Twitter

I'm resurrecting my Twitter account for my INST 5030 class. In my life right now, I don't need Twitter because of Facebook and all that, but I think it could be very helpful in my future career as a librarian. I wouldn't want my students to have access to the personal information on my Facebook account, so Twitter would help me avoid that situation. By using Twitter, I could easily give them quick updates about the library and share library-related information with them.

RSS and Bloglines

So I never knew what RSS meant until now... I've always wondered, but I never took the time to learn. I know; shame on me. I'm glad that this class forces me to learn things like this that I should already know. RSS means Really Simple Syndication, and it helps you follow web pages by subscribing to them. A lot of pages are constantly updating, so it really helps you stay on top of those updates. There are a lot of online services that help you manage these subscriptions. The one that I used is Bloglines. Bloglines can also help you search for blogs and other websites that you might want to subscribe to. I definitely used it for that, and I found some fun, new websites. I also used some Top 100 lists to find blogs, and I liked this method best. Since they have so many followers, it stands to reason that they are good sources of information. It was also very handy to use the blog rolls of these blogs in order to find related blogs.

I found two excellent blogs that I want to follow. They are Cool Cat Teacher Blog and A Striped Armchair. Cool Cat Teacher Blog focuses mainly on how to implement technology in teaching. This is something that I kind of shy away from, so it'd be nice to have a blog that gives me fresh ideas on how to do this. A Striped Armchair gives reading challenges and book reviews. I'm always interested in hearing other people's opinions, and it will also introduce me to new books. The reading challenges will also help give me ideas for my future students' reading.

Del.icio.us/Technorati/Library 2.0

Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website. As far as personal use is concerned, I prefer to just use my Google bookmarks, but I think that del.icio.us could be really helpful in a library. I could bookmark websites that I think would be helpful to my students, and they could access them easily there. It's also something that I could teach them for their own use. They could easily create a network for group projects, and then bookmark websites that they need to use. All of that information would be available to the whole group that way on any computer.

Technorati is a website that searches through blogs. You can choose to search through blogs or blog postings, and each one gives you different results. I think this website is awesome. There is so much information out there in the form of blogs, and this website helps us to find blogs with the information that we need. It also has a list of influential blogs, which we may not know about. Most of the blogs seem to be about entertainment, technology, politics, and business. There is definitely room for expansion with blogs about science and autos.

Library 2.0 is a modern form of library service. It is increasingly user-centered and uses technology much more. I think that it is a great idea because the world is changing and we need to be willing to change along with it. If we aren't willing to adapt to our users, we will become irrelevant. There are great things happening with technology, and we can better our services by using technology more.

Library Thing

Library Thing lets you catalog the books that you are reading and write reviews. You can also see what other people are reading and read their reviews as well. It's a nice way to collaborate, and I think it could be really helpful for book clubs. Librarians could also use it by making a page of books they recommend. It'd be really helpful for their students to just go online and read their librarian's book reviews. You can also add your Library Thing books to your blog like I've done. (Scroll down)

In other news, I recently read Crispin: The Cross of Lead for my children's literature class. It's by Avi, and it was pretty good. It's historical fiction, and it's set in medieval times. There's a really intriguing character named Bear that's this jester/priest/troubadour/guru/juggler/spy/revolutionist guy. He's cool. It's not a must-read, but if anything, just keep it in mind for your future children.

Go to this cool website to make pictures look old like this. You can find a bunch of other image generators at this website.


You all need to read Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It is one of the funniest books I have ever read. You guys could devour it in like an hour, at most.



Here's an example of what it looks like:



Hee!

Wiki

I've always considered myself to be fairly internet savvy, but oh man there are a lot of things out on the web that I've never tried or heard about. Now we've all heard of wikipedia, but I had no idea that you could have your own wiki! Wikis (apostrophe?) are pretty dang cool. It makes collaborating really easy. I've mostly used facebook groups for that, but not everyone is going to have a facebook account. It would be really useful for school projects and the like. There are of course possible issues with wikis. People could put false information or delete all of the information there, so you just have to be cautious about the people you choose to give access to the wiki. Anyways, check this out if you want to create a wiki.

P.S. I just finished re-reading A Wrinkle in Time, and I forgot how much I love that book. It has great characters (though Meg can get a bit annoying) and wonderful messages and symbolism. Also, I love Calvin! I now have one more reason to name one of my future kids Calvin. (The other reason is Calvin & Hobbes.) So the moral to this story is read A Wrinkle in Time! You can do it; it's super short.

And if you don't IT will get you...

Try this out!

Motivator: Create your own motivational posters!