Book Fair at DHS

Check out the book fair going on this week.

Thing 7: Communications

E-mail, no problem, long time user, love it. In fact, I probably have more e-mail accounts than I need, but what I love about gmail is the ability to pull all of my e-mail accounts into the one, so I read everything in one place (with the exception of my work e-mail). Instant messaging I do not use very often, probably because I prefer e-mail. I have used it at home if I am on one level of the house and the kids are on another level, both of us are online and I want to tell them to do something more active. They tend to respond more quickly to an IM than to me hollering up the stairs... go figure. Used ichat occasionally when I was at a Mac laptop school, but still preferred e-mail. . SMS I use mostly to communicate with my children. I still would prefer to pick up the phone and talk to them--its faster. But if I don't want an argument I send a text. Meebo is blocked by our web filter. Twitter I am still trying to figure out WHY TWITTER? Another way to waste time either reading a twitter or responding to twitters..

More Things on a Stick

I am going to try to finish the 23 things of the first round while simultaneously working on the 23 things in this More things round. I have been having lots of fun using image generators and learned of this new photo editing site called picnik. I told my 14 year old daughter about it and she is in love with it. She is having a great time editing picture to post to her Facebook page.

Thing 6: Online image generator

What a great way to make photos fancy. Lots of fun to be had here. I can see kids getting really creative with their photos using these tools. Big Huge Labs is full of tools, and Image Chef allows for lots of creativity.

Thing 5: More Flickr

I made a group for my family to share photos. Discovered a cool mash-up on world disasters courtesy of wikipedia and passed that along to a few teachers. Neat stuff. Still trying to get a handle on mashups... Some of the links are dead in the 23 things blog (like the 10 best flickr mashups) but thats ok, since I may not have time to explore those anyway. They can all be found from the Flickr site anyway--just don't know what the 10 best are.

Flickr

Playing with Flickr today. I started an account last summer (2007) after I returned from Poland and intended to upload all the pictures from that trip to Flickr to share with the campers at Ocwieka. Internet speed at home prevented me from attacking that work. We have faster internet now, so I might get going. I did upload a few from this past summer's trip to Poland. Today I created a group for the family to upload pictures. Will see how it works...

Thing 2:Library 2.0

Today is a great day weather-wise to spend some time on the 23 Things. With Library 2.0, there certainly are a lot of things to think about here. Of primary importance: how do I utilize web 2.0 tools to reach my high school students and educate my teaching colleagues? I have a lot of work and exploration ahead of me on this one. I am excited about a couple of things Abram mentioned; Western Trails, GoogleReader (which I am currently working on) and Meebo. The other two articles were just more food for thought on how to begin incorporating Web 2.0 tools into librarianship.
I spent some time today setting up my GoodReads account (monimoni) and entering a few of the many books sitting on my book shelf: you can't believe how many I entered as "to read". I happen to have a scanner here that I use for doing hockey registration and it worked really well for reading ISBN numbers. Slick! I entered 46 book, 45 of which I have not read (some I have started, and lost track of where I was, others Ihaven't even cracked. I am a bit of a collector, but find little time to read. Might even have less as I embark on this 23 things thing. I then spent some time setting up googlereader in my igoogle account, and looking for some rss feeds of interest. Have Library Technology Trends and School Library Journal feeding in from our Gale database, yea!