thing #13

While I was exploring various social bookmarking sites, I found several web sites that had material to complement my lesson plan for this week and for the book studies I have planned for the coming six weeks. I found one site that has interactive lessons, including a lesson to teach story elements through Cinderella. Searching by tags brought up a slew of useful sites for specific topics.
Social bookmarking can be a great way for teachers to share good web sites with their students on research projects, and for librarians to share great web sites on just about anything.
I am not sure I understand discovery exercise # 3 correctly:
3. See if you can figure out how to share your delicious site with others (students).
This is what I was thinking:
To share my delicious site with others , I make my bookmarks public (not mark them ‘private’) ,or give my username to my students so that they may find the bookmarks I have collected. I could also share the tags I have added to the bookmarks, so that they can search by tags.

thing #12

What struck me as the two most important guidelines for blogging were
1.Remain respectful in your comments.
and
2.Make your blog and your comments count.
Especially when commenting on someone else's contribution, try to contribute something new instead of just commenting to be..., well, commenting. Without meaningful comments, a blog remains a monologue instead of becoming a conversation or discussion.
However, what baffles me is how people find time to continuously carry on a meaningful discussion through blogs.

Blogs that I read that are not part of the Library2Play community were TravelBlog and HarryPotterFanZone. I like to follow these two blogs because of my general interest in travel, my particular interest in everything Scottish, and my obsession with the Harry Potter books, their author, the movies based on the books, and anything else even remotely connected to the boy wizard and his world.

thing #11

For thing # 11 I added 9 books to my Library Thing. I really had to stop myself, or I would be adding books for days and not work on assignments. I love Library Thing! With all the books my husband, sons, and I own, this is a blessing! While my husband is a non-fiction reader who prefers books on military issues and all sorts of vehicles, my grown sons and I are constantly recommending books to each other. With Library Thing, we can keep up with what we read and whether or not we want to recommend those book to each other.

thing # 10

For thing # 10 I created a Wordle. Who would have guessed that this would be so easy? I am wondering how I could, for example, use a Wordle in a Power point presentation. It would make for a great opening slide, but how do you copy it into a PP? By copying code? Probably not. I will have to ask someone much savvier than me to figure that out.
Big Huge Labs is easy to use also. I made a magazine cover with it for thing # 6.

thing # 9

The search tool I found the easiest was topix.net, because it offers a number of different search types. Whether I want to search by keywords, blog, source, URL, or even zip code, topix.net is flexible enough to allow it through Advanced Search. The one I did not like so much was technorati.com. It seemed more confusing to use than others.
I found feeds for YALSA and Young Adult Literature that I will use for the classes I teach, as well as for the classes I am taking.

thing # 8

What I love about RSS and readers is the incredible convenience of having the news I am interested in come to me instead of having to look for it. I used Google Reader to subscribe to a number of blogs and organized them into folders according to topic. I will use them to keep up with all the fun things I care about as well as professional topics. As a librarian, Google readers can help keep up with the latest in literature and information technology.

thing # 7

For thing 7, Cool Google Tools I used Google Earth to explore some of the sites that have come up in texts I recently used with my students. Last November, an ActivBoard was installed in my class room --- so anything I can have on my computer screen I can show to my students. The second thing I explored for thing 7 is Google Docs. My group and I had used Google Docs briefly for our collaboration project in Dr. Bishop's class, but I didn't really know all the possibilities this offers. Google Docs will be great to use for students' group projects.