Interrupted by real life!

My 12 things have been interrupted by the Labor Day holiday and all the usual back to school rituals.  As soon as the dust settles, I will finish up with Google Docs, which is another new thing for me.  Although I’m excited about the new school year (hmm… I didn’t think I would be!), I miss my online life and All Together Now.  Anyone else in the same boat?

I’ll be back!

Thing #11 is my friend!

Yay!  Here’s a thing I feel I’ve mastered… well, pretty much.  I’ve been using del.icio.us for a few years now.  It is the only thing that has ever worked for me in terms of being able to find my way back to a website I considered useful.  Although I can never remember the name of the website, I can usually always think of what terms I would have used to tag it with.  If you ever have to do a workshop on Web 2.0 tools, this is a great one to include.  I’ve found that most people who are introduced to it feel the same way about it that I do, and it’s very easy for them to go right home, open an account, and start using it right away.  I think there’s less of a learning curve than for some of the other tools.  It’s a spinoff of bookmarks, and everyone understands bookmarks.

I’ve used del.icio.us with students, too.  For instance, I had five 7th grade classes working on a social studies project. They were all researching Revolutionary War artifacts and there were students in each class who had the same artifact.  I set up a del.icio.us account for the entire grade level to share.  When students found good resources, they tagged them with the name of their artifact (for instance “musket cartridge”) and their name.  That way they were able to share their resources with others who had the same artifact.  If they clicked on their name as a tag, they would get a list of all the resources they were using.  This helped big time with getting the sites cited properly in their bibliographies, too, since it was easy for them to find them again and show them to us if they needed help.  Here’s a quote from a student:

“Using delicious really helps me and I found out that I have been helping some others that have the same artifact as me. “

I’ve been surprised that the middle school kids I work with have never heard of del.icio.us (they who thought they knew everything…).  They do seem to appreciate it’s usefulness, though!

Social notworking

From WordSpy :

social notworking pp. Surfing a social networking site instead of working. Also: social not-working.
—social notworker n.

Strike a chord with anyone?

Playing Catch Up: YouTube

Thing #9 is another one that’s pretty new to me. Yes, I was aware of YouTube, but had not spent much time exploring it. I often receive emails from friends with links to clips they think I should watch– usually something funny, or something about animals– and I always enjoy them. An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube was shared with me through Google Reader. This gave me a much better perspective on the whole YouTube phenomenon. It’s almost an hour long and well-worth the time commitment– both entertaining and interesting.

I’ve been intrigued by the book trailers that librarians and students are making. There has been quite a bit of sharing about this on LM_Net this summer. A new way of booktalking, and a great technology project for kids to work on. So when I went to YouTube to explore for Thing #9, this is what I looked for. No surprise– there were plenty, and some very professional looking ones, too.

My favorite book this summer was The Art of Racing in the Rain (yes, I’m a sucker for dogs stories, and this was a good one). If you haven’t read it, see if this book trailer will inspire you to run to the library (where you’ll probably have to put your name on a long waiting list). Oh wait, I was supposed to learn how to embed the video. Here goes:

Back in July, Naomi Bates posted instructions for LM_Net members on her blog on how to make digital booktrailers. While the example above was done with video, the book trailers can also be constructed with a series of still images and text for a pretty powerful presentation.  If you check her other posts, you’ll find samples to view. I think this would be a fun alternative to book reports– I’d love it if my students would come up with some good ones I could post on the media center’s webpage!

Got friends… got a manual?

I recognize that I am a “by the book” kind of person (or maybe a “buy the book” kind of person… or both).  Now that I have been befriended on Facebook (Alice, are you loaning me friends?), looking at the profiles of others and seeing how they are using Facebook is helping me understand it a little better.  But there are still things I don’t get — what does it mean to “poke” someone and why would I want to do that?  What’s with people giving each other flowers… and how do you do that?  There’s a lot of mysterious things going on out there!

Despite my geekiness, I really don’t like reading online.  I know there are probably a million websites out there that will answer all my questions about Facebook and social networking in general.  But you know what?  I’d rather have a book.  Remember when software came with manuals?  I still like a book with an index so I can look up the things I want to know about.  Yeah, I know I can do this online.  I don’t want to.  I know these books are outdated as soon as they’re published.  I can live with that.  My friends know this about me.  “Do you by any chance have an iMovie book I can borrow?”  Of course I do!  Photoshop?  Yup!  Dreamweaver?  Uh-huh.  Even if I don’t use them, I feel better knowing they are sitting on my shelf… just in case.

So perhaps I will read a book about Facebook.  Or parts of a book.  Or maybe just get one to sit on my shelf.  I checked Amazon.  Of course there is a “Facebook for Dummies” book… and lots of others.  Maybe I’ll take a spin to Borders tomorrow and have a look.  Gee, I wish you could borrow stuff like this from the library– that would be even better!

