Time & the Internet

The internet has definitely been a blessing for me with my job. As a youth services librarian, I am constantly looking for new ideas for storytimes and programs that I can do at my library.

I know that if I do a search on the internet, I am more than likely to come up with something for whatever idea I am hatching. The internet is also a great place to get on to listservs and look at different blog archives for ideas.

The other day my coworkers and I were discussing some possible upcoming programming ideas. Well, just a couple days after this conversation, I ran across an archived listserv that contained ideas for putting together the program we had been talking about. Now I have ideas and can begin working on putting things together to see if it will be a fit for my system. Half my work is already done. Of course one should always give credit where credit is due.

I think that if I had to continuously just use books for my resources, especially for things like fingerplays, I would be putting more time and effort into finding things that I like. Using the Internet is like one stop shopping. I have several sites bookmarked that have predone themes and fingerplays that I can go to and edit for my purposes. This only takes me a matter of minutes versus when I first started out when it took me several days to look through the books, type up the fingerplays, etc.

Also, the Internet helps me to keep up to date on new programming ideas like Hannah Montana for example. There wouldn't be much in a book but there are plenty of ideas out on the Internet to get me started.

Of course, we need to have a balance in using the Internet and doing our jobs but it seems like more of my time especially is being spent using the Internet to gather my resources.

First Timer

This is the first blog I have created but it definitely won't be my last, as I am working with a school librarian to create a book club blog for 5-8 graders.

I must say that this experience was relatively easy and painless. I really enjoyed setting the blog up and look forward to adding additional information over the next few weeks.