Delicious

Delicious is an excellent and useful Web 2.0 application. The tag cloud on the SDSL page for this challenge caught my eye and then I saw that a few others had included these clouds on their blogs, so I investigated and have been using Delicious for weeks. I have My Favorites organized into folders, but Delicious allows me to use it on any computer and to search by tags. I have used it many times while researching a question for school librarians and on site visits when I needed to get to a site quickly to share information. At first, I was trying to keep a notebook of this info and found it cumbersome and inadequate. Delicious helps me do my job! To expand my use to some of its other services I just subscribed using the tag school_libraries and found 1,353 bookmarks! I think this is going to be a "two pipe problem." This would be a great tool for high school students to use when evaluating websites. (One point of irony... the terms "tags" and "tagging" and the actions associated with them at my former school usually meant you spent some quality time with the principal after expressing your creative talents.)

MySpace

The footprints led up to the falls... but Sherlock was alive and well! As for me, I was not traveling abroad, but in South Dakota and Montana and am now back on the trail of Web 2.0. After taking a look at both MySpace and FaceBook I decided to set up a My Space account. I was curious about it because so many of my former students loved it and it made a lot of news on 20/20. The whole process took only a few minutes and was much easier than setting up a blog. Tom is not my friend, but I did invite one friend, yes, only one friend. I don't see a personal use for this at this time, but liked the teen library stuff I browsed through and think it has great potential for school libraries. However, most schools have blocked all social networking sites. Beebo is another very popular site and students quickly figure out the proxy for it and use it anyway on school computers. Students could create a yearbook type site or even a newspaper style site for schools using this. Oh, it probably wouldn't be as cool then! But the possibilities of linking music and video in addition to photos would be great. The ads are a little too much but can be ignored.

Office 2.0

Web-based is the key to it all! Google Docs was the quickest and easiest of all of the lessons so far. Maybe it just felt that way because bandwidth didn't seem to be an issue. The "any where, any computer" concept I am already in love with, in addition to the sharing. I've been working on a revised school library site visit form in Word so I uploaded it to Google Docs. At first, the formatting was an issue, the logo was unclear, and it produced three pages where I only had two in Word. The Help was easy to navigate, I changed the margins, deleted and re-inserted the logo off the SDSL webpage, deleted the line, and was back in business. Not much of a hassle, but it would have been easier if I had created the document in Docs. Next, I tried a PageMaker document. It first had to be changed to a pdf and when uploaded the font changed. (I have lots of documents in Pagemaker because I used it to create the school newspaper and yearbook at TTS.) The Google Groups caught my eye and I checked out the link to the National Writing Project. They have an interesting writing project in progress for high school students using Google Docs. The South Dakota connection is the Dakota Writing Project at USD. The subgroup Rural Sites Network has some interesting info. As always, I click on one thing and discover a ton more. Office 2.0 would save money and server space for schools and libraries. No more "I forgot to put my file on my memory stick" or "I forgot to e-mail my file to myself" as excuses for uncompleted homework. "I lost my disk or CD" has been long outdated. But there will still be "The internet was down!" I also tried out 30boxes because it was a clever name. The integration of Flickr, etc. is cool, but yet another account to create, another login, and another password...

Video Part 2

Podcast & Video

Personal On Demand media... MediaFly looks fun, but I like the simplicity of Feedzie. Nevertheless, using MediaFly I subscribed to Audiopolis which contains reviews from Audio File Magazine. The first one I listened to was a review of Sherman Alexie's newest and first book for young adults The Absolutely True Dairy of a Part-Time Indian. It includes Sherman Alexie reading excerpts. How cool is that! My former students and I love Sherman Alexie and it would be great for any student to hear the author's real voice. This could be used before, during or after reading the novel as part of a literature circle, AR assignment, to highlight new books in the library, etc. Next, I subscribed to a video feed using Feedzie http://www.evtv1.com/that came up when I searched "Sherlock Holmes." Oldies, but goodies would be great to use in the classroom or the library to introduce units, authors, titles, etc.

While I was in my Bloglines account doing that, I checked The Shifted Librarian and just had to use her mini poster link to create this one of my niece Emilee. She is a sophomore at Ohio State University and although she does read books, she spends a huge amount of time personally demanding her media on her laptop. (The cell phone is always nearby too.) I took this picture months ago but it reminds me of the recent article about what qualifies as real reading - it's all real reading!http://www.ala.org/ala/productsandpublications/READ_Mini_Posters.cfm

I have used YouTube a lot so I checked out Goggle. There were 3,990 hits for the term "librarians." As I was browsing the first list "NJ State Library Outreach to School Librarians" caught my eye. I recently looked at the NJ State Library's website and liked it, so here's the video. Watch out for your favorite School Library Coordinators at SDLA! (Hopefully the video comes up - did I embed it correctly?) The quality is not the best, but the idea is fantastic. All of Web 2.0 can be used for PR from the SDSL. Graphics are great, but photos and video are even better. (Update: I went back and added the video to a new post & it works!)

P.S. The most important thing I have learned from this lesson is you must never try all of these podcast & video things on dial-up! Wild Blue where are you? Thanks to Quynn for the advice on layout and I'm now going to steal her Shelfari idea!

A Red Herring

Well, I started to work on Podcasting & Video, but then decided to check my Bloglines first. The Librarian in Black recommends a search engine http://www.feedzie.com/ that searches audio and video - very cool. Also, there is new information that shows that hadrosaurs were so successful living with T-rexs because they grew bigger faster. For example, when a young hadrosaur was as big as a cow, a young T-rex of the same age was only as big as a dog. And of course, these two species of dinosaurs represent some of the most common fossils found in parts of South Dakota. OK, back on the trail of Web 2.0... If you haven't seen it already look for "Library Dominoes" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwihz7iZlx0 on You Tube. It gave me the great idea to play library dominoes with the reference books in my library last year as part of our National Library Week celebration. Yes, it is OK to play with the books like that and win prizes! Lots of others come up under that title search now. More later...

Flickr Part B

Mashups are quite easy and interesting... who are these people who invent this stuff? I now have a trading card and a Flickr Badge. I patterned my trading card after my hero Nancy Pearl (Book Lust) and asked Flickr to find all public Sherlock Holmes photos for the Badge. I am amazed at how simple it all is - even when it requires copying code which I am totally clueless at creating. It would be fun to have a Flickr Badge of the latest library event on a library's homepage, kids could create trading cards for themselves, for fictional characters, for biographical research, the applications are endless. Yet, I am frustrated with the layout of my blog page as it grows. Is there some easy way to move things around similar to a desktop publishing document?