Thing 23: Is it the end or the beginning????

I can't believe summer is coming to a close and that all of these Things have been learned! :)

My favorite Thing was probably the Readers or RSS feeds. That is something that I use daily now and I never knew what they were before. I also really loved learning through those Creative Content videos. My least favorite thing was probably Twitter! That is surprising because I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE facebook and Twitter is just another form of social networking but it just seems boring to me. I will probably never log onto it again. I thought LibWorm was disappointing too.

Google Docs was definitely something that I will use again. I thought that I knew what it was but really had no idea. I also learned how to actually use Wikis which is nice to understand.

I will be very interested to see what I can access in my school system because so many things are blocked. I hope that I can continue to use my Reader and would like to show my students about mash ups but I know Flickr is blocked. At least I will know what people are talking about as they throw around the jargon of the new technology.

All good Things must come to an end!! :)

Thing 17

So I cannot follow directions and am now in the process of working backwards to get caught up. Libworm is actually pretty cool (especially for me since I am so into the whole Google Reader / RSS Things now!).

I searched for read aloud since my buddy and I are both becoming school librarians next year and cannot find any great resources for our story time plans. I came upon this really cool story about kids that are too shy to read aloud. A library in New Mexico has dogs brought in that the children can read to without fear of being laughed at. Pretty neat idea!

I searched story time and got 2,672 PAGES of results. I skimmed page one and saw that it was just a bunch of scheduled events although I did see one really cool story about a library having story time on a web cast for parents that cannot get out.

Interesting Thing!

Thing 16

I know that I am jumping ahead but I could not control myself! :) LibraryThing caught my attention (on my Google Reader no less!) and I had to go there.

Seriously! Why would anyone want to catalog their home library? It would take such an enormous amount of time for what purpose? Maybe I am bitter about the class that I am taking (sorry Enoch!) but I wonder if this is for the super organized/do not have any life type of person. Am I wrong? Is there some benefit that I just don't get? I signed up and gave them my email address. I got a response email in about 10 seconds of signing up. Will I ever get on it again? Maybe / maybe not but you should check out for yourself: www.librarything.com and Rick--I am really directing that to you.

I do like the idea of hearing about books from other readers but hey--I have facebook for that! :O

I am broken!

So, I broke down and finally did it. I am totally embarrassed by it but I now have a Twitter account. My user name is courtneybis in the event you want to follow me. I have already blocked a few people that tried following me. Of course, on the news this morning was a big story about the Twitter accounts of several celebrities being hacked into. Seriously! Is it an omen?

One thing that I absolutely have to share is my absolute favorite "Thing" of the "Things" I have completed thus far. I am LOVING Google Reader. I love getting blog updates, gossip, and news all in one spot. It is my favorite of all the "Things" we have learned about!

RSS Feeds Things 7

OMG! I have always wondered what those little RSS orange icons are. It is still a little confusing as to how it all works but like the blog says--you don't need to know the technical ins and outs. It is just important to understand how you can use them to save time on the internet. BTW: I love those little Common Craft videos!

Google Reader

How cool is this? I loved it because I forget to regularly check out the blogs that I want to follow. The only thing that kind of bothered me was that I was already subscribed to all of those same blogs through Google Reader! How? I am guessing it is because I have email through Gmail. I guess that there is some connection between the blogs that I had subscribed to on blogger and Gmail. I don't know exactly. But, I had 28 unread items when I logged on. I have seen the Reader link when I am on my email but never clicked it. I think that I will check it regularly now that I know what it is for! :)