Week #7-WebQuest

Early Literacy WebQuest
I struggled with the uploading of the files for this assignment. It took me a lot of searching to figure out how to get the link to work correctly. I hope it works out well! I enjoyed using the WebQuest tool. Although I think my Rollyo topic is not one that is as 'kid-friendly' as it should be. Mine is a more general topic and I hope that works out okay with our next assignment that deals with our web resources. I would rather not change it completely if I can help it. I could see using wikis and WebQuests for older students. It gives them a new way to do an assignment and the teacher can control where they are looking. My concern with students using wikis would be keeping the content appropriate. I liked the suggestion to give students numbers or user names to help track who is posting what. Wikis would be great for book clubs or for group projects.

Week #7-Wikis

I think wikis are a fabulous web tool! We have a wiki that we use with our school for teachers to post ideas and/or comments on. It is a great way to communicate and really have an open forum. I had fun looking through the wikis on the Classroom Learning website. My two favorites were the Princeton Public Library Book Lovers Wiki and the Library Success: A Best Practice Wiki. I could see both of these being very helpful as a librarian. The Princeton wiki would also be great for coming up with book club choices, as it has a rating system for all different genres of books. I do use wikipedia on occasion as well...I know some people have a major problem with the information found on that wiki, but it is a good start when just looking up general information about a topic. Wikis are a great way to connect with others that have a similar interest/passion.

Week #6-Tagging, Folksonomies, and Technorati

I thought that del.icio.us was a very cool website. I could see it being beneficial for me as a teacher to separate my favorites by subject and by school and personal use. I also think it would be great to have access to my school bookmarked sites at home and my home ones at school. It would just be easier to have access to them where ever I am. I think this site would be beneficial to libraries because it would give them a way to organize sites and have people leave comments about them for others to view. When things are organized in a clear fashion people are much more apt to navigate through them. Technorati is a huge site! I don't know how I feel that my blog could be found on that site. I'm not much into all of my stuff being out for all to see. It was cool to find all of the School Library Learning 2.0 blogs out there. It shows how valuable these 23 things are that we are doing and how many other people have been educated through this site. The popular blog, searches, and tags area was unavailable on the website when I tried to use it. It said it would return soon so I will go back and look at it. The blogging world is pretty amazing. I do enjoy following other people's blogs but don't really think that my personal life is worth blogging about. It would be great as a librarian to have a blog that makes weekly recommendations about what to read or teaches a new skill for the patrons.

Week #5-Award Winners

I looked at the award winners in the education, books, and food categories. The one that I liked the best was the 2nd place food website, urbanspoon. It is a website that reviews restaurants in bigger cities around the country. The Grand Rapids area (which is about 45 miles from my house) was the section I found to be most relevant to me. I also travel to Chicago frequently so I could see using this site for meal recommendations. I liked how you could narrow down the searches for local areas not just big cities that are far away. In the book and education section winners, I didn't find them to be very relevant to me. Several were about learning languages, which may be useful someday but it isn't now, also the book sites were relating to finding books in an OPAC system or rare and out of print books. Someday these may be useful to me, but not at this time.

Week #5-Image Generators

I decided to give my dogs a voice using an image generator on the FD Toys website. It was so easy and simple to use. I also tried a pop art poster and used the mapmaker tool. It would be fun to add captions to a lot of my photos. I know my dogs were mad at me when I put these on that is why they only stayed on for long enough to get pictures. Unfortunately, my larger husky died this summer, but I still have lots of pictures of him so I wanted to use this one. I went to the Image Chef website and navigated around, but I found this website to be easier to use.