Week 9

I made it! For a while there when work had to take priority I thought I'd never catch up. But once I resolved to complete the exercises I began to really appreciate what Web 2.0 has to offer and am very grateful that ACL Learning encouraged and promoted this programme to its staff. Thank You.

What an amazing place the internet has become! I can so appreciate that there is something for everyone. This course has made me aware of tools that are going to be useful in my workplace; Bloglines will keep me uptodate with library matters, LibraryThing and BookBump are going to be useful with sharing book reviews, Google Docs is going to be a great tool for creating documents and spreadsheets for personal use. The best of all for me has been the photograpy sites. Flickr got me motivated to find out about digital cameras and into using my own. I can take all sorts of photos which can be put into albums and used to create great little pieces of my own artwork.

I will be keeping my Blog ongoing and developing in directions as yet I have not decided.....

Week 9

ebooks: Well I've setup my own account and had a look around. Netlibrary has a clean, clear and easy to navigate page setup. I searched for children's and teens books with little success. It was better just to scroll through the lists to find suitable titles. The content page for each title is very useful - certainly helps before deciding to select an item. When I checked the title "Children of Micronesia" I was surprised to find that it was published in 1994. So when I decided to add 'favourites', I chose items that wouldnt 'date' such as "Best Birthday Parties ever!" and "The care and feeding of dinosaurs".

Week 9

Podcasts : Another great teaching tool - as well as all the other uses. I like the idea of getting updates on a favourite podcast and after tripping around the podcast directories, I found 'Uncontrolled vocabulary' - an interactive discussion on current events in world libraries and librarians. I added it to my RSS feed on my Bloglines account and now I just have to check it every so often. And I've linked to my Bloglines at long last!!!! Now I can go back over my Blog sometime in the future and add those hyperlinks.....
At some stage I may want to have a go at podcasting too, but not until this training is over. There is still some way to go.

Week 9

Discover YouTube : I didnt think I would find anything that appealled to me, except for the library domino. Wow!

But I found this one which is just beautiful when looking at the animations. I think it is very clever as I did animation - not very well, as part of my Children's Literature Diploma and know how difficult it is:

Week 8

I had a look at web-based applications via Zoho Writer and Google Docs. I decided to register with Google Docs as I liked its layout. So I've 'published' some of my book reviews and added their book jackets. I just need to add the titles links to our catalogue:

What have I been reading?

I am the great horse

By Katherine Roberts

A thrilling read. This was a book I didn’t want to put down.

Bucephalas, Alexander’s great war horse recounts their dazzling campaign through the Ancient world, from Macedonia to Babylon. Weaving fact, that is Alexander’s epic journey , Katherine Roberts has used her knowledge of horses and her skill as a fantasy writer in this fantastic recreation of the actual battles and created characters, who bring it all to life.

Adventure / horse stories.

Readers : 9+ years

Life as we knew it

By Susan Beth Pfeffer

What would happen to our lives if a disaster changed the world? How would we cope without electricity, without the normal everyday things we take so much for granted?

Miranda keeps a diary which begins with the usual teenage rantings, but gradually she comments about how the weather changes begin to affect her life and the lives of those she loves.

Science fiction stories

Readers : 12+

Notes from the midnight driver

By Jordan Sonnenblick

What happens when a teenager gets drunk, steals his mother’s car and wrecks it in the process of demolishing a garden gnome ? If you are Alex and your mother is a nurse, you get assigned to a rest home to look after a cantankerous old man that’s what.

Humorous but a story with a moral in the telling. Another great read.

Humour

Readers : 12+

Week 8

I went to the short list of the Web 2.0 awards and it was great to see that Technorati, LibraryThing, Google docs and PBwiki were there among the top sites. Just for something different I went and had a look at Peertrainers and was very impressed. Eating and exercise! - or losing weight and getting fit! And you can do it with the support of a group or team of likeminded people, although they all seem to American and / or of the body beautiful category. The site would suit the seriously go-hard fitness bunnies like my daughters. So I'll send them the link.

The site includes help for eating and I especially liked the calorie wiki with tags -'Breakfast recipes' and 'Finfish and Shelfish products' and plenty of weight watchers tags, but the only references to meat eater's advice was in the comments section. Why is that?

Still, it would be a good site to have on the website along with health and fitness materials in collections.

Week 7

There certainly is something for everyone on the web. The PBwiki looks like a great tool for students working on class assignments. The piece in the PBwiki Library about using PBwiki, by a regular user who is a Stanford grad. explains the benefits of multiple people adding and editing these webspages was interesting. He recommended that teachers set up classroom webpages on PBwiki for students - with the syllabus which I can see would be great for libraries to follow coming demand on their collections.

