Thing 23!!!

I have seen a lot of these copyright and plagarism sites before. The video is cute and very creative but I don't think many would have the patience to watch it. Creative Commons has some great information and I like what he says about sharing creative endeavors in order to foster collaboration. I especially like the links on the Piracy and Plagiarism page because more of them are suitable to use for students in middle and high school. I have already bookmarked before this class several sites to use in both instruction of faculty and students. The only problem I have is finding the time to get this inserted into library instruction. We already have so much we want to teach and not enough time with the students. I am going to spend some time this year working with curriculum outcomes for information literacy standards so I hope to find the right the place to put this in instruction into instead of just hitting it here and there and to use some of the web 2.0 tools with the students so they can collaborate on creative projects (other than Face Book).

I had so much fun going through the 23 things and I am so proud of the teachers on my campus that completed the course as well. Some of them are already hard at work setting up their 2.0 classroooms and deciding what else they are going to use this year. I especially want to spend some more time on my delicious account and getting better acquainted with nings. Blogging was great fun and I've set up one for my Sunday School class that is really helping out. I really hope that Region One will be able to offer more opportunities like this one because you can really do some in depth work when it is also possible to be at home in your pajamas!

Thing 22, Week 9

I did a few searches on the Gutenberg site. I had already used it a couple of times and it is quite impressive. Of course, a lot of currently copyrighted books aren't on there but it is a great help with the classics. I wish I had gotten to this "thing" earlier because I see that on World e Book Fair they had open access for the month of July. I did browse lists of titles though but I was still finding that recent popular titles are not in the mix even when you have to pay for them. The Internet Archive site was another interesting place to visit. I liked what they are trying to do but the site was a little too commercial looking for a "library". I would like to spend some more time browsing the site before I make a real judgement though. I noticed that they do have an RSS feed as well so I will probably add that to my iGoogle page to remind me to keep looking.

We have not added any purchased e-books to our catalog yet, but I would like to be able to experiment with them this yearI haven't seen much discussion about them on the TLA listserv yet but I haven't checked the archives. I'm sure there is some stuff on LMNet. The LibriVox site would be great, again for the classics not anything new., to use with our learning challenged students who need the audio versions of their assigned books. It would be very helpful for them to be able to downloand the formats to their MP3 players. Another great application with some of the other sites I browsed would be the ability to download a book for research purposes that may be out of print and not locally available.

Thing 21, Week 9

I added the RSS reader feed to my blog for the "Harry Potter Prognosticator" podcasts. Really cool. I can see how finding some podcasts with educational authority could really be beneficial to add for students to access either to a blog or web page to help give them more depth in a subject area. I would like to be able to create our own podcasts to add to the Library blog maybe with book talks or to go over some instruction in the library that we may not have the opportunity to build on with a whole class again. That's always the problem with library instruction: you get the class in their once to go over a specific topic but you don't get them again to build on it. And, the teacher doesn't always support what we're trying to do or they think they don't have the time. I could do a podcast to go over the material again and/or maybe add to it.

I found another podcast called "Book Voyager" which is about children's literature from the perspective of a school librarian...I can see the same possibilities for young adult literature. Ah hah, found it! Here's the link to "YA Book Cast": http://yabookcast.libsyn.com/rss ...I need to listen to some of these and see if it would be worth adding to the Library Blog. ...Okay, so I went ahead and added it to the blog already...it looked too good to pass up. I also found some great things on the Education Podcast Network as well. It would be a better place to start looking since it is other educators sharing what they have already created.

Thing 20, Week 9

Ah, YouTube. Of course, I'm pretty familiar with this tool as almost every student who comes into the library wants to show me their favorite video of the day. I'll admit I get pretty hooked on them as well. I had already seen "Introducing the Book" (which I think is hysterical) and Web 2.0. "Library 2.0 Manifesto" and "March of the Librarians" were cute but not award winning. I need to remember to us "Introducing the Book" during a teacher in-service when we are talking technology integration. I had forgotten about "Conan: the Librarian", another good one to use.

I had to check out the "help" section on YouTube to get straight how to embed the player but once I saw the obvious (duh, dani), it was pretty easy to do and looks good on the blog. I found a teaser trailer for "Breaking Dawn", the fourth book in the Twilight series, which just came out last week. Being able to find movie type trailers for books that are popular with young adults will be great additions for reading promotion on our library web page and for book talks in the library. I've also added a video from "School Tube" which I have encouraged my faculty members to use for both themselves and students to use to upload videos for classroom purposes although I don't have anything against YouTube, but this allows other educators to share in the wealth. This particular video is fairly extensive and is a presentation that was used for instruction on information literacy with high school students. I do think that one of the drawbacks to YouTube is all the "stuff" one must sort through in order to get to anything worth watching in terms of educational purposes.

Thing 19, Week 8

I LOVE Library Thing!!! I've already been recommending it to friends who are book lovers so they can share their thoughts and libraries with other friends. I cataloged my five books very quickly and was impressed with the detail provided for each entry. I was reading one of the blog posts as well where Library Thing has cached book covers to share with other libraries and book stores to use in their OPACS or websites. What a wonderful tool. I definitely want to use the widget is some way to create recommended reading lists for students, parents and faculty members. (I don't know where I'm going to find the time to do all these things but I really, really want to).

I added the search widget for "my Library Thing" collection. I played with it a little bit but didn't get it quite wide enough on the page but it is still very usable. I also added an author tag cloud for the five books I've cataloged so far that is another great option. The reading reference options would be great on our Library web page. You could create and author tag cloud for "if you like reading this, then check out these other authors!!". That's the kind of questions I'm always getting from the kids. I wonder if you could add those kind of tag clouds into our OPAC??? A question to pose to Follett???

I also read through an option where you can upload your covers from your library, export them to Picassa and then create a poster of the covers. There are just too many options to talk about. I think I will probably sign up for the lifetime membership ($25) for myself just so I can keep adding books. I hope to get to use this tool quite a bit.

iGoogle page-Library Stuff

My igoogle page for Library Stuff!

Thing 18, Week 8

Using Zoho Writer is great. I love the tool bar and the ability to share the document. Any web based application is so time saving and means less space is needed on your own or the school's servers. I'm a little frustrated right now because I assumed there would be some drawing tools in the application like there is in word and other word processing applications but so far, I can't find them. When I looked around at the template feature, there were a lot of great ones you could add to your account's library such as a multiple choice test. This would be a great feature to share with faculty members. I also found a sample resume form which I'm always helping students to develop as well.P

I imported a document that had the the image from my iGoogle Library Stuff page that I had tried to import to the blog before. I then posted the document to my blog and it sort of worked as you can see. Posting to the blog is a great tool within Zoho but it seems like there ought to be a way to see the whole document by either clicking on it to enlarge or something. I'll keep working! You can insert a hyperlink to my Zoho account but it doesn't go directly to the document and I'm sure if I weren't already logged in to Zoho, it probably wouldn't show the file at all. Hmmm...