Thing #23 Overall Thoughts

My favorite discoveries were how to do podcasts and photo stories. They were so much easier than I thought and very doable for me and in the classroom.

The program assisted in my lifelong learning goals because I learned something new this summer, which is always a goal of mine - to use the summer for professional enrichment so I can start the school year with new ideas!

I was surprised to learn about the trading card thing and the ideas I got from other players on how to use them, like for book reviews (cover on one side with a review on the other) and the mish-mash tools. Didn't know so many were available; I had only heard about the Google maps and Google earth combos.

The format was perfect because we could work at our own pace, plus there was a variety of sources used in a variety of media format: documents, interactive programs, videos, etc. Maybe you could set up a central place or blog for comments to make it easier to read everyone else's. There are so many I don't think I connected as much as I wanted to. However, I would participate in other discovery programs in the future.

Awesome discoveries to broaden your mind and outlook with tools to change your school's learning environment to be more exciting and inviting!

Thing #22 Nings

Checking out the Nings for Teacher Librarians and the one for Texas Librarians, both are a good way to network and get/share ideas. I have been a member of LM-Net, an e-mail discussion group for school librarians for many years. One of the drawbacks is that you can't share attachments like photos, documents or videos. That is an advantage Nings offer. I saw photos of activities going on in libraries and lots of good advice on collection development from those in the know! I'm going to join both of those I mentioned! I also want to explore and search some more for groups on other related interests and will recommend the Ning for Teachers to colleagues.

Thing #21 podcasts and audio books

Wow, you can really get lost in those Picture Story projects because you can just keep adding music, customizing motion, typing captions, etc. I can see how podcasts might be a little easier. I always write out my book talks and print up what I'm going to say about each book; I could just record them, take a photo of the cover and post them to our library web site in a separate folder, depending what grade level it is. Okay, time to try to post my Photo Story. I tried to register with Switchpod, so I could park podcasts but they had a scripts error on the page so when I hit the Register button, nothing happened. So I don't have a place to park those so I can link them. Maybe I'll try later and it will work.

Thing #20 YouTube and TeacherTube

The Evaluating Website Tutorial is succint, to the point. It moves faster than a lot of tutorials and doesn't give the audience a chance to get bored. Quick intro! Love the CARS reminder; good place to start discussion.

Three steps good visualization of global peers, upbeat music, they have to read and watch to get the message! Great, short intro to rev up morale at beginning of school year for teachers. It shows several of the tools, but I think we would have to explain some of them to the teachers.

Love the Texas history video; got to show it to the coaches who teach history. Web site http://texashistory.unt.edu/

I like it that you have instructions on how to convert files and/or access them if the videos are blocked by your school's filter or firewall.

There are some good videos on activities in the library and library tutorials for specific libraries on YouTube. These would be fairly easy to make for our own library with a video camera; great way to get the students involved by having them help create them.

On TeacherTube there's a good video from a math teacher on "why I teach math." Now I want to know how he makes math "fun, relevant and exciting." There are also several videos for teaching specific math concepts for high school, as well as a personal documentary of a teacher's first year as a math teacher.

You can find almost anything. If this isn't blocked in our district, I will post a link to it on my library resources page and promote it just like UnitedStreaming's videos.

Thing #19: Web 2.0 Awards

Since I was bitten by the travel bug after a visit to NYC, I decided to try out Farecast, which checks flights, hotels and vacation deals across several travel sites at once. Wanting to check out hotels, I typed in a city and my pop-up blocker went crazy. You see, you need to temporarily allow pop-ups from this site because each search prompts opening a different window for each travel site. I got results from travelocity, expedia, hotels.com, hotwire and priceline. I was surprised Orbitz wasn't included. This is pretty cool because you can check each site for the same hotel and compare prices, but you have to beware of some comparisons and read the fine print because some of the prices listed include fees and others do not so check that out so you can compare apples to apples. Also, if you are a member of some of these individual sites you may be able to get better deals by signing in to those sites first.

I came across a site similar to this earlier this summer and it may have been kayak, the second runner up in this category. In that other one, you viewed the first result and then clicked to view the next and so on. This one is better because it opens all the windows in tabs on my browser so I can click and switch from one to the other fairly quickly to go back and forth. However, I wish there was a way to get the results listed side by side all in the same window. I have yet to find a site that does. If you know of one, please comment!

