Thing #23

I'm finally finished :) This has been a very interesting learning experience for me and I feel like i have learned a great deal from this. I'm not sure if i have a favorite exercise. I really enjoyed Flickr, Dumpr, and GoodReads. Some of the exercises were tough to get through but i am glad i finished each one. I just realized that i had not added a post for #2. I went back again and watched the tutorial for 7 1/2 things. I consider my self a lifelong learner. From when i first learned to read and how excited i was, to now all these years later learning about the new technology. A lot of the new technology is a challenge to me but i'm always willing to give it a try, and am always open to new ideas and skills. I feel like it is never to soon or to late to learn. Thank You! FRL, The Staff Development Team, and Sarah for all the work and time that you put in to the 23 Things and for giving me the opportunity to experience this.

#22 NetLibrary

I went to NetLibrary and first noticed that Fontana Regional system is already a subscriber!
I went to the mystery category and found several mysteries that would be interesting to listen to. I did see that you must be a subscriber with an account and password to download a book. You cannot listen on Ipods or Zune . Another concern might be the time it takes to download books, and how much time a patron is allowed on the computer if they were to listen to a whole book. What is good about it is that it is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

#21 Podcasts

I went to Podcast.com and Podcastpickle.com. I found Podcast.com to be easier to navigate. Podcast Pickle had more links to get to what I wanted, and I couldn't figure out how to add the RSS feed. On Podcast.com, I went to Books, Authors on Tour Live and listened to David Sedaris. I added Authors on Tour- live to my google reader page. On Podcastpickle.com I went to a cooking segment called Good Foods since that is of interest to me.

#20 Youtube and video sharing

Youtube is a lot of fun! There are so many different videos to view here. I spent a long time on this one and watched a lot of different videos and then started checking out the new movies that will be coming out in 2009. I chose Ice Age 3-Dawn of the dinosaurs, which will be coming to theatres July 4th 2009. I plan on going to watch that one. This execise was a lot of fun for me but I can't see how it could be used in a library setting.

#19 Your Choice

I went to "I'm cooked" and linked to English Muffin pizza's which turned out to be a cooking segment by "coupla fat guys". It was really silly, but entertaining!. There were all kinds of recipes and clips from cooking shows from fancy to what I clicked on which was not so fancy.

I think some of the patrons would enjoy this. The website itself was very fast!

#18 Online Productivity

I went to Google Doc and started a template for a Scrapbook of Nantahala Memories and inserted some photos. This was neat! Any of these documents would be useful to all types of patrons and projects. Students could use them for school presentations and other patrons could do scrapbooks, photo albums etc that look very professional!

#17 Your turn with the Wiki

This one was a little confusing. It seemed like alot of steps and you needed to be a little more knowledgeable about computers to do this. If I didn't have the steps listed on the things to do, I would not have been able to do it. Once it was done, it was fun to see that you can link right to my blog!

#16 Wikis

This was an area that I was not very familiar with but was interesting because based on the slide show I viewed about them, I found that many of the Wiki's are used for travel sites. For instance, someone could do a wiki on Nantahala, then anyone can add to it- you could set up places to visit, history of Nantahala and things to do. That's the beauty of the wiki! It would be of good use for Libraries to share local history from people in the community. The only concern (fault) I can see is that since anyone can post, it could be used for advertising, or to post false information since it is not verified by anyone.

#15 Library 2.0

Library 2.0 is just a way of saying that Libraries in the future will be more technology based. I see it more and more every day when High School Patrons come in and link up quickly with social groups. It will be more cost effective for Libraries in the future to be able to link to many reference books online, rather than purchase them in print. For example, Consumer Reports annual book, Physicians desk reference, etc are expensive, yet out of date in one year. These would more cost effective just to have links posted at the libraries for patrons to access.

The downside is that alot of the older generation is not as computer literate and do not want to access things like this on line just yet. They still want pick up a book, so Library 2.0 will have to be a gradual process as it already is.

#14 Google Books

I liked this website. It was easy to use, and had great links to buy the book if someone wanted to. It would be a good use for someone at home to preview a book- many people like to read the first couple of pages to see if they like a book, then they could come to the library and check out the book! I don't think that the copyright is too much of an issue as most people wouldn't want to print 300+ pages or sit online and read the whole thing. I didn't see anything that I didn't really like.

