Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Thing #? Social Bookmarking and del.icio.us

I've been studying up on del.icio.us during my high school media practicum and have found del.icio.us to be very interesting. I'm still working on getting connected to other's networks and my tags definitely need some cleaning up. I've created a powerpoint presentation that helps explain social bookmarking and I'll try to add that to this post soon.

In the meanwhile, watch this UTube Video--Social Bookmarking in Plain English. The creators--Common Craft do-- a great job of explaining things!

Thing #7 Web 2.0 Communication Tools

I have never really got into IMing, so this was a good experience for me. Since I'm not yet in my own library, I tried it at home. Me and my husband both have a gmail account which has a chat program called google chat in its interface. I sent him a note, he sent me a note, I sent him a note...

I have to admit t was pretty nifty. But now I'm trying to picture how IMing could be incorporated in a school library. If high school students were allowed cell phones in school, could they use their phones to send an IM request to the librarian's computer? I could see this working...a student is short on time so they IM the school library about a particular resource they are in need of. Then when they have time to visit the library, the needed source is ready and waiting for them. Of course, this cuts out the very important aspect of having students SEARCH for their own resources which the Librarian at the high school where I am currently doing my practicum just happened to remark on today. She said she had to train herself not to do everything for the students. An integral part of information literacy is being able to find and locate sources.

For this Thing #7 I also participated in a Minitex Webinar on Gale's K-12 Databases available through ELM. Webinars rock! It turned out I was the only participant. I didn't understand at first that I would actually be listening to someone talk via the phone. Good thing my baby decided to take a nap and my 5-year-old was taking his half hour daily screen time in the form of one hour watching Star Wars. During the webinar, I would see on my computer screen at home, exactly what the host of the webinar was doing on her computer. So I would see her mouse moving around on the screen, opening windows, clicking on things, etc. I learned useful information that will help me navigate some of these databases and I didn't even have to leave the comfor of my home. I would most definitely take one of their webinars again.

#6 Online Image Generators

I can see the potential with the creation of trading cards. My son is only five and he is addicted to Pokemon and other types of trading cards. I think collection and trading of cards would be a big hit in elementary school in particular. Cards could be made of favorite books, of historical figures students are studying, etc. Or they could be laminated and used as name tags. The possibilities are endless. As long as the media center has a sturdy color printer :)

#5 More fun with Flickr

OK, so this thing called Splashr is pretty neat. How it works is you enter a tag and then a desired layout and the program finds all the Flickr photos with that tag and puts it into the layout you have chosen. Neat! Click on the link below to see the presentation I created with Splashr

Flickr Photos of the Bloodroot Flower

I need to think more about how Flickr can be used in the Media Center. The obvious would be that students of the right age would enjoy messing around with it. Especially the mashups. The email about this post mentions library posters. Then I'm assuming that all the photos accessed with the various mashups are public photos. If I printed out a mashup of some Flickr photos would I have to acknowledge the photographers of all the various photos?

Thing 4 - Flickr

Over on the right is Ms. Miller from Dowling Elementary in Minneapolis--the Media Specialist in the media center where I did the elementary portion of my practicum.


I'm not sure I was really understanding the value of Flikr until I saw what the Clemens and Alcuin libraries are doing. What a great idea to take pictures of the books and then tag the books and also provide links to their catalog to see if the book is actually available. I think this scenario could be used for a school library, too. Book displays on certain themes could be photographed and tagged. Past displays could be accessed at any time. I think this would be very useful for middle school and high school. It's free, it's quick and easy to set up, etc. And an entire class or grade could have the ability to access it.

As far as using Flickr personally, I'm more interested in creating a password protected website for family and friends where I can post photos.

Thing 3 - RSS

I'm starting to get the hang of RSS feeds. First I downloaded a bunch (too many) and had them as Live Booksmarks in Firefox. Things started looking a little messy and my neat freak side couldn't handle it.

Tonight I created a Google Home Page and also downloaded Google Reader. Now I have all my RSS feeds coming into Google Reader and I like how that functions/looks. We'll see how often I get to peruse all the RSS.

I did a search for library-related RSS and I ended up subscribing to The Shifted Librarian. I'm keeping my eyes open for any RSS on school media specialists. I also subscribed to some RSS from Swedish newspapers. Cool!

Time to go read some RSS!

Thing 2 - Web 2.0

"...an exciting new era in modern librarianship" (john blyberg). Thus far I've had limited interaction with the Web 2.0 technologies (blogs, wikis, social networking sites). I know there is a need to know about these things as this is where communication is going or at least branching out into.

I need to start figuring out how I can incorporate the stuff I'm learning here into a school library media center. It would be fun to attempt to use some of these tools with a school media website. Many of the schools in my area do not have their own media center websites. Hopefully, wherever I end up, the principal will let me create a media center website if there already isn't one in place.