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!

Thing Sixteen

I guess the first thing I need to confess is that even though I frequently come upon and read entries in wikipedia I hadn't really put two and two together to realize that it was a wiki. Obviously I knew more about wikis than I thought.
I especially enjoyed the article on using wikis in communities, with specific ideas on how libraries benefit from creating wikis. It was fun to see the examples of wikis discussing books, a variety of subject headings and the ALA New Orelans wiki with all kinds of information on the conference and tourist information on New Orleans. I did notice that the information in the first two wikis mentioned above were very sketchy and kind of unpredictable. I guess that's another fault of wikis in addition to the fact that lots of erroneous maatrial can creep in.
I am excited about the prospect of MCPL staring a children's programming wiki. It will be great to share all of our great ideas, and will be very helpful in the coming hear with the challenges that face us. From what I understand though, there will be some oversight as to what gets posted rather than having a free for all wiki.
It might even be a good idea to have a wiki next year to deal with all of the changes and hardships the library will be facing. Honestly one downside - just finding time to participate and read!

Thing Fifteen

I read several of the articles recommended for this assignment, including "Away from the Icebergs," Into a New World of Librarianship" and "To more Powerful Ways to Cooperate." Basically I can see that the library is already turning to more of the Web 2.0 tools than I had really been aware of. I can see the value of them, in providing information to customers without having to rely on print material, the physical library building as much, and ways to locate materials and have a richer catalog with OCLC and WorldCat and more ability to share with each other. All of this shared knowledge and use of technology is so exciting and yet can be confusing and almost overwhelming. I love the idea of getting information at your fingertips, from home or anywhere. Also while it's wonderful to have all of this information from wherever, I hope that our library boat stays afloat and that people realized the we need to be well funded. Libraries provide free access to everyone, whether from at the library or on the web. Also we need to be aware of all of our customers, both with and without technical abilities and access to the technology.
As for me, I love learning the new things,but even after each exercise I feel grateful to being exposed to these new tools, yet feel I have barely touched the surface. I hope I can keep up to some degree even after I've retired.

Thing Fourteen

This time the goal was to learn something about technorati. I have to admit that I had some trouble getting into this one. I tried the exercise on searching for "Learning 2.0" in various ways, and am not sure I really understood if I was doing it right. I did find more when I tried to search blogs.
It was interesting to see which blogs were on the rise and which were falling. Interesting to see that the Twitter blog was falling! I was interested to read one blog claiming that the media hasn't given the Nashville floods as much press as they should have. I thought it was just that I hadn't followed it well as I would have liked, since I have a cousin in Nashville and was worried about how she was doing.
Otherwise, I wasn't surprised to see that events in the news were also the top blogs.
One other thing - I added labels for all of my posts. Not sure what that does. I didn't actively add my blog to technorati. Didn't want to be out there in cyperspace any more than I already am.

Thing Thirteen

This time I enjoyed the tagging assignment and spent the most time on del.iou.us, playing around with various tags. I now understand why the list of booklists that I use on the our own Kidsite looks the way it does! I had felt a little uncomfortable the first time I saw the new format of our lists, with the long blue titles! NOW I understand that they look the way they do because they are available (not sure of the correct terminology) through del.iou.us! Very interesting!
I played around with several other topics of interest to me, such as early literacy and storytimes, and bookmarked a few good sites for my own computer :-) Also enjoyed finging folkstreams again when I looked for folk music. I think it was the most tagged site under folk music. Also I managed to look up Silver Spring Maryland and get onto the Silver Spring Center site, which lists lots of great upcoming concerts, event in SS, including library programs! I see a few festivals coming up on Ellsworth street that I would love to drop in on.
All in all, a fun venture! and now I finally know what del.iou.us is!
Only glitch - the 12 minute intro video seemed to be unreachable, so I'm sure I missed some of the finer points, like how to see what other people actually said about their tags. Oh well, it's neverending once you get onto something, so I'm sure I learned enough for one day!

Thing Twelve

This assignment was to create create my own Search Tool using Rollyo. I enjoyed putting together a list of links under the title "forbabiesindc". I wanted to have an easy access point for links that would be helpful for parents and grandparents (like me) caregivers and professionals to have a grouping of links involving young children. So far I have added sites that concentrate on early child development, early literacy, some nutrition and health, music, as well as sites specific to the DC area with places to go and do with young children. I'm already thinking of more than can be added. Should be alot of fun and very useful!

Thing Eleven

This assignment was to take a look at Library Thing and to add five books to my library. I picked five of the most recent books that I have read - two where children's books, Just Grace, an easy humorous fiction title and 100 Cupboards, a fantasy. I also chose one YA title, Life as We Knew It, a futuristic hopefully scienc fiction story of one family's survival after the moon is hit by a meteorite. I also talked about two adult books, Oliver Kitteridge, last year's Pulitzer Prize winner, and About Alice, a memoir written by Calvin Trillen, a tribute to his late wife's memory.
I found the process alot of fun, if somewhat time consuming, even though I didn't go into as much depth as I could have. I am interested to go back to this site to see how my 'reviews' compare to others, and to get ideas for other books I might want to read.
A lot of fun!