Final Post and Reflection

What a rewarding experience. This class was challenging, rewarding, and definitely mind-expanding. The availability of content, freely available on the Internet, is growing daily. Not only is this wealth of information valuable, and necessary, to stay abreast of 21st Century teaching and learning skills, but the information is extremely valuable on a personal level. Creating personal learning networks and communities, and participating in these conversations, is invaluable in meeting personal learning objectives.

This was the perfect learning community -- 13 library clerks with similar jobs and different levels of comfort with the material. We came together as a learning team to explore, practice, create, and apply the Web 2.0 tools. We learned to blog, documenting our journey, to reflect on our learning outcomes for each of the "23 Things". The blog was a perfect medium to learn, journal, question, and respond to each other and make this learning journey together. We regularly commented on each other's blogs to support, observe, and help each other along. This perhaps was the most valuable outcome of the course -- the opportunity to get to know all the other clerks, learn together, and create a final product that will be useful for all media clerks.

This is an amazing group of women; each job, although different at each school, has many similarities and we were able to capitalize on the expertise and routines of other clerks. We were able to discuss and discover new ways to apply our newly learned skills to use immediately in our personal jobs and with staff and students in the library. Everyone added their skills, ideas, and expertise to make the class a success.

Even though I prepared the class structure and delivered the content, it was an amazing experience for me. I learned much, not only about how to deliver a class such as this, but I also learned so much more about our topic areas. Learning to teach the content, observing teaching and learning styles, and applying the material in a real learning environment was extremely valuable.

I look forward to planning and participating in future Professional Study Team classes with this group of library media clerks again. This format is perfect for learning, sharing, and expanding our job skills. To all the participants...THANK YOU for this amazingly rich learning experience.