Thing 14-Library Thing

This is a site I could spend a lot of time exploring. It is going on my list to "continue to explore" and think about how it can be used during the school year. It seems that I am always trying to find ways to share information and this may come in very handy.

I have also been trying to come up with ways to have kids recommend books to other kids in my middle school library. This has a lot of potential for this idea. I think they would LOVE it! It's almost a myspace/facebook type site for the readers!

It shows potential for the "what do I read next" question that I am asked a lot.

I also think it will assist me in some cataloging as there are always book that I acquire in random ways and then need to catalog from scratch.

Thing 13-Online Productivity Tools

Zamzar-This is great---if it works. It seems like every year there are more and more issues with converting files in our middle school library. This one will be given a workout this year!

Calendars and reminders--There are lots of them. I don't see a use for them as I use a Palm Phone that I sync with my home and school computer and we have a calendar feature in our school email that others can add to.

PDF converters-looks good for those who don't use Macs! (We have it built in!)

Thing 12-Do you Digg?

OK-I've been looking at this one for a few days and I can't get motivated to look at it in depth. I get it enough that I would have a clue what someone was talking about if they mentioned Digg, Reddit, or Newsvine to me. However, I don't see much of a use for it compared to some of the other things right now, so I'm going to move on and hope to come back to this.

Thing 11 Tagging and Del.icio.us

I have seen tagging and del.icio.us show up in several places recently. Great River regions library now has tagging within the entries for their items and St. Cloud Times lets you mark things to del-icio.us.

I like the way that deli.ciou.us can be integrated into the browser. I'm not sure how/if I would use these right now, but they are useful to have a bit of knowledge about to use if needed in the future.

Thing 10 Wikis

This was a useful "thing" for me. I now have some practical uses for a wiki. I hadn't really taken the time to think of ways a wiki could be used in positive ways.

I spend so much time this year working with my middle school students to be sure they knew what a wiki was and why they should note be using it as the primary resource for their research projects! This will continue to be a concern as there is no way to "prove" that the wiki is published and known to be accurate and factual.

I edited the 23 Things Wiki.

I'm not sure I can find a way to use this within my library right now-primarily due to the fact that it appears difficult to trace the entries to their owners.

Thing 9-Collaboration Tools

I spent some time working with Google Docs. What a great tool!

3 uses that I had for it just this week-
1. I was working on an online course and we had to put together a document. Google docs made this much easier than emailing the same Word document back and forth among 3 of us and trying to keep track of which was the most recent document.
2. A friend was complaining about not having Word on her home computer and having to stop at work over the summer to get emailed Word Documents opened and printed. Google Docs does that!
3. We now have multiple computers in our home and trying to work on a simple document and not knowing which computer would be available for me.

I'm sure there are more uses...but what a great tool when immediately I have 3 uses!

Thing 9-Collaboration Tools

Yes, I'm out of order--I'll come back to #8 later!

These are new for me!
I have had the struggles of working with others on documents where we don't all have the same software, so I was very interested in these.

Google Docs is a great collaborative feature....plus it has a few other features that I liked.

In the writing tools it not only word counts, but also gives a readability level!

It also allows you to save as a .pdf file!