Thing 11 Tagging & De.li.cious

De.li.cious is a very interesting place that I could easily spend hours on with no problem. I did notice some of what I saw seemed inappropriate for elementary students to view, but I found some very good things at the teacher tube site that I either want to use myself or share with staff in my buildings. I want to spend much more time following other peoples tags to see where they will lead me. I also found an article about consolidating email accounts into your gmail account. I just may try to do that to consolidate my email into one location. I will come back to de.li.cious again and again.

Thing 10 Wikis

This was a fun exploration of sites. I found several wikis I want to explore further, but for today I settled for adding a comment on the 23 things on a stick wiki. I was impressed with how quick and easy it was to do my addition. I am going to explore if we can use wikis with our network and students. I can see it as a great up to the minute list of good books for students to check when searching for a book to read.

Thing 9 Online collaboration tools

I have used Google docs for a couple of school related things many of us were working on. It was very nice to log in, see what the other people had written and be able to add my thoughts to theirs and record my own concerns for others to see. It was easy to use once I figured the system out. I liked it. I also just tried the Zoho document writing one also. It was easy to start my document, and add names of people who could have access. Either one would be a great way for students or staff to collaborate on a writing assignment without everyone having to be in the same place at the same time. I will definitely show both of these to my staff and students.

Thing 8 Sharing presentations

I tried Zoho show and found I had to put my jpg photos into power point format for Zoho to be able to access them. I was just looking to do something quick. I found creating the power pount first was time consuming. I had figured I could create the slideshow as I went in Zoho. Any power point presentations I have created to this point, I have saved on two flash drives and that seems to work for me. I am uncomfortable putting my things on the web for all to see. But I mght think about trying it. I can see some benefits (your flash drive quits working, or you forgot to grab it/them).

More of Thing 6 Image generator / jigsaw puzzle

Mr. Bear
Originally uploaded by kvandanacker

Our carved bear in our front yard is quite the talk of the neighborhood

Thing 7 Online communication tools

I use email daily in my elementary schools, communicating with staff. Elementary students do not have email accounts, but they would be a very useful way to communicate with students about library materials (overdues, books or other materials they are waiting for that have come in).

I have used instant messaging a couple of times personally, talking to friends on line. It was OK, sometimes it seemed to be on the slow side. But I will contuine to use it. It just isn't my first choice.

I use SMS on my cell phone quite often again for personal things. It's a great way for family to send me messages, without the annoying ringing of a phone. It also allows me to send a message if I need to without disturbing other peoples meetings or appointments. I am sure many high school libraries use this method to communicate with students and staff. Elementary students are generally not allowed phones in school.

A fellow librarian and I talked about setting a chat session, but we have gotten so busy it hasn't happened.

I recently tried participating in a webinar. Before the presentation started I had great audio. As the presentation started I lost the audio and couldn't figure out how to get it back, so finally just exited the webinar.

More of Thing #6 image generators

This was fun to play with. I could see something eye catching like this at the top of my library page on the school website.

Thing # 6 Online Image Generators

Created with dumpr.net - fun with your photos

Playing with the image generators was really fun. The dumpr site was interesting. This is my grandson being a fish. I plan to spend much more time playing here. But I have other things to do right now.

I also experimented with the trading card program. As someone suggested it would make really different business cards. I think that will be my next project, making some new business cards for myself. I will post one of my trading cards here. I didn't know most of these places were out there. I need to think about other ways I can use them at school.

Thing # 5 More Flickr Fun

Wow the possibilities available on Flickr to create new formats,and ways to use my photos. I was impressed how easy it was to use the fd Flickr toys to manipulate my photos. One of the activities I had the most fun with was the "Hockneyizer. I have a couple of photos of our grandson's big blue eyes I want to scrapbook that way. Now that I know how to do it I just need to find the photos again on my computer.

I also enjoyed playing with the jigsaw puzzle maker. I have several photos I would like to do that with and give to the person as a gift. It would be neat to do with photos of activities at school to have for the students to use in their free time.

The pocket album feature is a really fast efficient way to make little albums as gifts for parents, grandparents, godparents, or people who don't have a lot of room to display photos.

I also tried a couple of photos in the Warholizer, but I wasn't crazy about how they looked. I was never a big fan of Warhol's art anyway.

I could using the mosaic or poster programs to create advertisements or displays of activities at school. All in all I would say this was the funnest activity so far.

Thing 4 cont. Flickr--23 things on a stick

Display of African artifacts
Originally uploaded by kvandanacker

This is my photo I wanted to share. These are African artifacts borrowed from our district Multicultural Resource Center for Black History Month. I went back to Flickr and did find the Blog this button. After that it was simple.

Thing 4 Photosharing with Flickr

I have heard of the on line photo sharing programs, and I have even looked at other peoples photos on them, but never had the urge to try them myself. So today, I transferred some photos I had taken in my library to Picasa and from there to Flickr. I went in and titled the photos and added tags to the photos. I then tried to transfer them to my blog, and as I was following directions the link showed up on my blog, but I thought my picture would show up here.
Display of African artifacts on Flickr - Photo Sharing!: "Display of African artifacts"

I think I would place any school photos on our school web site where I believe parents would expect to find them. I would be more inclined to place personal pictures on Flickr or one of the other sites for sharing or more so for safe keeping.

Thing 3 RSS Feeds

I had never heard of RSS feeds before, but having spent some time exploring them I like what I see. I especially like the daily quotes and would like to set them up at my schools. My question is with two schools would I always have time to change them so they stayed fresh or would I need to find a feed that was totally student appropiate.

I also set up some techy feeds for myself because I like to know what is new in technology and hope I will have time to keep up with them.

I used Google Reader and found it easy to navigate and set up my feeds. I originally started this activity over a week ago, so today when working on it and reading some of the feeds, I had a couple I was no longer crazy about and they were easy to delete. That was nice. I was also able to add a couple of links to my blog pretty effortlessly. All in all it was a good day.

Thing 2 Library 2.0

I watched Abram's video and read Blyberg's blog post and needed time to process it. In looking at some other links on library 2 I found a site called The Shifted Librarian. All of a sudden it started to make more sense to me.

She talked about time shifting (recording shows, movies) to watch later at our convenience. She also talked about consumers transfering music files from other sources to MP3 players as space shifting of music already owned.

We don't go looking for information, it now comes to us from everywhere. A lot of what we get,we don't care about or don't need, but what we want is also delivered in new and more efficient ways. So now I need to as an elementary librarian/media specialist find ways to safely deliver these concepts to my students. I am still processing on some of these ideas. I am also working on ways I can make make my space and materials more portable. Many of my ideas are based on the website: http://theshiftedlibrarrian.com/stories/2000/01/19/whatIsAShiftedLibrarian.html

My only other comment is this this post has about 4 hours of work (looking at links, videos, and other things) involved in it. I have found some great sites I didn't know about, but I don't always have this kind of time either.

Thing #1 Create and export an avatar

Tonight I got a little smarter. I am one who needs to have printed directions in front of me, so I can refer back to them frequently, and if need be reread what it says I need to do. So the avatar part of the step was much easier than just setting up my blog last night. I had a little trouble finding my blog because I forgot a word in the URL. Once I got that figured out it was quick.



It was fun experimenting with all the different options for the avatar, especially the backgrounds. I picture myself moving her to many different exciting locations over the next several weeks, but so far I haven't found any store fronts for book stores or scrapbooking stores.

Setting this blog up

It wasn't extremely difficult, but I did start to get frustrated once and thought ,"What am I doing here?" But then things fell into place, and I thought," That wasn't so bad!"