Magpie

It has happened enough over the past few weeks that I started thinking about it. A number of parents and colleagues have stopped me to ask where I find links and resources that are integrated into our Learning Commons wiki. Like most librarians, I am a magpie. I gather things.

My RSS feed is the primary source of glittering, nourishing, astounding resources. Every day I zip through recent posts from the 97 blogs I follow. Peer librarians, technology gurus, publishing and book review sites, blogs on Google, social media trends and news aggregators from around the world all show up like the most personalized newspaper you can imagine.

By tagging items I build my own digital archive that I can search for specialized content. If I need to get quickly up to speed on the use of back channels in the classroom and the different platforms I can check my feed, where I have been tagging back channels for the last year. How about avatars? Yup.

For the last year or so I have known that I need to pay attention to mobile apps for the library. The best bloggers in the field of school librarianship have been posting resources and recounting their experiences, all for my benefit. By tagging their excellent work (thanks, Joyce Valenza!) I can easily refer to it when I am ready - which is this year.

I am not book marking websites. I am tagging content.

Here is a great example:

On the wire – September 2010 | Educational Origami

This blog post has some amazing web apps that work and are being used successfully with students. Click through for the links. Here are a couple of highlights:

• grabbing images - we always have students pulling images off the web for media projects
• cheat sheets for specialized programming languages (sending this link to our tech arts media teacher)
• Quickstart guide for iMovie09 - this will get posted on the wiki
• Sound Bible - royalty free music, great for those media projects, waiting to be posted to our wiki
• Lovely charts - I have to play with this, but it looks really powerful and a great way to present data in a compelling, visual way

RSS feeds, Diigo, Facebook, Twitter, and a handful of other outlets are all part of the daily doings of this little magpie. And our wiki is my nest. By the way, did you know that magpies gather in groups called "parliaments"? How cool is that? I wonder what you call a gathering of librarians...

A shelf of librarians?

Photo Credit:

Flickr Creative Commons

Perching Magpie