Two ways this would be useful for schools and students: for coaches trying to book rooms for teams playing in tournaments other places, students who are doing travel brochures for a country (history project) in which they have to do a budget trip and a deluxe trip (my son had to do this for Africa). All right, all right, not much to do with libraries, but I would recommend it for students doing this type of project when they are in my library's computer lab.

Thing #18 Online productivity tools

Just this week I read on one of those blogs I signed up for earlier about Microsoft offer this new Office-type software called Equipt, only cheaper. The article had this quote: "as much as we love free alternatives like OpenOffice.org, we have yet to find one that's 100% compatible with Microsoft Office" -- Brad Linder, ITLnet Blog. While Open Office is great and everyone can get it free, not everyone you send attachments too will be able to open them unless they go download it, too, and they just might not want to take up hard drive space with another program just to read your stuff. Since we have a license for Microsoft Office at school, I know we won't spend time downloading OpenOffice to every computer at school.

However, Microsoft Office's versions aren't always compatible with each other, either. Students will create something at home, save it on a flash drive and try to open it in our school's computer lab only to have it show up as jibberish because their version at home doesn't match the one we have at school. I always tell them to save documents in WordPad or Notepad, then they can copy and paste it into any wordprocessing document to edit/print when they get to school.

Thing #17: Rollyo

After I registered, I created a search roll for information on multiple sclerosis and current research on that disease using a list of reputable web sites from the government, multiple sclerosis organizations, and health care institutions specializing in MS. However, our assignment said to provide a link to it. That took some searching to figure out how to get to the site and copy the url. At first, I thought I needed to add a rollbar bookmarklet to get to it, but when I tried to Drag this link to your Bookmark Bar --> RollBar, it did not work. Either that or I don't know what my bookmark bar is. So then I clicked on Explore Searchrolls and found that mine was listed under "Recently added." I clicked on it and it gave me a "try it out" page. The link is listed below.

http://rollyo.com/search.html?q=Try+it+out...&sid=413626&x=16&y=9

But, when I typed in a keyword and clicked on search, I got nothing. So, I clicked on "Link to this search roll" and got the url below:

http://rollyo.com/mwcalco/ms_info_research/

After I save this post, I'll try the link and see if it takes me to my searchroll called "MS Info & Research.

This would be useful for teachers to use for guided searches on specific topics for their students as well as me keeping up with new info on whatever topic I want to create a searchroll on.

Thing #16 Wikis

Wikis are fun ways to share information. Of course, students are very familiar with Wikipedia; an article there will usually be the top result on any topic search they do. I have edited articles there before, very slightly.

We could adapt idea #2 where students compile a wiki for history of famous artists, architects, writers, etc. We could have used this for my high school's warrior peoples research project. The students could have created posts on their particular warriors and it would appear all on one page, rather than several individual pages. Plus they could post links to sites they used for their research for others to see.

I'd also like to see a wiki used as a way for students to review books they've read, create top 10 lists for books they've read or top 10 favorite authors, etc.

Thing #15: Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and the Future of Libraries

To me, it means getting library users to participate more in what's offered in their library and that participation driving what the library offers. Instead of building up required sections of the non-fiction section with books that never get opened, give users an easily accessed forum to offer suggestions, comment on what the library already has, tag what they find, make recommendations to other users and the librarians. With everyone participating, there is more interaction and therefore more use of the library's services and more direction on what the library should be offering.

Thing #14 Technorati

There are three blog posts with School Library Learning 2.0, 16 blogs about it and only two posts tagged under it.

2. Explore popular blog, searches and tags. Is anything interesting or surprising in your results?

The most popular blogs have to do with technology or gadgets and other computer or technology-related items so it just shows you that people who blog are interested in this technology and gadgets that can be used to do more things technology-wise.
A popular search is about something called "meedia." Now at first I thought it was media spelled wrong and found out there were 8 posts and a few videos. Well, not all those people would be spelling it wrong, right? "Meedia" is media that has to do with "ME" and how you can customize what you read, interact with and communicate to on the interest to pertain just to you, individually. I may have that wrong, but that's what I came away with. Some of the top tags are about gadgets (apple and iphone and iphone3 because a new one came out) and politics (barack obama, mccain, etc.) So tags are sort of categories like news sites use, i.e. sports, news, life, health, etc. So I could search using tags of interest to me, then choose blogs to add to my del.icio.us account or reader account. It's also cool for use in Flickr when you are looking for photos on a specific subject to demonstrate something or decorate a report or web page (but be sure to ask for permission and show copyright!). Tagging is a great way to organize information you need. Students could use it to tag their favorite books to help other students find similar books, i.e. baseball, romance, etc.

