Lesson 23 Google Labs

One of my favorite tools in Google Labs is Page Creator, it's a simple WYSIWYG webpage creator. You get 100 mb of space for free. No paying someone to host your site, no complicated software to learn, no address to register. It's free and in 5 minutes anyone can have a site up, all you need is your Gmail login. My website created with Google Page creator. I've been using this for my personal webpage since it came out months ago. They've made some great improvements and I'm surprised it hasn't graduated from Labs.

Google Reader looks interesting, I'm definitely going to take some time to play with it, especially since Robin mentioned the tagging aspect of it. Of course it's so new that it wasn't even available when we were designing this program!

I'm also going to be investigating Notebook too.

Lesson 21 - Online applications

I've been using a number of the online applications from google for awhile now. I've used Docs at two training classes where a computer with internet access is available to take notes. Robin and I have collaborated on a number of documents. The collaboration aspect is great because you don't have to worry about everyone having the same software or version of the software, you can see the revisions made and who made them, and easily revert to an earlier version if need be. Plus you can save your document as a PDF.

Lesson 19. Explore search engines

Mooter was the most interesting search engine. I like how the clusters display basically helping you narrow down your search. I think it would take some getting used to. I think my favorite new to me one would be Kartoo. I really like the visual mapping of the sites and keywords. I'm definitely going to spend some times playing with it. One thing I noticed on all the search engines I looked at is they have "sponsored" or paid links show up. While I'm all for businesses being allowed to advertise I think most people don't realize that "sponsored" means advertisement.

Lesson 20 - Library 2.0

Ask me what Learning2.0 is and I can tell you. At least you better hope I can since I helped design this whole program based on it. But ask me what Library2.0 is and I'm not sure I can be as concise. I have an definition, I have a lot of definitions, that's the problem. There are so many definitions of Library2.0 out there it's hard to decide which one(s) are correct or which one(s) I buy into I guess. I get the idea of it. I think. I found this paper to be very helpful and interesting read. Of course at 30 pages, its not concise, you're not going to get a definition in a nutshell, but you might get some new insight.

State visited - week 7

get your own map

comment management

I noticed some of our participants are having problems with spam comments on their blogs. You can help prevent this by turning "word verification"

1. Sign into your blog



2. Go to your "dashboard"



3. click on the "settings" tab



4. click on "comments"



5. scroll down



6. where it says "show word verification for comments" select "yes"



7. scroll to the bottom of the page and save settings

While you're on that page you can also enter an email address so that you'll recieve an email when someone leaves a comment on your blog. Be sure to save settings when done

image generators - wk 7

Make your own

RSS - wk 6

I have been using Bloglines for awhile now. I have to say that using feed reader saves a lot of time. Rather than book marking all the sites I like to look at and visiting them everyday to see if there is something new I can just go to one place – Bloglines. I have 192 feeds in my Bloglines account. I also take advantage of the folders options and have folders for library, knitting, friends and for the participants in this tutorial! It makes it so easy to see when anyone posts something new and helps me respond in a timely manner. I really don’t know what I would do without it! It’s a great tool for library staff to follow the great library blogs out there!

week 5 flickr mashups

I made the trading card for my mash-up. Fun and so easy to do!

Wk 5 Flickr

I’ve been using flickr for my personal photos for about 6 months. I even upgraded to a pro account. Pictures hosted on flickr work great with my blog and I really like how easy it is to share them with family and friends, and they can even leave comments if they have a flickr account! I tag all of my pictures with the month and year they were taken plus with the subject. It’s so handy if I’m looking for a picture of my dogs, all I have to do is click on the tag for their name and all of their pictures are right there.