Norfolk visit

After finding the Education Building on Monday and seeing classmates and the professors for the first time, I met Bill and we worked together on the video project.  We finished sooner than expected and it went off with very few do-overs.

On Tuesday, we worked on iPads in teams of two and looked at apps.  Since I don't have an iPad or a Mac, these two days gave me great exposure to iPads.  My partner was Rebecca Dalton from 678 and we got along great.  We had lunch together and talked about our families and our jobs.  She is an elementary school teacher who wants to teach Kindergarten and eventually be a librarian.  I was an Elementary Librarian last year, and I decided I don't want to do that again - so that was fun to talk about.

I enjoyed all of the sessions.  I learned a lot more about ebooks and their role in libraries from the Mackin representative and the doctoral student who talked about her elementary library at Quantico. The panel discussion about ebooks gave me a lot to think about.  I had never seen Adobe Connect in action, so that was informative. I enjoyed hearing how other librarians use ebooks in their libraries, school and public.  I learned about the problems that can come up - like the story about the library being sued because they loaned out ereaders that didn't read the text.  

I found out what "assistive technology" means.  Most of the "gadgets and gizmos" were new to me and I would love the opportunity to play around with them further. It seems that having technology that will read books aloud is a big deal, and not just for the blind.  That technology is also useful for people with many other issues.

It was very interesting to put faces and names together during these two days. I was surprised initially that an "online class" would have a required campus visit, and many people had to drive a long way to get there.  It took me 3 1/2 hours.  But I enjoyed seeing Norfolk and the beautiful ODU campus.  I feel that I finally figured out exactly how to get where I needed to go on campus...and it was time to go home.