Betty Blogger

The "Betty Blogger Summer School" is a program, run by the Burlington Public Library, which educates patrons in the ways of Web 2.0.  I am just finishing up a winter version tailored to folks in the Halton District School Board as a kind of "train the trainer" scenario.

The course is great, covering a range of currently available web services, and requires active participation in the likes of blogging, wiki creation, RSS reading, and more.  I was already familiar with the web services covered in the course, but, most significantly, learned about potential educational applications of these services.  If we are going to prepare students for their futures, we'd better have a solid grip on the technology of the present!

For me, the most challenging parts were not "procedural," but rather the parts that required wrapping my head around the ways that I can use these tools (like De.licio.us or PBWiki) to further student skills and knowledge.  The best ideas I had for personal practice involve use of blogging & wikis for summer school teaching -- I'm going to try a "very 2.0" grade 12 English class in July...

I think all key 2.0 applications were covered in the Betty Blogger course, but two areas may be of benefit to future students: using online utilities and finding out "what's hot" online.

Online Utilities: as a teacher-librarian, I get requests all the time from students who want to convert file formats, edit photos, and the like.  While platform-based software exists that does such things, online services such as Zamzar and Photoshop Express are where I send people.  I'm sure that a million more useful utility sites are out there; comment back to this blog post if you know of some!

What's Hot: I often have cool, new "web stuff" to share with people, and they often ask me how I know so much about what's "out there."  The answer has nothing to do with any skills of mine, but a lot to do with Internet trend monitoring sites like digg (I'm a big fan of the stack) or reddit or popurls.  I consider knowing about these to be a solid part of knowing web 2.0.

The Betty Blogger course was very well supported but very self-directed, which makes sense: if self-directed, 2.0 learning is the way of the future, why not have the course that teaches these skills be self-directed as well?

Thanks, and hats off to the "Library Lady" and BPL's Betty Blogger!