Week 6, Thing 14, Technorati

Let me start by saying, I was not impressed by Technorati. I tried approaching this "thing"as a way to figure out how to make Technorati work for me. I found the menu for finding items with "any authority" to "alot of authority". I played around looking here and there and found it to be overwhelming. So I decided to do the assignment as directed. I did a search of "School Library Learning 2.0" a couple different ways. When I did the search with "any authority in English" I found 68 posts, 20 videos, and 10 blogs. I wondered if I could narrow it further and did the same search, but with "some authority in English", this time I found 8 blogs, 20 videos, and 0 posts. Maybe I narrowed it too far, but I wasn't so overwhelmed.
I made the same kind of search of tags. I found 11 tags with "any authority in English", and 0 tags with "some authority in English". I couldn't find Raven About Web 2.0 at all no matter how I searched. I don't know what I was doing wrong there.
I next went to Blogger Central and found Boing Boing to be the #1 blog. I checked it out and found the subjects to be scattered, and hit or miss if it was something that I was interested in.
As I stated at the beginning, I was unimpressed with Technorati. I couldn't figure out where I was hierarchically, it was too much information and organized in a way that didn't make sense to my digital immigrant brain.

Week 6, Thing 13, Del.icio.us

I'd seen Del.icio.us before. When I was in the SLMS program at UW one of the teachers had us learn (search, post, etc.) Del.icio.us. But I never really felt comfortable with it. This time, I thought "this has potential!" It seems like the last two months (unrelated to this class) I have been finding that the bookmarks I wanted weren't on my list. It was usually because I was in Internet Explorer and I had saved something when I was in Firefox or vice versa, or sometimes it was because I was at home but had found it at work and it was bookmarked there. So, I set up an account and the first thing I bookmarked was the site for this class. I found that two other people had already done the same thing. I looked at the tags they used and saw that we used similar or the same tags. Next I bookmarked the school district home page and my school home page. I like that when I find something that someone else has previously bookmarked, I can see other things they have found and benefit from their searches. Hopefully as I add to my list, others will benefit from mine as well. I can see how this could be far less confusing than how I have been doing things. Next I went to iKeepBookmarks to see what I had put on that account about a year ago, and need to think through if I want to put the two together, or if they will serve different purposes. I was using iKeepBookmarks for when a teacher asked for resources to supplement their curriculum.
The "Social Bookmarking in Plain English" tutorial by Lee LeFever was great. I have found his other tutorials to be very helpful too.

Week 5, Thing 12, Voice Thread

 I found out about Voice Thread last summer at the School Librarians Leadership Academy.  I thought it looked too involved then, so I didn't try it.  I figured I'd try it this time, and I'm impressed!  It was easy to use and aside from having the "Oops!" dialog box at the beginning  and the "Share" info at the end it looks like the kind of thing that I would put on my school's web page.  (You can still hear and see my Voice Thread by clicking on the OK button.)  I can see this being a good way to share books - an image of the book with kids telling what they thought of the book.  We could start with Battle of the Books or Young Reader's Choice titles.  My school will have a new technology teacher this year, and I would like to collaborate with her/him and a classroom teacher to use this for a class project.

Week 5, Thing 11, Award-Winning Applications & NING

I have a class reunion coming up next year, and so I thought I would look at the social networking mainstay sites.  Twitter, the number 1 site isn't set up to do searches for people like I wanted. Facebook (number 2) worked great!  I could search by school and year.  I found a few people, one that wasn't at the first reunion, but may have been at the second, (not sure since I don't have a record of that reunion.)  I was surprised to find my daughter registered on Bebo.  That could be a whole separate blog entry!  MySpace and Friendster didn't have any classmates that I could find, but that wasn't a big surprise to me since these looked like sites for people a bit younger than myself and my classmates.  

I saw nings for the first time when I took the School Librarians Leadership Academy last summer.  I'm a member of the ASD Librarians Ning and the Alaska School Librarians Ning and thought I had also joined the  Teacher Librarian Ning, but when I went to sign in, it said I wasn't a member.  So, I signed up for that ning and joined the Elementary School Librarians group.  I have to admit that I don't do a good job of participating or even keeping track of these nings.  Maybe I can add them to my RSS feeder to keep up better.  I'm still not clear on the difference between nings and wikis.  I think I want to start one for the class reunion I mentioned earlier, but need to find out more about wikis to figure which would be a better application.   

Week 5, Thing 10, Comic Strip Generator

This was fun! I can see using this for lots of stuff - reminders on my library bulletin board, newsletter articles, notes home for students with very late books (maybe a comic would make it home when my overdue notices don't. http://www.comicstripgenerator.com/ was easy for a visual person like me to maneuver around in. The hardest part was figuring out how to get the cartoon into my blog. I'm getting much more comfortable looking for help online. I looked for a tutorial on Teacher Tube - nothing. I looked for a tutorial or some other kind of help on You Tube - nothing. I went to the help menu - BINGO! I figured it out.

Week 4, Thing 9, More RSS

So yesterday I set up my Google Reader account and spent a couple hours looking for feeds that would not only fulfill the assignment requirements, but also be useful to me. Today I look at "thing 9" and find ways to search for relevant feeds. (Guess I should have looked ahead yesterday.) I found Bloglines to be the easiest to navigate through but was opposite of what I was expecting to see in terms of page layout. The blogs that were the best matches were on the right, not in the middle. I don't usually look at the right side, because that's where Google puts ads. I didn't like Blogdigger and Syndic8 because neither of them had descriptions of the blog/feed on the results page. "Award-winning blogs" didn't interest me, and "school library blogs" was to disjointed for me. Topix, Technorati and Google Blog Search all had nice layouts but didn't come up with what I wanted quickly and/or easily. But, the best place I found for finding feeds was in the LM NET archives. I added Joyce Valenza's Never Ending Search and NPR: Children's Books.

Week 4, Thing 8, RSS

Well, I already knew what RSS was. But I didn't realize just how easy it would be to set up an RSS aggregator. I used Google Reader because that's the reader that was used in the Blip TV video. When the instructions for this assignment stated to subscribe to at least 5 newsfeeds, I wasn't (and still am not) sure if blogs could be counted in that 5, but my list does have some blogs. I've started out subscribing to the Anchorage Daily News, Unshelved, School Library Journal, Doug Johnson's Blue Skunk Blog, and LISNews - Librarian and Information Science News. I had heard of and looked at all of these at one time or another except LISNews. I like that I don't have to think about going to these places and looking if there is anything new. But, I can also see that having all this information waiting for me could be tremendously time consuming to go through. I'm still not caught up on all my personal email! I have thought about having a wiki for students to do book reviews and that could be set us as an RSS, but I haven't come up with any other ways to use RSS with my students. I've been looking for good feeds for new book reviews for elementary age kids, I can see how that would be helpful to me professionally.