Ning a success and Zoho presentations

Either my extended family is humoring me a great deal, or our family NING is a success. It is a great way to share pictures, news, comments, information. The younger members are naturals at this, and the older members like the novelty. I am thankful to CSLA for showing me this. I have gone a little crazy with image generators on my posts!

I have been experimenting with Zoho shows as a way to present tutorials on my library webpage. Zoho looks better and better to me. I like their wiki, too.

I plan on continuing this blog as a way to organize my thoughts and remember ideas. I signed up for a SIRSI Dynix webinar on Library 2.0 http://www.sirsidynixinstitute.com/future.php

NINGING

I set up a Ning for my family. It was surprisingly easy, and has proven to be lots of fun. I can see this tool as a great project enhancer. Students representing presidents on a class ning, etc..

Look at my PacMan. Well, I took it down, but it was fun. I got it from Widgetbox. I am so happy!

Thing 23 Mainly Thank you!

Here is a screen shoot from Walk 2 Web which visually summarizes my learning experience. Many things I learned here can be linked together to strengthen my collaborations with faculty and the library program. A simple example : the images I learned to generate added to my future wikis make them appealing.
Thank you CSLA. This was a fun learning experience and an inspiration for me in sharing these tools with my coworkers.

week 9 Thing 22

Part of a book series I collect is online at Project Gutenberg.Betty Wales Sophomore, recently joined by Betty Wales Senior by Margaret Warde. These are books from a series for girls written in the early 1900s set in Harding College, which is a fictional Smith College. Once I saw this on Project Gutenberg, I was convinced I could find a lot of books there and I was right.

It hadn't occurred to me to put some of these books in our library catalog, but I will, thanks to Napa High Books . I have purchased a good number of e-books for our library, mostly reference books. These have been a big hit (which is sort of a pun as they get a lot of hits according to the statistics I track). My favorite vendor platform for the books is Gale's. It is very versatile in regards to printing and emailing, useful search feature, it lets you search more than one book at a time, it links nicely to Gale databases and it has a nice citation generator.

I have used DailyLit which sends a chapter a day of selected classics. I received daily chapters of the Personal Memoirs of General U. S. Grant until I got tired of just reading a chapter a day and went and checked the book out! But I thought this might be a way to hook reluctant readers. I also use my public library for ebooks and audio books. I just wish Apple and Overdrive would solve the format problems so I could download into my iPod.

I explored LibriVox, and will keep this tool in mind. I subscribe to Audible and have loved listening to books on my commute. I recommend audiobooks to patrons who seem to really like "story". . Also, I have found some students can listen to a classic book much more easily than they can read it. I find this to be true for myself. I recently listened to Madame Bovary and I liked it better than I did when I read it (admittedly a long time ago). I have not yet found a good mechanism for actually checking audiobooks out through the library, though.

WEEK 9 Thing 21 Podcasts

I have a 45 minute commute to and from work and I plug my iPod
into a device that allows my car radio to "broadcast" and enjoy the drive. Also, podcasts keep me exercising a little bit longer, as I usually want to hear the whole podcast and so will stay on my bike a little longer.

NPR offers lots of free podcasts. My favorites are This American Life and Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. Now I never miss an episode. I use iTunes to subscribe to them by pulling down the advanced menu on the iTunes toolbar, clicking on subscribe and then pasting in the url of the podcast.

I also subscribe to SirsiDynix podcasts, which seem to come along every 3-4 weeks. These are podcasts of their web seminars and I almost always find them valuable for my library life.

I like Yahoo's podcast directory, and like to look at the highly rated and most popular picks now and then. I also was glad to learn of Podcast Alley. I have found most of my podcasts through word of mouth, though.

These are podcasts I use for my own entertainment and education. I have not really thought of podcasts as a reference and research tool I could present to library patrons and students. That is an interesting idea. In that case the ratings and recommendation aspects of the podcast directories would take on new meaning.

I have thought about podcasting myself for various classes, but I haven't gone there yet. I use iTunes at school to subscribe to a few video podcasts fron CNN , NBC and CBS. ( I didn't get around to ABC). Then, if someone needs a newsclip from yesterday's or last weeks news, I can usually retrieve it without effort. This idea came to me when students doing a media bias report that required watching news shows on a regular basis missed a day or two.

Week 9 Thing 20 Youtube

Here is my choice of video - one from my hometown. This captures an essence of Butte so well.
Mysterious Unicylist in Butte Montana Taunts Death
From: ledgeman




How do I feel about youtube? A teaching tool, a bit voyeuristic, a time waster, silly, interesting, promising, etc... I have mixed feelings, as I am sure many do. There are lots of uses- capture the culture of a place as this video does,performances of Shakespeare, showing MLK and Malcolm X in a civil rights discussion, show other historical events, great science displays, wonderful creative art. Like everything else, the biggest challenge is to evaluate these videos and pick and choose the useful ones. For this "thing" I was searching for some science related videos, and did a search with mitosis as term. I came across a very clever synchronized swimming display of mitosis. But then as I read though comments, a viewer was disputing if what was shown was mitosis or meiosis. I didn't look further into accuracy, but here too the mantra is "verify,verify".

Week 8: Thing 19 Library Thing

Library Thing is another tool I learned about (indirectly) from the CSLA conference ( a coworker saw it and showed it to me.) We started using it right away as a way to present reading lists for various classes. The students , not surprisingly, responded to the visual aspect of the covers, but were not so enthralled with the social aspect as I was. That may be because I was really happy with it and it was hard to beat my enthusiasm. My problem was keeping track of the various lists. I created accounts for various teachers, but those was somewhat of a pain to remember. This year I think am going to tag the books by teacher name and then have students search. My reluctance to use tags otherwise extends to Library Thing. It is my inconsistency issue again. Yet, here I like reading the tags and even searching by tags suggested by tagged books.

Later in the school year I saw Moreau School's Library using Library Thing to highlight new books. I thought that was a great idea and plan on doing the same thing at my school. This seems like another way to market books.

I wonder if this random book script I cut and pasted from Library thing under the tools tab can be used on wikis? Maybe I would add that to all the wikis I create at school as a bit of advertising at the end. Sort of a reminder to relax and read when you are done. Hmm. Or I could put in books that extend the lesson. .
Yes. It worked on my longsuffering extinct wiki http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/okey/ although it took the other goodies out again. I will have to fool with order on source scripts there.