Week 6 Thing 14: Technorati

OK, so I was prepared to be a little overwhelmed by this assignment. Technorati is a little overwhelming but once I got the hang of it, I really enjoyed putting in some cool search terms, or tags, and finding some interesting blogs. It was incredibly easy to put them onto my Google Reader site too. (Side note - I switched from Bloglines because I get interrupted too often and with Bloglines you have to save unread blogs or they disappear, with GR, they don't go away until you mark them as read.) I probably have too many to keep up with now, but I'll give it a try because the ones I've selected have some really great information on them. I liked all the different ways blogs can be found too - Top 100, most popular, different topics, top searches. It's a blogging dream. There's probably someone who reads it all and blogs about blogging.
As far as tagging goes, it's pretty much what we as librarians have been doing all along, we just call it cataloging. Back in the days when I did my cataloging "by hand", my main concern was "if I want my students to find this book, what are the best subject headings to use?" Then, I would get frustrated when Sears wouldn't have the exact term I wanted. That's a great thing about tagging - you put in whatever will make you remember the photo/site/blog. The biggest drawback with tagging is the beauty of cataloging - authority control. Even with my Delicious site I've used a couple different tags and it drives me nuts when I see that I have 7 sites under blog and 14 under blogs.
As far as claiming my blog and creating tags for it, I'm not ready for that yet. When I'm ready to blog about more than this class, that will be the time to do it but I'm glad I know how to get read. It's hard to write when you think no one is reading. Some of our CFF teachers are putting together a tech blog for the other CFF teachers and I'll be able to get that out there for others. I think the most intimidating thing is the HTML code but I will not let it beat me! They have a very good Technorati blog directory page.

Week 6 Thing 13 Del.icio.us!

I love del.icio.us! I first found out about it in early 2007. We had just found out we were to be one of the first Classrooms for the Future schools to get up and running. My coach was counting on me help her with great web sites and I wanted to create an iWeb site for the CFF teachers to go to find them. I was going just a little nuts trying to keep track of all the sites I found considering I was on one of four different computers at any given time - two at home, (my laptop or the kid's computer) and two at school (one in my office, one at the circulation desk). Add to that configuration a Mac installed in my workroom for the iWeb project and I was at my wits' end. My system of consolidating websites consisted of scraps of paper and emails to myself with "cool sites" in the subject line.

Then came a SLJ article in January 2007, that would change everything. In the "All together now" column, Donna DesRoches wrote about social bookmarking and how it could work in classrooms and libraries. I started my first del.icio.us site that day. I showed to our CFF coach and with all that was happening with trainings, etc., we scrapped the iWeb project and concentrated on building a del.icio.us site that all the CFF teachers could access. Both she and I contribute to it and the teachers can if they want to. Not only do our teachers use it, but they have their students access it too.

I have three del.icio.us sites now, one for CFF, one for my library sites, and one for my sites. It's such a great way to share sites with others and doesn't take that much time or effort. I was lucky enough to do the inservice for our librarians last week and was very excited to show them del.icio.us. With their teaching schedules and, in the case of the elementary librarians, their traveling schedules, they don't have time to easily create and maintain a website. When showing them del.icio.us, I stressed how easy it is to create a site for their teachers. They already have great sites bookmarked and they come across more sites all the time. All they have to do is install the "post to del.icio.us" link on their toolbar, tag the sites, and send out a notice to their teachers about the great resources they've gathered for them. They look like heroines when all they did was surf the net.

My del.icio.us sites:
del.icio.us/debsherry
del.icio.us/debsherrylib
del.icio.us/debsherrymine

Week 5 Thing 12 Rollyo

Rollyo is very cool. I was ready to be totally confused, (don't know why) but it was quite fun to learn and I can't wait to send the link for the World of Warcraft Rollyo to my brother-in-law. (Even though he's an IT guy who doesn't "believe" in Web 2.0)

I created my Rollyo of favorite recipe sites because more than once I've searched site after site for the "perfect" recipe but no more. I'm anxious to see if I'll be able to create a Rollyo on our school campus of some of our subscription sites that read our IP address. I'll return to this post to give an update after school starts.

Here's my recipe Rollyo!

