Week 6 Thing # 13

Delicious So many places so little time. I found that the biggest advantage of Delicious is grabbing other resources that other people have tagged. My recent favorite find is 1oo Unbelievably Useful Sites You Have Never Heard Of. I discovered the search engine Ms. Dewey on this site. When using this search engine you are entertained by Ms. Dewey an actress who will comment on what you are searching. I will visit this social bookmarking site from time to time to see what resources are out there. Teachers who teach the same subject find Delicious useful to share websites. I wish the developer of Delicious had chosen a name that was more descriptive of the bookmarking site. I became more curious about the name and have discovered that Delicious is a domain hack. At least I now know there is a reason for this madness.

week 5 Thing #12

ROLLYO will make researching individual topics more slick. Instead of just hunting in one drawer you get to search in a bunch all at once. We had students researching Alternative Energy Sources this past spring. We placed oodles of websites for students to use on their research pathfinder. I took all of those websites and created one search using ROLLYO. You can check out the Alternative Energy Sources ROLLYO that I put together.

extra Thing u must see

I am interrupting my next thing to share a site with a plethora of resources for you to use. I have just begun to explore
Web Tools4u2Use

Week 5 Thing #11

I checked out a few of web 2.0 and played a bit. Google Docs was reintroduced to me this past spring. Excellent way for students to work collaboratively on a document and or powerpoint. We were finding it difficult for students to work on a document together. It often involved one student being in charge of creating the word document with input being given to them either verbally or written. Google Docs allows for collaboration to take place, each student can add to the same document. Once an account is created go to new to select the kind of document you want to create - document, spreadsheet or presentation (powerpoint). All students need to do is set up an account in Google. Free of course. Another app I checked out was Twitter the podcast I listen to (TWIT) keeps mentioning Twitter and I have always meant to Google it but now I have bumped into it on the Web2.0 award winning list. Twitter is a social network that you can use to tell what your friends, family and coworkers what you are doing every minute of the day. You simply answer the question, What are you doing? In my world of teaching information at the high school I better know what is going on or "gasp" I will look outdated!

Week 5 Thing #10

Absolutely love image chef to create visuals for the blog page. Can really see how using images on a high school library page would entice students to check out what is happening in the library. I am not crazy about comic strip generator. First, I can't get the image to appear when pasting the link to my blog page. Secondly, many pictures are not copyright free images - a big no no.
Learning 4 Life picture is AASL's new catch phrase for Standards for 21st Century Learner. And of course I knew this by checking out one of my feeds.

L4L

Week 4 Thing #9

Did I really read add a few useful School Library and news feeds? I can't stop trying to decide which ones to add and which to delete. I have been posting, editing, deleting and adding to the list. I really like the ease of adding and making things go away in my blog. I think I have a pretty solid list of library resources and am wondering at the same time what I may be overlooking. I love how the feeds tell you how long ago they were posted. One of my pet peeves is reading old news. You know, like when you are waiting in a waiting room and all the magazines are over 3 months old. Yuk! I also like how you can display a bit of the info before going and checking the rest of it out.

Week 4 Thing #8

This week is about RSS feeds that can be set up using a variety of outlets. I set up Google Reader and added some new RSS feeds and added some favorites that I already subscribed to. I prefer reading my feeds through my iGoogle page. I have my feeds categorized by content area. Students should take advantage and set up RSS feeds when doing research. Students could be alerted when websites have new information on their research topic. The best place to put your feeds is where you will see them the most and right now it is here.