Final Reflections of LIS 629

Night and day, black and white, sun and moon....these are the kinds of phrases that come to mind when I think of how I walked into LIS 629 on July 13th and how I feel now upon completing my final project.  While I was familiar with only a handful (um, maybe more like a thimbleful) of the terminology included in the pre-course questionnaire I felt comfortable in enrolling in this class. That confidence lasted until about the first hour of day one!  It was a clear case of the more you learn the more you realize you don't know.  And, by day two I thought I may have really gotten in over my head.  Ultimately, what I have taken away more than anything is a much stronger capacity and confidence around navigating these tools.  If the speed of the class was a bit dizzying, there was still an enormous amount of quality hands-on learning that truly took the mystique out of designing a Wiki (which I had heard of but really had no concept of how I would use one pre-629) and a number of the routine tasks like uploading a You Tube video or embedding a file in a presentation.  These skills are critical preparation for a 21st Century librarian and LIS 629 provided clear instuction on how they can effectively be applied in the school library.
Based on my updated and revised understanding of Twitter, I now see how this can play an important part and become a valuable tool for learning and I will continue to identify folks that I can follow...hopefully having a bit more to tweet about in my future.  Glogster is a new favorite for me and it's application and value and simplicity make it a tool that I will absolutely integrate in many ways.  LiveBinder I will keep an eye on and play with.  I see some tremendous value in it as a bookmarking tool but found it harder to organize if I attempted to use certain features like the subtab.  Google Docs, perhaps the one tool(s) I had some level of familiarity with, surprised me with it's survey component in forms.  I look forward to using that and the rest of Google Docs as a student and teacher.
Would it be a little over the top to say I am a new person post-629?!