Am I a Techy Now?

Nope...not yet. But I am A LOT closer. This has been a great crash course on many different ideas, technologies, software, programs, media, etc that are available to individuals and can be specifically used for educational purposes. It was fast and furious but effective as an introduction. Now the responsibility falls on me to expound on the groundwork created while doing the Learning 2.0 assignments. I especially enjoyed learning more about social bookmarking, Skype, image generators, Google docs, and tag clouds. They were areas I either knew little about, learned the most, or can see an immediate use in my library. So maybe my next blog should be called "Confessions of a Librarian Who is Still Learning" because that is exactly what I plan to do!!!

Google Docs - TOTALLY AMAZING!

I love Google docs. I've been using the cloud for awhile for shared documents but I have never used the "form" option and it was SO MUCH FUN (and very useful...of course:). I was curious how you could receive results from the survey and BAM, a spreadsheet is made for you in correlation with the survey. How cool is that?!? I just checked, and to date, I only have a few responders but the concept is so mind blowing that I could sing...lalala!!!! Use it! Love it! And Use it AGAIN!

Fun Survey

Word Clouds are beautiful!

Word (Tag) clouds are so much fun! I love them. They are easy, quick, but impressive looking. The students think they are great and you can use them for anything and everything: advertising a genre, book characters, theme, mission statement, report information, etc. The most common site used to create tag clouds is Wordle, but I like Tagxedo better so I posted an example I did on the latter using the same topic as my embedded video: Cinder by Marissa Meyer.

Pod casting?

So what is pod casting? It is basically a DVR for your favorite radio (audio) programs. You can pick and choose what you want to listen to, save on it on your device, and listen when ever you want. I found a great podcast called "Book talks Quick and Simple". A middle school librarian, Nancy Keane, produces book talks and you can subscribe to hear her every week. The podcast I listened to is based on the book "Chicken Chicken Duck" by Nadia Krilanovich. It was cute and to the point. I could get hooked to a simple method like this to get information on new books that come out or any topic that interests me.

Just as a side note, I am addicted to Wait Wait Don't Tell Me pod casts from NPR and listen to their Saturday broadcast, through out the week. There are so many resources and options when it comes to multimedia.

YouTube Book Trailers - Cinder

I chose to post a book trailer about the YA novel Cinder by Marissa Meyer because I see that being a great use of YouTube in a library website/blog/or wiki. This is a quick and exciting way to interest students about books that are coming out. Also, this book trailer was professionally done, but many are done by average readers, including students. They then can be posted and viewed by their peers. I think that is pretty fantastic and I can see other students getting excited about not only seeing what others think but creating their own book trailers.

Why Tweet?

So, if you haven't guessed from my previous posts, I'm not a huge fan of social media. It can be a little too time consuming and wasteful in my opinion, so I just avoid it altogether. But in a school library (or certain settings) I can see the value. Especially if you are dealing with high school students who LIVE for social media. This is a great way to connect with them on a level they are familiar with and gives you great repertoire for being "with it". I could see sending tweets as reminders for various events or just little blurbs about new books or such, being a very effective way to reach out to the students.