Thing #11

I love to read and often struggle to figure out what to read next. The Library Thing is a great solution to this. I entered in a few books and then looked at people with similar libraries. I saw tons of books that looked interesting. I loved all of the discussions that were going on about books as well. A couple of the groups looked particularly interesting. One was the 50 most banned books and the other was 1001 books to read before you die. I also saw a group for librarians to discuss books as well as other issues. This is another great resource.

Thing #10

I discovered Glogster where you could make your own poster. Some of the previously created ones were phenomenal. I included one I found on Artemis Fowl by Janice. I downsized it and then included the link. It really is impressive because it includes information about the books, music and video clips. The posters can be very simple or very elaborate. I thought this would be a great way to share a book talk or to have students respond to a book. This would be a great product for any project.

Image chef was simpler and I played with it for just a few minutes. Again, I found all kinds of things that would make learning fun and creative.

Thing #9

Wow!! I am completely overwhelmed by how much information and blogs are out there. I found many good ones. I appreciated the article by Cool Cat because it helped point out the necessity to keep the priorities straight by finding excellent bloggers and focusing on those. Of course it does make it much more convenient when you can add them to your reader and have it all handy. The Edublogs website was helpful because it was education specific. Topix was interesting because it immediately brought up local information and current topics in the news. Google Blogger was very broad and took some searching to find what I wanted. I did find one blog I added, The Shifted Librarian. I also found very many interesting ones as well. I'll have to keep on reading and exploring.

Thing #8

I was not at all familiar with RSS feeds or readers. I thought this was great, especially as I am growing more familiar with blogging. Google reader conveniently displays all desired blogs and news feeds, even differentiating between new and previously read items. Using this tool would be a time saver since everything is in one place.

A publicly shared page, unique to a district's administrators, faculty, parents, or librarians, would be valuable to share relevant information.

Thing #7

Google has some extremely interesting applications. I explored several of them. Most of the applications were fairly easy to use. Many of them interfaced with other Google applications. I explored the Picasa pictures and created a photo album.
I also looked around at Google docs. Picasa pictures could be used much like Flickr in the classroom. Google docs will allow you to take any document and post it on the web making it more easily accessible.

Thing #6

Mashups were very interesting. I spent way too much time looking around at all of the different applications. I really liked the retrievr where you drew an image in a certain color and it matched photos. I'm not sure how I could use it in my classroom or librarian but it was great fun to see what images would come up!

The Trading Card application would be good to use for promoting books. An application like Mappr would be beneficial in tracking places that have been read about or explored in the classroom or library. The Motivator could be used as a response to reading.

I did try to use Motivator but I think my old and slow desktop could not handle it. I will try again on another one.

I did notice that Big Huge Labs had a link for free educator things. I will definitely look into that too. It looked like you could let your students use products without them having to have a separate sign-in. Another project for another day.

Thing #5

I thought these photos would be useful in teaching my second grade class about the food chain. I love the photo of the flower with the grasshopper.

The possibilities with Flickr are endless. It was easy to get lost in the search and follow related tags.