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.

Google Reader Fan!

I have played around a little with Google Reader but found myself being sucked into a time consuming past time with so many family members and friends blogging, so I dropped it all together. But now that I am trying it again in a professional sense, I can see what a great tool it is so as to be informed of new ideas, books, trends, technology, etc... that are critical to the job of a librarian.

The two blogs I added to my reader are Kiss the Book and Free Technology for Teachers. We all now know about Cindy Mitchell and her blog with book reviews, but I wanted to add it after going to UELMA and participating in her class. It was great and I can see it being a wonderful aid to librarians who are trying to decide on book purchases. We can't possibly read every book so this is a great detailed look at many many YA and MG books. The Free Technology blog caught my eye because we are always looking for new and innovative ways to present ideas to our students. On the first page, the author introduces a way to take an interior tour of the White House using Google maps! How cool is that?!? So I am looking forward to keeping up with these blogs and many more.

School Library 2.0

In an article found in the School Library Journal by Christopher Harris titled School Library 2.0 the author talks about the need to be innovative and lead the way in a school when it comes to harnessing and using technology so that the Library continues to be a center of learning despite inevitable changes in the way education is done.

I very much enjoyed the ideas he presented about how librarians are incorporating blogs, social media, book talks, and book sharing into their libraries. I especially liked his comment that libraries need to put stickers on everything saying "Library Powered" to mimic Intel's sticker "Intel Inside" so that everyone would think about how essential a library is to the learning process.

Some of the ideas seem more appropriate for high school and middle school libraries so a little less applicable to me and my school but still, some great things to think about and I agree that we have to be be flexible and knowledgeable about the techno trends or we will be left behind, which is a disservice to our students who need to be educated about the digital world. Although I can't see applying all the examples at my school I could see introducing and helping upper elementary students create book trailers, pod casts, and online book reviews to be a lot of fun! And I have a feeling that anything that involves a computer and creativity will be a hit!!!

Trying out Technorati

This is a blogging world. Only a few short years ago, Blogs were a newly emerging form of self publication. Now they are everywhere. Anyone who has an opinion, a passion or merely a desire to share, can create a blog and be connected to millions of people. So how do we keep track of these hundreds of thousands of blogs and find those that are the most reliable and interesting to us? Technorati is one way to do so!

I found Technorati a great site to look up blogs by post topics, blog title, and category. I am a cupcake lover! So the first think I looked up was....cupcakes! When I did a search by post title, I found some great recipes for Boston Cream Cupcakes (which look sinful:) and Nutella Cupcakes (YUM!) both at The Kitchn (yes that is spelled correctly) -which happens to be a highly rated blog site when you look in the "blog directory" under 'living' and then 'food'.

When I put "cupcakes" into the search under blog titles, I got totally different results such as Cupcakes Take the Cake and Baking Bites. I was less impressed with these results because these blogs have more commentary and fewer recipes. So I found what I really wanted by doing a post search. That might not always be the case but for this example, that is what I found.

I also found it interesting that the most well represented categories were in the areas of books, small business, food, home, art, family, and info tech. I will definitely be looking at the book blogs, food blogs, home blogs and family blogs so I seem to fit well into popular mainstream blogging:).