked in groups to create a group project which they had to present for the class.  This was very successful and I will continue to use this in the future for my upcoming classes and sessions.

            What I found most difficult at times was embedding videos into the blog.  So, basically blogging!  I'm not a blogger, by any means, so writing out what I thought and putting in information was more of a challenge than I expected.  I did a bit of research before starting my own blog and found a bunch of nonsense that people write about.  I found a blog of people pretending to be cats and speaking as a cat, go figure.  Plus, I found blogs that were very helpful and well written.  It took some getting used to, but I was able to muster up enough of an opinion to blog about it.  

            I've had several people ask me what this class was about and if it was difficult.  My response was yes and no.  Yes because I spooked myself into believing that it would be hard and no because I learned to go with the flow.  We often fear what we don't understand and at the end of the day, I can say that I understood a lot more of this new world we live in.  Technology, although intimidating, is actually meant to make things easier.  It takes some getting used to, but it's quite exciting to use.