I didn't opt to register my blog yet because it's about stuff in this class and I want it to be eventually just about books in our library so once it is, I may do that and just see how popular it becomes! The widgets would be of more use then.

Thing #13 Tagging and del.icio.us

This is a really cool tool. I used to have an "ikeepbookmarks" account, but del.icio.us is much easier to use and has the "tag" feature. This would be great for teachers creating research projects. They can have students access an account and use whatever tag they have assigned to that project. Also, the students can find other sites and tag them as well. I could also have tags for a collection of sites or articles for teachers on separate topics. Teachers can use it by tagging all their favorite sites and having easy access to them from home or at school or in a computer lab where students can access them, too.

Thing #12 Commenting, part 2

Some of the blogs I signed up for when we did the Thing on RSS feeds were about Oklahoma.

One, I found one was a little too political for me so I opted out of subscribing, but I believe it is important to read about politics and the political beliefs of candidates so one can be an informed voter, as well as a participant in the political process. Also, blogs are an important part of the political process these days so I would like to find one with a broader audience.

Another was about goings on in the part of Oklahoma where my hometown is located. Blogging is a faster way of letting people know about community events, especially in rural towns where the paper only comes out once a week or not at all and/or doesn't have a web presence.

Thing #12 Commenting

There are many useful articles on the "art of commenting" and making your comments useful and participatory. Also, there's etiquette involved. I didn't know you could keep track of your own comments or that comments brought more readership to your own blog so that was enlightening. One tip was to not require registration for leaving comments because that is a barrier. I think that is true, but a lot of people are just making sure inappropriate comments don't appear on their blogs, which is responsible, especially if you are dealing with a school blog read by students. What do you think? (Ask questions; it invites more comments!)

Thing #11 Library Thing

It is easy to add books to your library after joining Library Thing. I just typed in the name of favorite authors and then clicked on all the titles I had read. What is hard to do is to add favorite authors to your profile. In the instructions under "how to add," it says to do a search for your favorite author and add it from their author page. I found two different author pages, but could not see where on the page there is a link or whatever to add it to your profile as a favorite author. Also, I was reading reviews on a recent book I read and wanted to add a tag. I read the tags listed for the book, but couldn't find where to add one. When I click on tags in the top menu, it just tells me I haven't posted any tags. Well, I know that! How do I?

However, I think this would be a great resource to recommend to students to help them find other books they might enjoy. But, since it is a blog, it will be blocked by our district and they could only use it from home. Same for this blog...

There are groups for librarians and those reading young adult fiction. The ya group I found didn't seem too organized and were reading old ya books, not any from our state's current list, which was disappointing.

Thing #10 Image generators

I liked Image Chef and it was easy to post it to the blog because you just click a button for blogger! You can create your own jersey in whatever sport you want, make it whatever color you want, etc, so you could use it to create a graphic to go with your school's sport of the season in school colors. Of course, I put my name on my jersey, but I used OU QB Sam Bradford's number. You could also use it to create your own logo for a book club or your own graphics for different sections of your web site.

Thing #9

So I searched some blogs and added some to my reader. Actually, I already had a reader set up with Yahoo in our My Yahoo! page, but I didn't know that's what it was. We customized our headlines from their selected line-up when we set it up, but now because I know what RSS is, I set up RSS feeds to our favorite news sources in Oklahoma, where we are from so we can keep up with what's going on back home. I also scanned through some blogs and added a few of those. We didn't have any RSS feeds for blogs and there aren't really too many that I want on there all the time, but I did add five like the assignment asked. However, I will probably remove most of them unless I just get addicted like so many people I read about when learning about blogs... Blah, Blah, Blah!

Thing #8

RSS feeds are a way to have news come to you automatically rather than searching for it or checking your favorite web site for updates. The RSS explained video was a great illustration. I've always wondered what they were, but didn't really "get it." Thanks.