Select...My RecipesSearch The Web

Week 5 Thing 11 Web 2.0 Awards

What an awesome list of cool sites. It took me a while to post because I was spending a lot of time exploring. There were a few sites I was familiar with, some from my own experience, some from this class. There were quite a few I don't know that I'd ever use but a least I'll know where to find them if some one's need should arrive. I can't wait to share IM Cooked, iFoods, and Recipe Key with my FCS department. Our new department head loves when I find her cool tools on the web. I have a couple English teachers that will really go for One Sentence.
My favorite is StumbeUpon. A couple of students hooked me up with StumbleUpon last spring and I really enjoyed it but it disappeared from my toolbar when our iMacs were re-imaged.
StumbleUpon is a cool tool that helps you "stumble upon" some really interesting sites that you might never come across. The key is to upload StumbleUpon's toolbar to either IE or Firefox (it's not for Safari). Once you've uploaded, you're asked what types of subjects you are interested in. I immediately chose books and library resources plus some others. If you haven't already signed up, sign up then, and start stumbling. Once you click the SU button, a website pertaining to one of your chosen topics pops up. You either click on "like it" or "don't like it". If you like it, it will be saved and will go on to the next. If you only want to look at one certain subject at a time, you can do that too. I love this site when I want to find something fresh and interesting for my teachers or students but I'm not sure exactly what I want.
I also checked out Ning. I had a hard time with this part of the assignment because I did a search for "library", looked at everything that came up and got really overwhelmed. I would find a decent looking ning and then realize that no one had posted in six months, or there where only five members. I was about to give up when I decided to read other blogs to see what kind of results were out there. Luckily, I clicked on There from Here and read about TeacherLibrarian Ning. I visited and I even joined, which I swore I wasn't going to do, but it just looked too interesting. So a big thanks to Jane!
I also played Travel IQ and loved it so much, I put it on my library's new web page.

Week 5 Thing 10 Play!

The Image generators are way cool! The one I pasted here is one I'm going to put on my new web page for all things pertaining to Freshmen Orientation. I found it on Dummiez Book Cover Maker while I was checking out Comic Strip Generator.
I love learning all these really neat new things. I had no idea all this cool stuff was out there. If it didn't look like ordinary clip art I guess I just figured people knew how to create things from scratch or had a program they bought that would do it for them. Now I know how to create my own "clip art" for my web page and blog. I was hoping to be able to figure out how create things and paste them into word but I just couldn't make it work.
I will definitely share this with my fellow teachers!

Week 4 Thing 8 & 9 RSS

This was an easy week. Thanks to our awesome CFF coach, I set up bloglines account last spring. Some of the blogs I've kept up with are for fun but most have been really helpful. My biggest challenge was keeping the blogs I wanted to follow off the "blocked" list since many blogs seemed to get blocked by our former filtering system. My next challenge was reading everything. It's great to have all the posts come to one place but I still had to have the time to read them and once i got backed up, all was lost. While checking out some of the education and librarian blogs for this exercise, I came a across a blogger who kept up with about 100 new posts a day. I don't know how they did it since I was on information overload after a while.
I have a couple of favorite library blogs that I've gotten some great information and ideas from. My favorite for terrific sites is Library Internet Index. I love, love, love Tip Line by Jim Gates for so much tech information. While checking out new sites for this assignment, I came across a couple I added to bloglines. (I also created a Google Reader site to see how that works differently than bloglines.) I liked Blue Skunk Blog, Infodoodads, and Never Ending Search blog by Joyce Valenza on School Library Journal.  I'm looking forward to keeping up with theirs blogs.  I may revisit some of the ones I started out with and do some scaling back to keep things a little more manageable.  It's better to have a few really great feeds and be able to keep on top of things than get lost from information overload.

Week 3 Thing 7

Technology. It's very appropriate that writing about technology is our assignment for thing 7 since I just finished up three days at our school's tech camp and was inundated with technology! I finally made some headway on a library web page, practiced on our school's new Moodle page, learned some wiki tricks and shared some info on flickr with my colleagues. One of the best things I found out was that our filter has been loosened up on the teacher computers so that we can get to so many more things! It was so frustrating in past years to find really great links at home, only to have them blocked at school.
Enough rambling - What I love about technology. My colleagues and I are blessed to teach in a technology rich school district. Our senior high is a Classroom for the Future school and we have really taken advantage of the program. Some believe the technology really benefits the academic students and gets them ready for college but the real thrill is seeing what a difference technology brings to the average and struggling students.
Technology can really level the playing field for so many of our students. Quite a few of them feel more comfortable with a computer keyboard that pen and paper and it shows. They don't feel as intimidated because they've grown up with computers and video games and feel at ease with technology. When they feel comfortable with the medium, it seems a lot easier to get the message across. We have an incredible learning support teacher who taught her students podcasting and then gave them step-by-step instructions for a podcasting assignment on the three branches of government. She assigned each of her three groups one branch and let them go. Students who could barely read were gathering information, writing it down, and reading into the computer! Their finished products were better than some done by our "regular" education students. Their hard work earned one student from each group a trip to Harrisburg to the CFF Student Capitol Day. It was an incredible experience for them and one they would not have otherwise gotten. Their next unit was a bit of a let down until I found my friend a link to a Google Earth Lewis and Clark historical map
As the parent of a learning support student, I don't usually answer the phone and hear "Your son's a genius!" from the teacher on the other end. Yet his science teacher and our CFF coach had been trying all day to figure out how a particular program would "read" to the students and were having no luck. As the teacher continued to struggle, he heard noises coming from my son's computer and realized he had gotten it to work. My son has also helped his LS English teacher with Google Earth and was able to show off a really nice Keynote presentation to the whole family at Thanksgiving last year. There aren't too many opportunities for my boy to shine academically but having access to technology at school has given him more of a chance.