Week Eight: Thing # 18

This week I explored Google Docs as I already had a gmail account. I browsed the site, clicked on all the tabs and experimented. Finally I typed in a recipe for Beef Stroganoff as my first entry to Google Docs. I had no trouble doing so. The formatting wasn't quite so tight as when using Word but more experimenting provided good results. Then I tried to upload the document from Google Docs to my Blog. This proved a little more difficult so I needed to go to the Help page. Trial and error eventually saw me achieving my aim. If you look at a previous post you may even try out the recipe - it's very easy.

The idea of sharing a document with others to allow editing is exciting. I can see applications for group assignments, and updating district policies.

I also checked out the google sites tutorial. I'm not sure I’m ready for some of my information to be available publicly. Perhaps I’ll just start with the librarians in my school district as I know they’d be supportive of my efforts. I saw how to add links, insert images, etc. I like the way that site changes mean that I can be notified by email. I can invite other people to see my page.

There are a lot of good ideas and applications...

Week Seven: Thing # 17

I enjoyed exploring the information presented about wikis in CSLA's School Library Learning 2.0. I have used wikis as a student in David Loertscher's classes at SJSU and have seen the usefulness of the application in class work. Now, how to go about incorporating it into my library... I think I could establish book sharing with students at school. It would be a great way for students to recommend new books to each other. A new task for second semester! I’d also like to have pathfinders established so that teacher and student collaboration could be fostered when doing research.

Week Seven: Thing # 16

Libraries all over the country have begun to use wikis to collaborate and share knowledge.

I particularly liked the BookLoversWiki developed by the Princeton Public Library at http://booklovers.pbwiki.com/Princeton%20Public%20Library The page was easy to navigate with the Index to Reviews being clearly laid out. Each book has an annotation and a ranking and an image of the book cover makes the page attractive. This page has given me lots of good ideas which I’d like to emulate in my school library. I would like to get a Book Group of students together and a wiki, where the students can contribute, would be a terrific way to boost ‘attendance’.

The Albany County Public Library staff wiki which provides documentation to library staff on how to do things is a wonderful idea – a sort of on-line procedure manual. I had a close look at their statistics information and their technology plan. The Circulation Desk section would prove a boon to school library subs. We do have one in a binder but having the information in an on-line format with the ability to hyperlink headings would allow for easy and immediate access.

The Blogging Libraries Wiki was terrific. The purpose of this wiki is to collect links to library blogs. There is a wealth of information under School Libraries. http://www.blogwithoutalibrary.net/links/index.php?title=School_libraries

Teacherlibrarianwiki at http://teacherlibrarianwiki.pbwiki.com/ maintained my Joyce Valenza gives many examples of how Web 2.0 applications can be used to create useful professional tools for librarians and patrons. Check out the booklists for high school students, information literacy models, Must Have Graphic Novels for secondary schools – so many good things here…

Week Six: Thing # 15

I particularly enjoyed reading the article about Library 2.0 in Wikipedia which gave a succinct definition and a brief overview of exactly where the phrase originated. With Library 2.0, library services are able to be frequently evaluated and updated to meet the changing needs of library users. The discussion about the future of OPACs is very exciting. Students seem to enjoy using OPACs more than the traditional card catalogs. Indeed, students at my school have probably never seen a card catalog!

I contend that the ideas presented using Web 2.0 are not necessarily new – it is the methods of delivery that will foster and promote the services and library materials available to the library patron. There are many excellent ideas and applications available – let’s use them – we have a new generation of library users, let’s give them a new generation of library service.

Part Two: Library 2.0 - It's many things to many people. What does it mean to you? What does it mean for school libraries?

According to Wikipedia, Library 2.0 is a loosely defined model for a modernized form of library service that reflects a transition within the library world in the way that services are delivered to users.

Librarians need to constantly update and reevaluate the best way to serve library users. Students at high schools love their computers. What better way to market and promote library resources than by using on-line services, wikis, blogs, and other Web 2.0 devices. I am in the midst of organizing a wiki for the juniors taking APEL at my high school. They are about to undertake the writing of their Junior Paper – a main focus of their second semester work. These students need to know about the print materials the library has, the e-books which are available, the online databases which would render them good service. I’ll go through these resources with the classes when they come to the library but I’m hoping the wiki will provide them with additional backing. Any student feedback will be useful to me as to how I can better serve them next time.