Being Social… Time to face Facebook

Okay, so I’ll confess I’ve never even looked at Facebook until today.  I now have my own account.  I’m still not exactly sure what to do with it.  I have to invite some people to be my friends, otherwise when people click on the “view friends” link it will say “Shayne Russell has no friends,” and that’s just too sad!  Facebook suggested some friends for me (“these are people you may know”) based on my high school and college information and indeed, I spotted some people I haven’t even thought about in years.  Would they even remember me?

I sure would be interested in hearing how some of you are using your Facebook accounts.  I don’t really need yet another thing to distract me from the work I should be doing– how can Facebook be useful to me?  I did play around with applications a little– I added iRead and My Flickr… I’ll continue to explore.

I also revisited Netvibes today and added all the blogs from All Together Now with recent activity.  I really want to read what everyone else is thinking about and learning.  There were way too many to keep up with in the beginning, but those who are actively posting have decreased to a manageable number.  Interesting reading as everyone has different levels of experience with the “things” we are exploring.

The rain in Maine falls mainly on… well, me

I’m on vacation in Maine this week. Neither the weather or internet access is very good, so I’ll have some “things” to catch up on next week. On the bright side, I’m getting a lot of reading done. So far, I’ve finished:

• Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
• The Disappeared by Gloria Whelan
• Smiles to Go by Jerry Spinelli
• Found by Margaret Peterson Haddix
• Seer of Shadows by Avi

Next, I will start reading Bird Lake Moon by Kevin Henkes. Oh yeah, I have other things I should be working on, but all this reading has been wonderful!

Flickr Fun

Back when we were doing Thing #2: RSS, a friend had shared the iLibrarian post on 17+Things to Do with Your Online Photos. I thought the BeFunky cartoonizer looked like fun, but I didn’t try it. A week or so later, I was going to the wedding of two friends from my bike team. It was a casual outdoor wedding (the invitation said we could show up in shorts!) and for a gift, we got them bicycle jerseys that looked like a wedding dress and a tuxedo (yeah, tacky… but fun!). I volunteered to get the card, and of course the right card just did not exist (at least not in the Hallmark store). So I took one of my Flickr pictures of them from a bike ride and “cartoonized” them.

Cartoonized Lisa & Bob

Voila! I printed the card on my photo printer on nice card stock. On the front it said: “Life is a journey. Choose your traveling companions well.” (with a little tandem bicycle logo). The inside just said “Good Choice!” and Congratulations. At least we know they will not have received the same card from anyone else!

Will have to try some more toys now…

Let’s Share! Come Wiki with Me!

I went in to school today (insert “boo!” comment as heard in CommonCraft videos) and ran into my supervisor who asked me, yet again, about a topic for the Regional Librarian’s inservice in November. There is supposedly a focus group to decide these things, but in 6 years I’ve yet to see hide or hair of them. After 6 years, I’m starting to run out of ideas. But then… there are these 12 things…

I’m pretty sure someone else wrote in their blog about doing an inservice based on our All Together Now experience. The idea I pitched to my supervisor was for a workshop called “New Technologies for Programs, Promotion, and Productivity.” I would like to take maybe 3 or 4 of our 12 things and show examples of how they are being used (or could be used!) in a school library as part of a library program or class project, to promote library programs and services, or to help us be more organized and productive. For each thing, there would be time to brainstorm ideas and to get on a computer, create an account, and experiment (it’s a 5 hour inservice).

Is anyone else planning to do a workshop or inservice? What if we practice our wiki skills and plan together? Instead of having all our good ideas and examples scattered all over the net in individual blogs and comments, we could put them all in one place and use that resource for ideas when it’s inservice time. If you’d like to give it a whirl, I’ve created a wiki: http://12thingsinaction.pbwiki.com . (I think you will get a message saying you have to request to join before you can post– I’m not sure how to change that, or if I even should…). I’ve made a page for each of the 12 things (well, just the first 5 so far) so that we can keep things organized.

If it sounds like a good idea, come join me!

Virtual Library Tours

My library after unpacking in 2006

My library after unpacking in 2006
Originally uploaded by Ms. Russell

One of the Flickr ideas I discovered and liked was creating a virtual library tour. You can see an example here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/11329886@N00/sets/72157594291410121/ This is something I think I would like to do and link to my library’s webpage, but I think I will wait until school starts and get some kids to do it for me– they would probably enjoy working on it.

i’ve been using Flickr for awhile and I’m always learning new things that can be done with it. Another use I think is great is that you can convert a PowerPoint presentation to a Flickr set and share it online. I learned about this awhile back by reading about it on a blog I like, Alan Levine’s CogDogBlog. I tried it– it worked: http://www.flickr.com/photos/srussell/sets/72157602444681095/

Cool!