Week 5, Thing 11: Web 2.0 Award List

I went to the short list link of the award winning Web 2.0 websites. I selected Twitter from the social bookmarking category. I have heard of twitter alot in the news and amongst friends. I really didn't know what it was until I actually went and reviewed the site. I am not the type of person that cares for posts about people walking somewhere, eating something, or doing something in particular. To me that is a waste of my time. Some people truly spend too much time on their computers. I would definetly not twitter. But on a positive note, it does help that their are people out their twittering and doing all the posting and leaving a long list of things that I could at one point read ( if time allows it ). I did a search on Michael Jackson and found great video links, pictures, etc. that I would not have taken time to find. Thank you Twitters! I tried to Travel IQ games and I was really bad. Geography is not my best subject. I wish I had tons of time to go through all the twitter accounts. I will surely visit and learn about more of them.

Week 4, Thing 9: Library/Educational Blogs/Newsfeeds

This was a very interesting activity but like always, I spend too much time surfing the websites. Oh, well. I first went to the award winning edublogs. The 2008 winner link allowed me to review the best blogs. There were different categories like the best individual blog, best group blog, most influential, etc. I loved to be able to see the best teacher blog, librarian blog, and tech support (which are the ones I can share with my staff). I will definately recommend this website. I also clicked on the link for library blogs and was not very impressed. It has not been updated and it is not very friendly looking. I tried all the websites recommended to find blogs/feeds. My favorite was Google Blog Search for blogs and Syndic8.com to find feeds. I did not like the conversation tracker, Blog Pulse. I really don't have time to check who is talking about who. Overall, I'm liking and understanding blogs/feeds alot more.

Week 5, Thing 10: Image Generator

Boy, am I having fun. The first website I tried was http://www.imagechef.com/ . I created my very own Hollywood star (above). Their is a great amount of things you can creat there. I love being able to share the images with my friends. I also tried the Comic Strip Generator. I usually do a lesson about graphic novels and find that having the kids creat their own comic strip would tie in the lesson greatly. I have found that these image generator websites are used quite often by our students especially to accessorize their myspace pages.

Week 4, Thing 8: RSS Feeds

I learned that RSS (Really Simple Syndication) helps busy people keep tabs to their favorite websites by reading the information needed.The RSS feeds sends you updated information from the website you registered so you don't deviate by reading other stuff. I think this is a great tool because I always spend more time reading information I wasn't looking for and deviate from my original purpose. I also created an aggregator reader account from Google Reader which makes RSS even cooler. What does this account do? Well, it lets me send all the RSS feeds subscriptions to one place for my convenient reading. I also subcribed to some of the Google Reader news, entertainment feeds. I can totally see that I can use RSS feeds with my job as a librarian in that I could subscribe to feeds to keeps myself well informed on new and inovating ways to improve my library services. The big plus for me is that websites have feeds for specific sections of their website allowing me not to deviate and read only what I need. This is one of the main reasons I trully believe that these Things we are doing are taking way more than the 18 hours we are getting credit for. I am personally taking way to much time to post due to all the deviations. Oh, well, thats life.