Things Twenty-Three!!!!

Yay! I'm relieved to have gotten to the finish line before I retire next week! It has been a very interesting and fun experience to get to sample so many Internet tools. I would say that my favorite learning tools were Library Things, the image generators, and especially the on-line word processing tools. I also enjoyed exploring some sites that I already felt somewhat familiar with such as youtube and OverDive and NetLibrary.
I can see that there is always more to learn. I felt like I just barely skimmed the surface of most the sites I looked at. It's great to have more of a comfort level with knowing what these tools. I look forward to having the opportunity to going back to look deeper into the ones that interested me. Also I'm in the interesting position of being about to retire, so I feel a little afraid of how far out of the loop I may get. It's great that I can find the links to this training on the internet so I can play around more on my own. I hope that there will be some options for retirees like myself to continue with our lifelong learning.
To improve: check links to make sure they still work. Thanks for a great journey!

Thing Twenty-Two

I enjoyed taking a closer look at Overdrive and NetLibrary. It was helpful to go onto our own website and get a better idea of what the pros and cons are for each of these sources for audiobooks. I feel that I am more comfortable in explaining the features to customers for each. I do think that NetLibrary was easier to navigate and seems to have many other advantages, such a longer loan periods, ability to check out more items at a time, easier availability of titles, ability to renew. I especially was interested in how many choices are now availabe for ipods. It seems to me that Overdrive might have more ipod-loadable titles than Netlibary.
I can see some choices that I am definitely interested in downloading. I imagine that when I choose to download some audiobooks to my computer or ipod, I will probably choose NetLibrary first. I like the range of children's books that are available, as well as many adult titles that interest me such as popular fiction and Pimsleur language courses that can be found on NetLibrary.
Very worthwhile dip into the land of audiobooks.

Thing Twenty-One

Podcasts. Surprisingly to me, I didn't have much success with this one. I only found one of the three links to still be active - podcastally.com. Honestly, I didn't really find much that interested me in the choices. I looked at several categories of genres: Arts, Food and Drink, Family and Kids, Society and Culture and Travel. When I tried to click on a podcast that I was interested in, I didn't really understand how to get it to play. It seemed like I had to subscribe to it, which I really didn't feel like doing...
I didn't have any more luck when I tried to follow the link for MERLIN. This Things left still pretty much in the dark! Sorry!

Thing Twenty

Another fun THING! Youtube is pretty amazing. I use it often. I have watched important events, speeches, videos that my friends post of children and grandchildren, and even instructions for things I need to know. My favorite Youtube moment was when I spent the night in the hospital with my daughter and her two day old son! We watched Youtube when we needed instructions on how to swaddle the baby and didn't want to admit to the nurse that we were still struggling with it!
Tonight I had fun looking at old clips of some of my favorite entertainers like Jonathan Winters and Danny Kaye.
I'm posting a link to this clip
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm6ktYq0Yxk
from the movie "The Five Pennies" where Danny Kaye and Louis Armstrong sing a fantastic rendition of "When the Saints Go Marching In." One of my all-time favorite films, and this is one of the highlights! I even learned the names of many composers with this song, when I first heard it as a kid.
I'm glad to introduce it to anyone who might read my blog!
I didn't enjoy the other video sites as much as Youtube.
The uses for Youtube in the library are almost limitless - as an instructional tool,advertising and also as a record of programming, which can be a learning tool in itself.

Thing Nineteen

This was a really fun lesson too - to look over and explore one of the nominees for 2.0 Tool Awards. I took a look at Twitter, joined and chose a few sites (not sure of Twitter terminilogy) such as NYTimes Books, Neil Gaimon, Rachel Maddow, Sesame Street and Bill Cosby. I see that I already have several tweets to look at. I honestly don't know that I'll keep up with Twitter. I am not that curious about any of the tweets that I see so far. It seems like Twitter could be fun, but also something you could end up (dare I say) wasting a lot of time. Still I've been very curious to take a look at Twitter, since it's something you hear mentioned so often.
So now I've had my taste -- and who knows, maybe I'll be back!
I also took this opportunity to do part of a sample lession in French in Mango. It's fun! I imagine I might want to brush up on my French and Spanish knowledge through MCPL's Mango subscription, once I retire.
As for library applications, of course, we already are involved with both of these sites!

Thing Eighteen

This has been my favorite Thing!!How great to discover these tools available online. I had just been thinking that I might want to buy a Microsoft Office software, but now I can just scratch that off my list! I LOVED exploring Zoho. I was able to use Zoho Writer to create a To Do List of all the things I need to wrap at work before I retire in two weeks! Ack!! I also created a Planner of all kind of upcoming events through the end of June. In doing so, I managed to discover that I have a conflict on a day that I scheduled a doctor's appointment. Whoops! I'll have to take care of that on Monday. Good I could copy the entire planner list to my email so easily, as a reminder to myself!
At any rate I found Zoho Writer and Planner very easy to use and look forward to using some of the other features, such as Zoho Show, which I'm thinking might be like Power Point. What a gem!
I'm sure that the comparable Google Docs is also great and am loking forward to trying it out as well. Thanks for including these tools in the training! It's great!

Thing Seventeen

I'm afraid I didn't have much luck playing in the Sandbox! The links for all of the Discovery resources seemed broken and when I tried to log in to the Maryland Libraries Sandbox, I really didn't get too far. I tried to create an account, but seemed to get go around in circles and was not able to get anywhere. Sorry! On to Thing Eighteen!