Web 2.0

Social Bookmarking

Delicious Rollyo

Photographs

Flickr
Big Huge Labs Home of fd's Flickr Toys
Microsoft Photo Story 3

Establish a Blog
Blogger TypePad WordPress

Search for Blogs

Technorati

Wikis

Wikispaces

Readers

Bloglines Google Reader

Personalized Search Engines

iGoggle My Yahoo!

Social Networking

Ning Twitter Facebook My Space

FriedBeef's Tech is an interesting site that posts technology related articles.

If you enjoy reading take a look at LibraryThing.

Selecting Search Engines

Selecting Search Engines

Experts suggest that you should have at least two search engines you are familiar with for your Internet searching. Select a topic you are knowledgeable about and perform a search using the search engines listed below. Be sure to look at many aspects of the search engine.

• Do you have access to:
• Images
  o Video
  o Maps
  o News
  o Other services
• Can you personalize the search page?
• Does the page seem cluttered to you?
• Can you see the history of search your searches?
• Are possible search terms suggested?
• Do you like and understand the Advanced Search options?
  Selecting Search Engines
  
  
  http://www.ask.com/
  
  
  http://www.altavista.com/
  
  
  http://www.bing.com/
  
  
  http://clusty.com/
  
  
  http://www.dogpile.com/
  
  
  http://www.excite.com/
  
  
  www.ixquick.com/
  
  
  http://www.google.com/
  
  
  http://www.hotbot.com/
  
  http://www.lycos.com/
  
  
  http://www.metacrawler.com/
  
  
  http://surfwax.com/
  
  
  http://www.webcrawler.com/
  
  
  http://www.yahoo.com/
  
  
  

Week 9 - Item 22 Audio Books and eBooks

WOW! It is amazing to look at and "turn the pages" of books that you would not even be able to be in the same room with let alone touch the pages. The Virtual Books in the British Library are outstanding. What a gift technology has given us.

The Fried Beef's Tech site has all sorts of interesting things. The listing of eBooks and Audio Books is great but the site is also filled with all sorts of other things. Later I am going back to an article Twitter 101: 7 Ways to Make Better Sense of Twitter to see if I can better understand and find uses for Twitter.

Knowing that many online resources do exist makes me rethink places I may suggest to students to look for certain types of research projects.

Week 9 - Item 21 Podcasts

Finally, something I know a little about. Just over a year ago I bought myself an iPod and was cool a librarian for about a week. Then I discovered podcasts and have spent more hours listing to podcasts on the iPod than listening to music. Several of the students decided that it took me a week to geekify the iPod by listening to political podcasts. I love it and it is a great way to stay up to speed on the many things happening in the world.

In looking through the suggested listings of podcasts I learned that I really LOVE iTunes! It is so much easier to use to search and locate interesting podcasts. Maybe it is just that I am used to using iTunes that it seems so much easier to locate information. I did add a feed to the Blog but it is not something that I would really be interested in listening to consistently.

Week 9 - Item 20 YouTube

It is amazing what is on YouTube! I had a student ask me to look at their band a year or two ago so I looked and the video was the typical thing you would see for a group of junior high garage band. It is so interesting the difference in quality of video. How true that some are very funny, educational, or entertaining while others are of questionable quality or taste.



I did a bit of looking around on Teacher Tube as well. It seemed a bit harder to find things and I am not really sure that I found anything that I would use with students yet but I will have to keep looking. The whole concept of video within the library for entertainment and instruction is great. It reminds me to keep searching because someone may already have what I need and I do not need to invent it again.

Week 8 - Item 19 LibraryThing

LibraryThing is an interesting site that lets you add titles you have read or are interested in reading. The feature of recommending titles is useful. Each time you return to the home page new recommendations will appear on the page.

Adding the listing of books to a library site is a good use for the site. The visual approach would appeal to teens. Students could even create the lists from books they have enjoyed reading. The site could also be used for students to track the books they read over the course of the school year. Being a visual learner myself it seems that this would be an interesting way for students to watch their reading list grow.

While working on blogging I went back and added books to the library listing. The books that were added are automatically added to the posting below. I like the functionality of the site and the potential uses.

Week 8 - Item 18 Productivity Tools

What a great idea to have access to various Productivity Tools on line. Right now our school is undergoing a huge hit from a virus. The computers are not reliable at the moment and flash drives should not be used so that you are not infecting your home computer. This makes the on line word processing, spread sheet, and slide show tools so valuable.

With computer problems at school, the end of the school year, and student projects needing to be finished I also see another use. Consistently I am hearing that students have computer problems with word processing, do not have Power Point or any other variety of reasons for not completing their project. The tools would be a way for a student to complete something if they had Internet access and even have access to the documents at school.

For some reason I think I like Google Docs a bit better than Zoho. I really can't give a good reason for that feeling but it is there. I am also amazed at how close the tools are to Microsoft buttons. Item 18 was an interesting exploration.