#19 week 8

Help I've been lost in library thing for two days. I feel like I've been drowning between the blogs and reviews and groups. This website is huge. It's too much. Actually it's all overwhelming. There is a lot out there. One minute I'm logging on the the site and the next think I know 2 hours have passed. It will probably take hours more for me to focus on what I can use in my library. Something of my own that doesn't include everything else found there. Here's the link to my book page.
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/librarianjan

Week 8 #18

It worked! See previous post

This is my experimental blog in googl...

This is my experimental blog in google docs. I've had an account for quite a while but never used it. One time I tried to get a class signed up in google in order to work with their partners using google docs. It didn't work. Most of them were unable to sign up. I posted on calib at the time and found out other librarians had had the same problem. I gave up on it after that.
Our district continuation school distributed net books to all the students (not many there) and they only use google docs. It seems to be working over there.  I don't know if it's because we have an older staff or people don't want to be bothered but teachers here are not interested in web 2.0. I think one reason is it can be complicated setting everything up. Too many glitches, not enough time. I just noticed the other day that I have been missing a lot of posts. I feel really dumb. I've basically been blogging just one of the things every week. It took me all this time to figure out that there was more than one thing each week.  Should I go back and fill in the holes?

 

 

#16 Week 7

I spent a lot of time going through the various wikis and could have spent hours more. Some of them were just too much, the SJCPL for instance. I think the most relevant to me were the book reviews and the school library wikis like Joyce Valenza's. I was hoping to get a step by step guide to setting one up. I already have a couple that I never do anything with. There isn't a lot of excitement at my school for 21st century learning except from the tech teacher and myself. I think ease of use and time to learn it are the biggest obstacles. I guess I don't see how a wiki would make the classroom projects I'm acquainted with any easier. Except of course when the person with all the work is absent and the project is due that day.

#11 Week 5

I did a lot of exploring but didn't find much I could use in the library. There was a lot I found for personal use such as urban spoon, madmen yourself (I did, my new profile picture on facebook), whatshouldireadnext (ok but hard to see the links between books), So far I'm finding that I could spend hours and hours investigating and trying out all the sites library 2.0 links to. It's fun and interesting but with week 5 I didn't feel productive.

# 8 week 4 RSS feeds

I used google reader because I already have an igoogle account. I set up five rss feeds. Four were ones recommended by the Library 2.0 team. All those were interesting to me. I chose our local newspaper education rss feed. There is a lot more I need to learn about rss. Do I have to go to my google reader account to see what updates there are or will I be notified? I wonder if I can put rss links on my library website. We are restricted as to format by the district. No place for creativity or imagination. If I can put links on my website, I can find helpful links for the classes that use the library. I need to talk to our tech guy about this. I've seen the rss logo on websites I visit and I think I will add the feed for sites I use a lot. After this exercise the mystery about rss is gone and I feel comfortable using this technology. Only time will tell how much I use it.

#5 Week 3

I think I've spent hours on the flickr site. First I was attracted by the beautiful and artful photos. I'm sure many of these people are professionals. I opened an account and downloaded a couple of pictures from my computer. (See previous entry). Getting student permission isn't a speedy process so I chose teachers. I especially liked the geo map feature. I looked up pictures for places I will be visiting this summer. I thought it would be useful for students in global studies doing country power points. Of course the student I tried to help with this had chosen Guinea for their country and there were no pictures of it. I'm trying to download some pictures I took this weekend on my iphone to the map site but I'm still working on getting them into flickr. I thought I could go straight from snapfish to flickr but no luck. I can see a use for this site in the school setting. I could spend many more hours on flickr and the other sites you mentioned but I think I better go onto the next thing or I'll never make it through the course.

#5 Week 3

Social Science department favorites,
originally uploaded by librarianjan1.

I have pictures throughout the library of students and teachers with their favorite or recommended books. For something different I decided to take pictures of teachers by departments holding books. Students love to comment on their teachers' choice and how they look in the picture. This picture was taken a couple of years ago. Now only 3 of the 5 are still in the social science department.

Week 2 Thing 3

After months(years?) of procrastinating I am finally beginning 2.0. What took me so long? I finally figured out that it is fear of taking a step into the unknown untested (by me) world of web 2.0. Something out of my comfort zone. Once I realized that I knew I had to do it. I wish I could say I jumped right on it but I haven't. My next biggest obstacle was making the time for it. So here I am. Setting up the blog was fun. Picking a avatar was fun. Exporting the avatar to the blog not so much. They wanted a link to a url. I couldn't find a link for html. So I'll wait on that until I can get some advice.