Web 2.0 Awards List

I played around in the Spanish Pod. This was an award winner under the category of education. The site says it is free but it can cost you if you want to get into deeper lessons. Browsing through the food category, phrases were written and translated into English. The neat thing was that clicking on the right arrow beside the phrase produced the pronunciation of the phrase that could be repeated over and over again. I won't pay for any lessons but it will help me learn some basic Spanish words and phrases used in different situations. You can access the site at http://spanishpod.com. Have some fun!

Final Comments

I admit that I wasn't too excited about starting this journey but I must say that I have enjoyed it tremendously. In addition, I have learned so much. The course itself was well organized. The modules seemed a bit seamless. That is, their order was a logical progression. The introductions with the Plain English videos done by LeFever (?) were great. I liked how we were always drawn back to the question of "What use do you see for this in the library?" I know that I won't use everything I learned right away or be an expert but that's okay. At least I won't have a blank look on my face when someone asks me about blogs, wikis, podcasts and etc! Now, if I could only remember all my usernames and passwords!!

NetLibrary

Yes, it has been a task to create all these new accounts. When I got to the section of logging into the NetLibrary from LD Bell, I found that I couldn't do that. I can't wait until it is fixed.

Podcast

One podcast that was interesting to me was Lit2Go: Audio Files for K-12. Utilizing this technology, students/instructors can listen to a plethora of nursery rhymes, poems, and books. Not all the presenters were what I would call superb but neither were they that bad. Their expression, voice dynamics, and inflections were all satisfactory or above. Librarians could use all or parts of certain presentations and have students compare it with a book they are reading. Also, in centers or individually, students could listen to a podcast and write about it. If you want to investigate the particular one I choose yourself, you can at http://podcast.com. Search for Lit2Go show number 5634.

You Tube

Searching through You Tube Spotlight Videos, I viewed Twas the Night Before Christmas in Lego http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjydWIRkj1s. This video was an animated Lego presentation of the poem--created like the Claymation videos. In school, this type of technology (using Legos, clay, or whatever) could be incorporated into curriculum units as the student's end evaluation project in almost any subject area.

Web 2.0

I am thankful that our instructor let us just explore the short list of winners! When I browsed Worldcat.com, I put in my zip code and voila, up popped local school libraries and my public library. This site allowed for items of interest to by placed on manageable lists that can be shared. Great for book clubs or maybe teachers/students wanting to inform you of resources they would like purchased for the library. I also explored Livemocha which is for learning a foreign language. The basic classes were free but upgrades costs. I am enrolling in the basic Spanish (free version) class.
I forgot to mention my thoughts on Web 2.0. Each article proposed various ideas of what the libraries and librarians should be aiming towards with service and technology. While it is true that we need to serve our patrons and that everything needed can't be contained on the library shelves, I question how much the tax payers will support such endeavors. Right now in my own school library, the computer alone are inadequate. It is my opinion that we will have to be satisfied with baby steps to reach our mission of serve and demand.

Zoho Writer

For this module in our journey, I recreated a partial table of the "Frightfully Good Books" that some of us helped create in October to accomodate readers who always ask for scary books. In my table, I wanted to alphabetize the books but I never discovered a way to do that.

Frightfully Good Books

This list was started by the HEB Librarians for K-6. Feel free to add your students favorites.

Title	Author	Call Number
All the Lovely Bad Ones	Hahn, Mary D	FIC HAH
Mysterious Matter of I.M. Fine	Stanley, Diane	FIC STA
Robe of Skulls	French, Vivian	FIC FRE
Blue Ghost	Bauer, Marion	FIC BAU
Graveyard Ghost	Kehret, Peg	FIC KEH
Old Willis Place	Hahn, Mary D	FIC HAH
Ghost Fever	Hayes, Joe	FIC HAY

Enjoy this site at http://www.writer.zoho.com

Wiki

Talk about keeping it short and simple. Wikis are simple to use. I like the idea of using a wiki to get/provide information and ideas for a group. Some of the public library wikis that I explored had interesting community notes on places to eat or events in the area. These are helpful for the community as well as persons visiting or new to the area. I thought in school it could be used by teachers and students to do creative writing--especially doing a progressive story where one person writes something and the rest of the group contributes until they have a complete story. Also, I thought teachers/librarians could post ideas and resources utilized with particular units of study and grades. Another way to use it in the library is to compose collaborative lists of special books that students ask for such as "scary books." Something else I read was to use wikis in the catalog but I wonder about inappropriate remarks. http://heb23-favoritethings.wikispaces.com/Favorite+Book
http://heb23-favoritethings.wikispaces.com/Favorite+Movie

Delicious

I went to the education tag on Delicious. What appeared was that there were tons of resources on the topic--just like I thought. What I liked was that I could keep narrowing the search. I narrowed it to science, then natural resources. While I was searching through some sites to see the content and relevancy, I found a site for one of the third grade teachers that I think she can use with this 6 weeks science unit! Although I didn't create an account myself, I may in the near future.

Rollyo

Maneuvering through Rollyo to set up my personal searchroll proved very cumbersome. The site ran very, very slow. The Internet connection was broken many times and I had to reconnect time after time. Finally, I was successful. I do think that creating a searchroll is a convenient method to research a topic on several sites at once. My searchroll, titled What or Who is mainly for students to access info on a topic such as a particular battle or person. You can reach it at http://rollyo.com/libraryb/what_or_who/ . My account is http://www.rollyo.com/libraryb/

Image generators

Play Time #5 has been the most time consuming module for me so far but ironically the one I found the most interesting. I went through many sites that I would have liked to use but they weren't free. One interesting site was http://bighughlabs.com/education.php. Here, you could register students so that no email was needed and also advertisements could be blocked. In the end, I used http://comicsgtripgenerator.com/ because it was simple and free. You can see the result is the Bugs Bunny poster on the right.

I set up a book shelf in LibraryThing. Please view it at http://www.librarything.com/home/libraryb2

bloglines

Created a blogline account and added 10 newsfeeds mostly about books and libraries. I liked the Blogline Search Tool. I can see how this saves time--having the information come to me and being able to quickly sift through things. Blogline will be helpful in instructor/student searching and sharing. It's like a one place stop and shop. I tried Publisher's Weekly, Shifted Librarian, USA Today.com books-Top Stories, Books news, reviews & Author interviews guardian.co.uk, and Librarian.net. My account is http://www.bloglines.com/public/libraryb and http://www.bloglines.com/blog/libraryb

flickr

This afternoon I posted a picture on Flickr. You can see it here. This was taken at the Gaylord during Christmas break. My daughter and I went to see the ice sculptures of one of my favorite Dr. Seuss books--How The Grinch Stole Christmas.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/shadybrooklibrary

I am creating this blog as part of a requirement for an online class. This is my first attempt at posting.

I have been a librarian for 15 years. It is my intention that this blog will be used by students to create postings about books they are reading and questions about databases or research.