Week 9 Thing 23: Copyright

I have the seen the "Fairy Use Tale" a few months ago and I thought it was really good. The only thing that may be a problem is that I don't think students will quite get the concept because it does seem to be fast paced but would recognize the cartoons. Teachers would benefit from it better. The Creative Commons website provided useful information . I deal with copyright everyday in the library and it seems that teachers push it more than students. Part of that does stem from the teachers' lack of knowledge about copyright and we as librarians need to teach them how to avoid copyright infringement.

Week 9 Thing 22: ebooks and Audio ebooks

Surprise, there are a lot of websites that offer free ebooks. The only thing I did not like was I found downloading the books was challenging. Sad to say I am not a big fan of classics and most of websites contained many classics. I did look at Kids Audible and saw that there were a few free ebooks that my students would possibly interested. I guess I am not that comfortable in downloading ebooks. The last time I used an ebook was when I was finishing my master's. I was not very interested in this activity.

Week 9 Thing 21: Podcasts

My only experience with Podcasts was that I took a 1 day training on Podcasts. We used Macs with Garageband and learned how to create a podcast and I thought it was an intense class. It took a while to practice recording songs, phrases and actually talking and recording and matching all that to the pictures. When I went to search the podcast directory, I found out that a couple of the links did not work. Podcast.net's link was broken and Yahoo Podcast could not be found. Right now, I did not find anything that would benefit me to use in my library but I will keep searching and who knows maybe I might find just the right thing to share with my students.

Week 9 Thing 20: You Tube and few sites

For as long as You Tube has been around, this is the first time I experience looking through it. While I was taking this workshop I came across a wiki and saw a video that really caught my eye. I noticed they found it on You Tube and so I went to look for it myself. I found it and I thought it would a great introduction to teachers about using technology and connecting and sharing information that ties in with the library.





Another video I came across was so inspiring for writing that I would love to share it with our teachers. This little girl is so amazing and her vocabulary is mind boggling!!!

Week 8 #19: Library Thing

I have never heard of Library Thing until I took this workshop. I never knew there was such a tool to catalog books but surprisingly it can only catalog up to 200 books. Adding books was actually easy. I can actually catalog all of the books that my kids have at home. I like that you can see how the books rate and actually read other reviews. Here is a link to my library thing.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/mebarr66

Week 8 Thing 18: Online Productivity Tools

I created an account with Zoho writer and played around trying to create a sample document but did not find it that user friendly. My preference would be Google docs and I have not really used it until last week when we used it during a workshop. Now that I had a chance to spend some time with Google docs, I can see using this as a great way to share research units with other librarians. I really like this tool for the reason that I don't have to worry about saving documents or presentations on a jump drive and I can pull it up on any computer wherever I go. How convenient is that?

Week 6 Thing 14: Technorati

After I did a search for school library 2.0 using Technorati, I was surprised the number of posts. I expected the results would be higher. There was only 539 post but when I did a tag search, no results showed up. I did not feel very comfortable with this particular tool. Maybe I need to research this more in depth to find it useful for me.

Week 5 Thing 11: Web 2.0 Awards

As I was looking around the 2.0 awards list, I found some interesting topics to discuss. The first thing I noticed was the 1st place winner for Digital Storing and Remote Access was disbanded in 2008. Omnidrive was supposed to be an easy tool to just drop and drag online content but since it won the award in 2007 they kept the listing on this site. I wonder why it was disbanded, was it due to lack of use by consumers or that it might not have been as easy to use as they said? It makes you wonder. Another thing I was looking at was hosted wikis. I thought it was interesting that PB Wikis landed 1st place but Wikispaces received 3rd place. I thought they would be rated equally. As for my decision to create a wiki for my library, I have to choose a wiki that my school district will support. I can see why Google docs received 1st place for collaborative writing and word processing. I had the opportunity to experience with Google docs last week while taking a videoconferencing workshop. It was very easy to use and share with others.

Week 6 Thing #13: Del.icio.us and tagging

I can see the use of this tool can be very helpful and played around with it to figure. Of course I did have the problem with the buttons. This reminds me of another tool that I used in the past when searching for websites for research unit. We used a program called Filimentality that did the same thing. You were able to create a collection of bookmarks and tagged them according to the subject. I did not think Del. icio.us is as user friendly but that is because I am used to Filimentality. I will have to play with Del.icio.us some more to be more comfortable. My idea to use this would be for collecting websites to be used for a research unit.

Week #7: Thing 17 Entry to Sandbox wiki

When I went to the sandbox wiki I didn't much activity there so I was not sure what I was supposed to do. I posted a comment in regards to my wiki. I created a wiki for my school library with the purpose of trying to go paperless and provide information about my library program to the entire school community. There is a page for students, teachers and parents. It has taken some time to create everything and planning on what I want in the wiki. I just hope I can get most of it completed by the time school starts.

Week 5 Thing #12: Rollyo, Wordle and Animoto

I will try to sum it up in a few words. No, No, and Yes. I tried Rollyo and created a account and played around and I could not figure it out. It frustrated me and I gave up.
I checked out Wordle and couldn't understand how that would be benefit me. I did learn from a class member how this could be used with writing to see how many times you use a word but I don't see the need for this right now.

Now for Animoto, I really like this one. I thought it was easy to organize. I did a test video and it was real simple that I had to try with some of my pictures. Selecting the pictures and music was easy except the only drawback is that it takes quite some time for the process to create the video. I plan on using this with lesson introductions possible. Here is a video I created with my kids swim lessons. I hope it works.

http://animoto.com/play/fXrarBbkNLbaCyR30d6w1g