Week Six: Thing # 14

Tags help describe an item and allow it to be found again by browsing or searching. Keywords in an article can be used for tags. People can categorize their posts, blog, photos, videos, or music with any tag that makes sense to describe it. Other people can add tags to an article. Tag clouds can be formed. The most used tags are displayed in order of increasing font size. Tagging takes away the worries about choosing the ‘correct’ category for a posting.
However tags can be misspelled – or should that be misspelt?? Words can be found in the singular or plural form. Sometimes tags can be irrelevant and lack precision.

Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs and tagged social media. It can be found at www.technorati.com The Support tab was informative and useful, so too was the FAQ section. In Technorati, there are two kinds of tags. There is the Post Tag and the Blog Tag. The Post Tag is used to describe the topics covered in individual items and is associated to the item either via Tag Code or Category Code (Wordpress Categories, Blogger Labels). This can apply to all types of media such as posts, photos, videos, or music. The About page of Technorati had the following information: Technorati was founded to help bloggers succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the global online conversation. Founded as the first blog search engine, Technorati has expanded to a full service media company providing services to the blogs and social media sites and connecting them with advertisers who want to join the conversation, and whose online properties introduce blog content to millions of consumers.

If only I had time to read all of these blogs!!

Week Six - Thing # 13

Exploring del.icio.us was interesting, it’s a great way to keep track of things on the web. If you use computers in multiple locations, say one at home and one at work, delicious can synchronize your bookmarks. I loved the social networking aspect of Del.icio.us, I found myself bookmarking all sorts of interesting things. The ability to see how other users have tagged similar links and how this can lead to discover other websites of interest to me is a strong plus. The interface is simple to use and RSS feeds are enabled too.

And I’ve finally worked out what a folksonomy is! The activity of tagging website addresses (any object which can be identified by URL) is called a folksonomy (folk + taxonomy).

Potential of this tool for research assistance – it’s free. It allows for the identifying, organizing, storing, finding, classifying and sharing of favorite web resources. Because it is a social bookmarking service, not only can favorite information be archived on the Internet, but other new sites can be discovered using ‘collective intelligence’. It is easy to use, no special knowledge is necessary. The sites can be saved and accessed on any computer with an Internet connection. Students love computers – social browsing leads to finding useful links.

Week Five - Thing # 12

Rollyo allows the user to take up to twenty five websites or blogs and create a search tool called a Searchroll that searches only those domains. The Searchroll can be edited and modified at any time. Rollyo Searchrolls can be shared with friends. I can see the possibilities of incorporating Searchrolls with Pathfinders for school students as an aid when conducting research.

Have a look at the Rollyo I created for Citation Creators at http://rollyo.com/eturner/my_citation_creators/

Free, online citation help. You can create records for books, web sites, interviews, images, music and sound effects, videos and animation, and more. Records can be formatted in several formats. Each has its own features so find the one you like best.

It was very easy to create my Searchroll which can be found from any browser or computer.

Quick Quotes at http://rollyo.com/kizuki-sama/quick_quotes_search/ was wonderful

Rollyo - very cool, very easy, and totally free!

Calendar Widget

See, I did it. A widget can be imported directly to your blog page. Again the necessity of keeping a good record of passwords is evident. What fun!

Week Five - Thing # 11

Widgets

I was very taken with www.yourminis.com. This site is a widget platform and was launched in October 2006 in San Diego which makes it a very local offering for me. It allows you to customize and grab widgets for your blog, website, and desktop.

Widgets often take the form of on-screen tools (clocks, event countdowns, auction-tickers, stock market tickers, flight arrival information, daily weather etc).

The site had a search field for widgets. The Youtube widget with allows you to view videos from YouTube. The countdown widget which lets you create a countdown to a specific event. I also found a RSS widget which lets you add your own RSS feeds. The calendar widget tracks the date and allows events to be added to the calendar. I was impressed with the depth of the website.

I am now noticing the RSS icons on webpages. This week too I have also joined a Ning. The importance of keeping track of passwords for all these applications is apparent. It’s going to be very interesting to track which of all these Web 2.0 tools are going to grow and become market dominators.

And I played Travel IQ and to my chagrin I wasn’t very good!

Week Five - Thing #10

This week was full of fun exercises. I liked http://www.imagechef.com/ I created the following image very easily and quickly. To post to my blog all I had to do was to click on a tab. The instructions there were simple to follow and now you too can see the results.



