Thing 11, Library Thing

Library Thing is so simple to use, I love it. I have also used Shelfari which is also very simple. I think it is a great tool for reader's advisory and could be used as a tool in collection development. I posted my Library Thing widget in the sidebar; I had to make myself quit adding books!!
I read books from all genres and checked out several different groups. It is hard to choose just one or two groups, I think I'll just pop in now and then to see what's new rather than join a particular group.

Thing 10-Online Image Generator

I love this type of site and I think that students will have fun with it too.

I played with Image Chef and I am on a baseball team!!

This "sketch" was made from one of my digital photos uploaded to Dumpr. There were a lot more image generators on Dumpr to explore; this one just happened to catch my eye.

I made a Wordle using the URL to this blog:

Glogster looked like it would be fun to play with, students could use this venue instead of a paper poster. I made a poster with some photos from my trip to London in 2008. It was fun but not a very intuitive site and I did not get the glog to save properly. I will try again at a later date. All of these Web 2.0 tools would allow students to express themselves while using new technology.

Thing 9-Finding Useful Library-Related Blogs and Newsfeeds

I really enjoyed reading the post by the Cool Cat Teacher on creating a Circle of the Wise and decided to add this blog to my RSS reader. What better way to insure life-long learning than by subscribing to the feeds of the leaders in a particular field? This is an "ah-hah" moment for me; of course, I appreciate the warning about over-doing it and how to select blogs that would be worthwhile.

I tried the suggested search on Google Blog Search and typed in "Library2Play". I got a list of the blogs with a brief synopsis of posts from this exercise, I even decided to reply to one of the blogs. As usual there is just so much to muddle through and I tend to try to muddle through everything; haven't quite learned the art of browsing. I subscribed to the local news from the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express News. I grew up in Houston and still have family living in the Conroe area and therefore very interested in the local news. I live close to San Antonio so I am very interested in the local news as it pertains to my locale.

The difficult part-the looking and deciding which feed to subscribe to; that will become an ongoing quest. The easy part, subscribing to the feed; click on the orange icon and then a new window pops up that asks which feed reader. Voila! The read is in your menu; now I need to go back and organize in folders.

I cannot see anything that is not beneficial in using a feed reader; in fact it is becoming quite apparent that one should not choose to log on without one; if for no other reason than to save precious time clicking through all your bookmarked URLs.

Thing 8-RSS Feeds

I learned about RSS feeds and readers in my library science technology class and therefore have an account in Google Reader. I have not visited it in awhile so I had LOTS of new posts that I had not browsed. Some of the blogs that I was following had changed URLs so I updated those links. I could not remember why I had subscribed to some of the feeds that I did but after browsing I quickly remembered and made a mental note to myself to visit at least a couple of times a week to keep abreast of the musings that some of these great minds post to cyberspace. Gotta love Web 2.0!! Some of the blogs I follow are: Mary Ann Bell's "For Whom the Bell Told", Teri Lesesne's "Goddess of YA Literature", Doug Johnson's "Blue Skunk Blog", Information Today's "Library Stuff", and "School Library Journal Neverending Search". One of the really cool things I noticed is that the blogs from the Library2Play community I am following were automatically pulled into the reader.
Feed readers are necessary if for no other reason than time management; one can easily browse the subscription list, read the post or newsfeed of interest and continue the day; no more typing in countless web addresses and searching for content of interest!!
I can see the benefit in any classroom that follows current events; subscribe to a newsfeed of choice and tag for content-a teacher's dream!