#10 (Week 5) Play Time

I love to Play!





What fun this is - I could spend hours upon hours playing with all the toys.

#9 (Week 4) Locate library related blogs and/or news feeds

I found Technorati to be the most user friendly of the suggested search tools. I liked the fact that they had separated Posts, Blogs, Videos and Photos. It seems easy to use, clean to read and complete in its search. Topix had an interesting feature with the timeline or what they call an “Interactive graph of “______” in the news”. Feedster seems to be down right now, so I was unable to view this site. From a search in Google it seems that this is a BETA version and is down “Version 2.1 BETA. Feedster is Changing... We'll be back up soon with exciting news!” Overall this was an interesting activity, but not something I got a great deal out of.

Bill Clinton's GIVING

#8 (Week 4) RSS & Newsreaders

Currently I use SharpReader as my aggregate reader and I am very happy with the program. I did sign up for Bloglines to try it out, but I think I will stay with SharpReader. I currently have 17 feeds and find it hard to keep up. Through this course and other webventures I have added several feeds including:

• A Wandering Eyre


• LITA Blog


• librarian.net


• eSchoolNews


• Kathy Schrock's Kaffeeklatsch


• theFischBowl


• techlearning

The truth is I find it very difficult to stay up with all of these feeds and find that the clock often reads past midnight when I get sucked into the cyber hole created by the many great links and pieces of information.

#7 (WEEK 3) Technology

Last December (for my birthday) I got a new digital camera, the Nikon D200. I love the camera but have not yet learned even half of what it is capabilities. I love taking pictures and wanted a way to produce my pictures on DVD for others to see. My brother-in-law suggested a program called ProShow by Photodex. He has created some amazing DVDs of his family. What I love about this program is Photodex allows you to download the FULL version for 15 days

• ProShow Producer for professionals



• ProShow Gold for enthusiasts



• ProShow Standard for beginners
  
  

Another plus - You can't beat the price. The Gold version is only $70.00 and is well worth every cent.

This was not suppose to be an advertisement, I just wanted to share another way I use my digital photography.

More on Life-Long Learning

In an article entitled Teaching Life-Long Skills from Techlearning.com (July 6, 2007) Jacob Nielson, an expert on the usability of the Internet, suggests that students need Life-Long Computer Skills:

• Ability to evaluate online information
  
• Techniques for dealing with information overload


• Ability to write hyper-linked online text
  
• Ability to create presentations (and avoid bad habits!)


• Abiility to understand workplace ergonomics


• Ability to debug, the logical process of tracking down errors


• Usability basics, for making informed decisions on a product's ease of use

#3 and #4 (Week 2) Blogging - Getting Set-up

Setting up this blog was as easy as 1 - 2 - 3. However, I found a way to make this task a little more difficult as I could not decide whether to use Blogspot.com or Edublog.org (I created my 1st blog about a month ago during a workshop hosted by the Orange County Department of Education posted on edublog). So of course the overachiever that I am I created a blog in both places to see how each worked. I also wanted to know which site would work best through our firewalls (we have a wonderful firewall both at the district and county that block just about everything). The difficultly came with keeping track of the site names, passwords, and log-in areas for administrative needs. After reviewing the two sites I decided to stick with Blogspot.com as it was the recommendation of the School Library Learning 2.0 program.