Week 1 - Life long learning

Thing 1: Learning is forever

Fortunately, learning doesn’t end once you graduate! There is much more to learn about School Library Media Administration than what we can fit in our courses. New instructional technology comes out every day. It is your job to let your teachers know what they can use in their classrooms to enhance their teaching. Life long learning is key to stay current and successful and above all to make life interesting!

Thing 1 Learning2.0 Tasks
1. To start out on our learning quest we go through a slide show by Lori Reed called Seven and ½ Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners.
2. Write down the 7.5 habits and start think about your strongest and weakest habits and how you might improve on your weaker ones. Next week you are setting up a blog and your first post will be about your lifelong learning habits.

Thing 2: Usernames and passwords, gmail

While working your way through the n Things you sometimes need to register to use software or download the software itself. We are only using free stuff so not to worry! However, you typically need to provide an email address and generate a username and password.

It is handy to create a username and have a generic safe password ready to use whenever you are registering to use free software. Rather than creating a bunch of different user names and passwords that you need to remember you’ll use this password just for cases like this. Make sure it is different from your regular and serious username and passwords!

For privacy reasons you might not want to use a name that can be easily traced back to you. Instead of using a firstname.lastname construction (e.g. casey.jones) use something entirely different (e.g. lacrosse09).

Creating a safe password is an art. Read these instructions and run your password by the secure password checker that is listed on the page.

Finally, before you embark on your learning quest it is handy to create a Google email account (gmail account) that you can provide whenever a website asks for an email address. Rather than providing your regular email address you can use your gmail address. Go to gmail.com and create an account. Make sure you understand how to go to your account and send and receive mail.