I really enjoyed exploring http://www.comicstripgenerator.com/ I can see that this site could be used to make library signs. I did a search under manga to find the following images which in made on my twenty fourth wedding anniversary. Check out my first attempts above.

Week Four - Thing #9

I enjoyed looking at http://libraryblogs.suprglu.com/ for ideas for promoting books and libraries. The archives section was useful to access past news. And I loved the Pimp My Bookcart contest photos - http://www.unshelved.com/PimpMyBookcart/2008/
Feedster was unavailable for investigation so I turned to Syndic8.com Syndic8 is an open directory of RSS feeds that contains thousands of RSS feeds that users have submitted.

Here I found Teen Reads at http://www.ccrls.org/woodburn/rss/teens.rss which has RSS feeds for new teen book recommendations.

I also checked out technorati.com where I found http://www.technorati.com/pop/books/ Of course not everything there was directed at a high school library but it did make for an interesting spread of information.

Google blog search was useful. I looked up high school libraries – and got lots of ideas. It was easy to use and quick to load.

Check out Stony Brook Library’s Research Guide where there are links to
http://www.stonybrook.edu/library/tutorial/

Blogpulse.com gave interesting feedback under searches for high school libraries.

Week Three - Thing #8

RSS and Newsreaders

This section on RSS feeds took a long time for me to explore, ponder and absorb but it was well worth the effort.


I have created a free RSS aggregator by using Google Reader. Google Reader is Google's web based feed reader. Google Reader constantly checks the news sites that I have chosen for new content which greatly simplifies my reading experience. Everything is in one convenient place. I can share my favorite items with my friends by sending them to the relevant links. The best part about Google Reader is that my account can be accessed from any computer with online access.

Week Three - Thing #7

Hmmm, a technology related blog post... so many topics to choose from!

In December 2009, my husband gave me a lovely Panasonic digital camera for my twenty fourth wedding anniversary. It has a lot of bells and whistles with which I am gradually becoming familiar. I’ve been learning the art of transferring photos to various applications.

Not only have I learned how to use the camera, but I've learned how to download the images into a card reader on my computer, how to resize them for web purposes or email and then how to add them to my blog.

Something else I've noticed since we've recently changed from satellite to cable is that one of the channels is Flickr. Would I have noticed this had I not been taking the CSLA Web 2.0 course? I suspect not. I'm going to investigate further but I think I will be able to upload photos to Flickr and then view them on the television screen. I also like the idea of using Flickr so that my family in Australia can see what we're up to here in California.

The advancements in technology are simply amazing.

Here are a couple of photos of a camping trip to Agua Caliente in the Anza Borrego Desert. The first is a view of the mountains from our camp site. The second is a view of one of the pools filled with water from the hot springs at Agua Caliente.

Week Three - Thing #6

Well I can see that my blog is woefully out of order but I can see how to straighten things up from now on. Experience and trial and error are helping.

I have been exploring some of the fun Flickr mahups and third party tools which are available.

Just what is a 'mashup'? The CSLA link sent me to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup_(web_application_hybrid) which was helpful. A mashup is a hybrid web application that takes features from one application like Flickr and mashes it up with another such as a map giving us Mapr. Another example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data. The end result is a new and distinct web service.

A mashup that intrigued me was 'trippermap', or should that be 'tripprmap'? Trippermap allows you to put a flash based world map of your Flickr photos on your own website or blog. Trippermap will then automatically search your photos at flickr for location information and plot the photos on your own Trippermap, on your own website. Going traveling around the world? Trippermap will allow you to arrange photos according to the countries visited. Trippermap had a very helpful tutorial on its home page along with a tour and a blog.

Check it out!

Week Two - Thing #4

So far I've set up my blog, added my first post and an avatar.

Now I've registered my blog too. Upon registration I was kindly sent the following email which arrived very late on Christmas day - what a nice present...

Hello Erica,

Have fun working through the 23 Things - I know that you'll find many uses at home and at school for the fun applications you'll encounter here.

Enjoy!
Connie

Connie Williams
President
California School Library Assn
CSLA 2.0 Team

What a Journey!

For the past three weeks my husband and son traveled to Perth, Western Australia to vist family and friends for the first time in seven and a half years. I really missed them but it gave me a splendid opportunity to work through the 23 Things in the School Library Learning 2.0 program.
This was really exciting and I've learned a lot. I kept notes the first time around in Word. Now I want to work through the 23 Things again, blog about my experiences, and make sure that I have a thorough grasp of the new concepts.
Stay tuned...