Thing #16

Wikis are such a wonderful collaboration tool that soon everyone will be using them. We have one for our district librarians. At first I thought it was just another time consuming thing to check each day, but actually it is a time saver. It's getting hard to imagine communicating the way we did before internet at all! I attempted to make a wiki for my library newsletter last year but didn't get it started up, so I went ahead and did them in publisher and emailed them. I have a hard time collaborating with the teachers at school due to scheduling that I hope I can get them involved in a wiki with me as well. I can even forsee the possibility of a wiki for communicating with parents rather than setting up a website.

Thing #15

Library 2.0 exemplefies what libraries have been doing for years, serving library patrons the best way they can. Libraries have to fill the patron's needs. Whether it's a librarian traveling on horseback to get books to a remote location or a librarian tweeting about a new book, libraries and librarians are where the patrons are. A quality that libraries and librarians truly need is flexibilty and the will to change.

I read all the 5 perspectives from the OCLC newsletter. Reading the perspectives made me feel good about where librarians have been, where we are now and where we are going to be in the future, which is right on top of the situation.

Thing #14

Technorati is great tool for searching blogs. I really found searching by tags as a very useful element. If you weren't able to fine what you are searching in one option, try another.
I wasn't too surprised by the popular searches, eventhough they are not the types of things I search. It looked more like topics on the entertainment shows on TV with a few news headlines added in. I added the Technorati top tags to my blog. I really like that cloud of words. If I were asked a few months ago what a cloud was pertaining to the internet, I would have had no idea.

Thing #13

I experimented with Delicious earlier this year and found it first, to be a great way to organize and access my own bookmarks. With further experimentation, I see how I can generate bookmarks to share with classroom teachers from delicious rather than copy and pasteing them into an email. Hopefully this will encourage them to explore delicious as well and begin to use it with collegues as well as students. I am at an elementary school, so there is not a huge amount of internet use for projects going on, but with our TEKS being more involved with research this year, this may be in higher demand.

I checked out the other sights mentioned and may use some as well, but I feel Delicious will be of most benefit for me.

Thing #12

Most important to me about commenting on a blog, is that you contribute something meaningful to the conversation and stay on the subject of the thread. I have read some where commenters get way off the subject at hand. I raise guineafowl and joined a group of others guinea raisers. I asked questions to help me out with some new keets and got some wonderful answers, however sometimes the other members got way off track. I thinks some of it was just for fun as the people seem to know each other, at least in cyberspace.


Another hobby of mine is horses. I am looking for a good blog and may have found one dealing with the Parelli method of training. I am signed up on twitter with the Parelli as well and receive updates from them on my phone. It's no wonder we see so many people glued to their telephones! Almost all of this can be picked up on your phone if it will handle it. My phone's not quite there, but my next one probably will be. I have commented on several other horse or farm related blogs and have gotten responses. One of them joined my blog for this class! I mentioned some of our common interests to her on my comment. It sounds like I may have a new friend in New York! I have also enjoyed commenting and receiving comments from other library2play blogs. They are so interesting to read.

Thing #11

I have heard of LibraryThing before from other librarians, but I hadn't taken a look at it yet. I'm glad it was included in 23things! I have some teachers at school that need to get involved in this, like the reading specialist. The librarian group is definately of interest to me, so I joined that one. There sure needs to be more that 24 hours in a day for me to get to all the things on the internet that I find interesting as well as beneficial.

Thing #10

www.smileyfacegenerator.com

I've been out for awhile with company, but I'm back and ready to finish this up. The image generators are a great source for capturing students, as well as teachers, attention. There are many ways to create cute signs and comics to direct and inform students in a clever way. I like the signs with the smiley faces like the one above. I also made a more personal trading card to give to my daughter-in-law. The smiley one was easy and quick, I found some to be more complicated and stressful on my old computer's memory.

Thing #9

This Thing gave me a headache! There are sooooo many blogs out there and some of them are a senseless waste of time and space. I have to look pretty far to find anything interesting. Google, which usually is my favorite, is easy to use, as well as Edublog. Maybe it is just my "summer brain" but this was hard for me to get into. I liked looking into the "Best" blogs on edublog. I thought I was going to like library blogs on suprglu, but I found it confusing. One thing for sure, you can find a blog out there about anything you're interested in if you have the time and patience to look. I am raising guinea fowl, which is something many people have never heard of, and found a few blogson thim and other farm animals.

Thing #8

Setting up Google Reader was pretty easy. I put some professional as well as some personal blogs there to read. I can ceratinly see how this can save time if you get hooked on reading all these various blogs. I don't see how I'll have time to keep track of this, but there is a great deal of information available at our fingertips. I am beginning to feel a sense of information overload already. Teachers, librarians and administrators can certainly make use of keeping track of blogs where they continually find useful information. Using the search feature withing the program will make that information accessible to them. Another great timesaving tool!

Thing #7

I have been a big Google fan since I first began using it in library school with Dr. Bell. I use alot of it on a regualr basis, so I chose someting to explore that I had not gotten to yet. I set up a Google Alert and have already received an alert about the Bureau of Land Managemeny Mustang Adoption that I set it up for. That will be interesting. I love the iGoogle page that I set up because it has so many gadgets that help to personalize it for me. I can see my internet time going up already. The most useful thing I am going to try out is Google Docs. I set up an experimental one to use for book fair sign up in the fall. This one could save me some email time. Here is the link:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ArreNpU7j3VCclVLc25UcV82d3FtU0U2QzIwSndFMGc&hl=en

Thing #6

I have really enjoyed Flickr and all the mashups and other fantasic apps created from it. There are some really creative people out there that have much more time to spend on the computer than I do. If I could use this at school there would be lots of creative uses. The magazine cover would be interesting to use if I were able to. Maybe someday things like this won't be blocked in my district. I made a trading card for my son and daughter -in-law, loved the mosaics and looking at the endless inspiration off all those pictures.

Thing #5

I spent way too much time exploring Flickr! I have taken lots of great pictures of things going on in my library that I can now share! I enjoyed library groups sharing pictures and talking about them and can see myself doing the same. There are also vintage pictures that have been uploaded that I was surprised to see. There was an old picture of my home town, Dodge City during the dustbowl. I have downloaded a picture of my assistant's pet peeve - messy shelves!