#13 Del.icio.us

I looked at this and found some interesting tags. However, I did find that most of them are pretty generic, such as "Baseball" or "Sports" or "Iraq" or "interesting". I clicked on "interesting and clicked on the article which sent me to a "Digg" post. So it pulled some of the previous exercises that we have worked on together! It might be too generic and big for people to use to research in the library, but if someone was looking for interesting tidbits for research, they could use this technique.

#11 Digg

I looked at Digg and found an article about the "Five Ways Technology had changed the Olympics". the first "way" was about how the Chinese have Supercomputers and weather control. They have great ways of not only predicting the weather forecast, but actually have anti-aircraft guns that shoot material into clouds and absorb the rain! I can't believe that Americans have not used this technology to control some of the Midwest flooding. The Chinese can control the rain so the Olympics will go smoothly, but we have people that are now homeless because of the overabundance of rain!

Link to this article is http://io9.com/5026558/five-ways-technology-has-changed-the -Olympics

Thing #12

My favorite exercise so far is #7 -exploring flickr because i really enjoyed looking at all of the beautiful pictures of different things. I have been reading other participants blogs and found them very interesting. I left a comment on someone elses blog. If i finish with the 23 things before the deadline,the prize I would like is a mp3 player.

#10 Good Reads

I set up a Good Reads account and added five of my favorite books,tagged them,and took a look at other peoples reviews. I found a new series by Nora Roberts (or at least it is new to me). Blue Dahlia (In the Garden trilogy). Here is the link : http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1144638

#9 Dumpr

I think this exercise was the most fun of all so far and looked at all the ways to create photos. The rubiks Cube was really neat along with a lot of others but i chose the jigsaw puzzle. I added a jigsaw puzzle picture of the fall colors at Nantahala lake.

#8 Mashups

Mashups are interesting to look at and try to figure out. I looked at the listing of mashups on the Mashup Directory. There are a lot of examples to choose from. Music, shopping, and food were my favorites. From looking at Retrievr, Delivr, and earthquake, Delivr was the one i liked the most because i'm always sending free e-cards and greeting cards so this one is the most interesting to me.

#7 Flickr

I really enjoyed exploring Flickr. It was so much fun looking at all of the beautiful pictures. The pictures of lakes, waterfalls, and rainbows are beautiful, but i think the pictures of the different kinds of flowers were my favorite. I added a picture of Pretty Purple Flowers and the link to it. Interestingness was also fun. I looked up different dates on the calendar to see what happened on that day. Through Flickr I explored many different tags. I enjoyed looking at all of them, and how groups work seems like it would be a lot of fun to make new friends with the same interests.

# 6: Finding More Feeds

As far as I can tell using a RSS Feed would simply make websites that you go to often easier to find. If you have time to add a lot of RSS Feeds that you are interested in, you could then just quickly click on them. I liked the Google Reader because it seemed like it would be easy to find RSS Feeds. As for how they would be helpful to libraries, just as I said before, the quickness of being able to find a site would be the advantage here. I haven't had time to look at a lot of them so I'm not sure which ones are weird or which one I would choose as a favorite. This is something that I would like to experiment with more as I have more time!

RSS Feeds

Well!! I made a Google Reader page and added some news sites to it. I am not too sure how this works but will figure it all out soon. I hope! I don't think the RSS feed thing is very easy to use. I wasn't sure how to add sites to it and it took a little while to figure out how to make everything shared. I am still working on how to add feeds to my blog site. I think it will be interesting to know how to do this and I hope I get really good at it!

my first blog

Ok this wasn't as easy as I thought. I had to create this two times because I never got my email verification for the first one. I think it is going to be fun to fiddle around with the different formatting. I can't wait to start putting pictures in here. I think that the way 'blogger' is set up will make it easier to figure all this out. I think that the only thing I will have problems with is finding one hundred twenty five :) words to say! all in all I think this will be very exciting and I am glad to learn these new things. I am going to play with the fonts and stuff here :)