I'm hoping that in the course of these exercises that I'll find out how to add hyperlinks to these sites so that I can make them quickly accessible.....

Week 7

I have been using wikipedia reguarly as a work tool to find out about manga series and have found it so useful. I had realised that it has so many branches or tools. I had been a little wary about the fact that other people can alter a wiki, but then that allows for growth and interaction. I was impressed to learn that there is also the opportunity to use wikis to create online communities and particularly for libraries. Where this appealed to me was as a result of a discussion with a librarian working at the National Library who suggested a Blog on our website for making contact with schools. We had been finding it difficult to obtain information from schools about the subjects they would be studying on a term by term basis. The library wiki examples has just the answer - 'create a community wiki to be a one-stop-shop for community information' There can be wiki functionality to the catalogue for patrons to post reviews, to allow them to upate subject guides and add their own useful resources.

added Note: I missed Rollyo earlier so did go back to that exercise and added my own searchroll....
I can see that I'll have to do more on this one as is definitely will be a useful tool to have.

The Library Success: A Best Practice wiki is a helpful place to regularly check for ideas and information shared around by other librarians's successes. I intend to refer to it often.

Week 6

Well here we go tagging along... When I first saw tags on Amazon I thought what a great way to look around the content to find similar material. In the course of this excerise I've registered with a number of blogs and websites. I'm gonna love LibraryThing for recording my book reading and reviewing. At the moment its all in a huge Word document. This way I can share great and not so great books with others.

Technorati didnt appeal to me, so I didnt look around for very long. But Del.icio.us is marvellous! I was able to bookmark blogs and websites for libraries and books after I had registered with Worldcat.

Search for an item in libraries near you:
Enter title, subject or author





WorldCat.org >>

I also found Us.ef.ul: A beginners guide to Del.icio.us and Several Habits of wildly successful Del.icio.us users to be very 'useful' so I've bookmarked them both for future reference.

Week 5

Now this exercise was a whole heap of fun!

Had a play with various possibilities on the Generator Blog. I'd really have liked to do a slide show but no joy there.

LetterJames offers so many fascinating ways to use photos, so I had a go at making a calendar. I really liked the idea of using personal photos to make a desk calendar. Such a useful tool when its so hard to find desk calendars.

I also made myself a copy for December 2007 which I saved as a pdf and couldnt add here.

Week 4

After playing around with the digital cameras we have at home, I'm much more familiar with their features and am having so much fun being the 'photographer' rather than ducking and diving when I see one coming. I've also added some of the photos from my phone camera to my collection on flickr. I still want to do some work on creating montages and such before I publish them.

And finally I have something to show. I had to borrow the work camera and the helpful people round here downloaded the pictures within minutes yet its taken me ages to find my way to this creation. I experimented with adding tags and also with adding the URL from my flickr page, but I lost it and couldnt find it again. So had to save the image to the Gdrive.

Week 5

And since I dont have my camera with me to do the library picture, I went on ahead to the next step and had a look at these RSS feeds and setup my own Bloglines account : http://www.bloglines.com/public/USERNAME This was a very useful exercise. I was able to use it as a work tool too. I found a link to a news item about children and cooking which lead me to a book called "The spatulata cookbook" which is now in our collections. It only took 2 weeks to arrive and added to our collections. The Reader's Club Rss feed will be useful too and as I find more to do with children's and teens books, I'll add them as well.
I've also added a Bloglines notifier to my task bar, so I'll get alerts to my Bloglines.

Week 3

What a fascinating site! I've spent quite a bit of time looking at and exploring . It prompted me to get my photos downloaded from my new digital camera and to access photos from my phone camera. Then I'll add them to my Flickr account.

Amazing to see so many libraries Flickring, including our own North Shore and Hamilton. The number that had a Teen focus was great to see.

Week 2:

Wow! Social networking makes writing to penpals something like in the dark ages. Having the facility to add images and meet new friends is amazing. I can understand why its so popular and a great way to keep in contact with friends and make new friends. The 3 sites have such a different appeal so there is something for everyone.

Week 1

This is so much fun. I spent a morning setting it up and just wanted to keep going. Seeing what others have done has been most interesting and generates more ideas and possibilities. I think I might change mine somewhat as a result. I surprised the young ones at home, when I told them I had a Blog. They're keen to find out how to set up their own now.

After a busy week in the office...