Thing #9...9 useful library-related blogs & news feeds

I tried most of the blog search tools and liked Edublogs' award winners the best. For a blog-reading novice like me, it was nice to find some high quality blogs that had already received a stamp of approval by peers and not have to jump through hoops to sift through the millions of entries out there in cyberspace.

I am planning on creating a blog roll to showcase some of these fabulous "substance" blogs that I discovered, amongst them the one by Clay Burrell (Beyond School) which provided great reviews on the cool educational tools available online. Check out the "self-centered" interactive pop quiz that I created after reading Strut Your Etymo-Lexico Stuff with a Mystudiyo Vocab Quiz. Burrell's blog was easy to add because after clicking on his RSS feed icon,it asked me to which platform (Google Reader, Rojo, Newsgater, Pageflake, Netvibes, etc.) I wished to add it, and voila, it was a done deal. Everything did not go as smoothly with other RSS feeds that I encountered; for example, after I clicked the RSS icon to subscribe to a feed, a new page of seemingly nothing but html mumbo-jumbo would pop up, and that would be it. I wasn't sure what to do with it (there was nowhere to click on it), so instead, I went back to my Google Reader and added the feed manually by entering the blog's URL... That worked without a glitch.

Incidentally, I also found the new term (for me)of "permalinks" and I was wondering if they are the same thing as RSS feeds. Some of the blogs I read had that permalink hyperlink but I don't know what its use is. When I clicked on it at the end of a blog, the same gobly-gook came up as for non-working RSS feeds, i.e. more of these html hieroglyphics I had mentioned before!

Here is my review of the other blog/news search I tried out, on a scale of 1 to 5 stars (5 being the best):

School Library Blogs on Suprglu - *** Good information and links to other blogs, but I am glad that I had the pointers given by our Captains, else I don't think I would have known what to do with the site.

Google Blog Search - **** Very user-friendly and straight to the point. I did a search for "Library2Play" and there were around 150 results for it, including the comments people left on the blogs! Way to go, Spring Branch!

Topix.net - **** Great presentation --clean and organized. I liked the advanced search feature which allows to do "blog-less" searches and only focus on news results instead. Good tool to locate RSS feeds for information.

Syndic8.com - * Too drab for me; I need more colors and I had a hard time operating the site.

Technorati - **** Great blog finding tool! I really enjoyed Blogger Central: what’s percolating in blogs now and all the features it includes, such as "Rising links of the day." It sort of reminds me of the "trends" available in the Google Reader, of which, I must confess I have become really fond!

Interactive Online Quiz Created with MyStudiyo

Thing #8... RSS Feeds & Readers

21st century, here I come at last! I felt so relieved that I belong to the norm and didn't know what RSS meant. As usual when you don't know the meaning of a word, you assume that everyone else knows it; well, I am so thrilled about THIS thing! I have been using the Google Reader and am amazed at the technology available today to simplify our life and make every minute count. I thought the TeacherTube video was very helpful with its layman terms --first reading the Wikipedia definition got me a little worried. I particularly am eager to find out my trends and use the data to unsubscribe to feeds that do not update often or that I don't read. Even with the Internet, I seem to be a pack-rat! Among the news site that I subscribed to was of course NPR and I read about the fact that Mars is trying to map out the genome for the cocoa bean --hmmm, endless supply of chocolate, here I come! (see right). It is pretty cool how it gives you a summary of the NPR report...
Also, while I was adding the Vanity Fair RSS to my reader, I accidentally came across their BLOGOPTICON: an indispensable guide to the blogosphere
and it gave me some additional blogs to feed to (sorry, I have to have a little bit of celebrity gossip!)

Thing #7... Google Tools

I don't know if I am just tired and if that is why I am struggling with this latest "thing." Everyone seems to be very excited about the Google tools and I seem to be simply frustrated and overwhelmed. Did all the hype create too high expectations for me? Like almost everyone, I had used Google as a search engine before and was aware of Google Earth (solely because I knew we were not allowed to download the program when we still had the stand-alone computers at school and because it was not available for my Mac at home!). Since imitation is the best form of flattery, I am going to share my review in the same format as the amazing Horatio who masterminds the insightful and well-written blog La Bibliotecaria Loca.

Google Alerts
This tool is pretty nifty and does all the research for you and keeps you posted. I used "hurricane" as my test topic and got a long e-mail this morning about each piece of news around the world that mentioned the word. Since I like to get straight to the info that pertains to me, I wonder if there is a way to further narrow down the alert search...

Google Calendar
I think it can be a very useful tool, though I tend to remain more of a paper agenda kind of girl. There is nothing like scratching out what you have accomplished! Also, I think that I spend more time entering the info online than I actually would by hand. Of course, the advantage is that there are no ugly scratches when a change needs to be made and that you can share with your colleagues, which is obviously not a function a Franklin Planner offers! LOL



iGoogle
To use one of the new terms that I learned this summer, this feature kinda reminded me of a hybrid mashup, since this personalized Google home page draws on info from other websites. I got so caught up with the cool gadgets available, that my iGoogle homepage looked rather messy initially. Being a voracious quotation collector, I ended up having 3 or 4 quotations of the day besides the tops news from Time & CNN, National Geographics Picture of the Day, World clocks --that I couldn't figure to set to France & the USA, and of course... the always much needed daily weight-loss advice! Well, a hodge-podge of my interests that I am still shuffling around and weeding out so that I eventually can use the website as efficiently as intended. A work in progress...

Google Notebook
I dabbled with this feature last night and didn't get it. I revisited tonight and played a little more with it, but I was quickly annoyed as each time I used the web search option within the Notebook page, it would leave my notebook page and go to the new URL. So, it felt very time consuming to click back on the browser each time to paste the information that I had gathered and copied from the website. All I can figure out is that I must not have been doing something correctly and that I must be choosing my usual difficult way of doing things instead of the easier and more sensible route. Did any one else experience that problem? I found my old way of copying and pasting Web info into my Microsoft Word much more user-friendly... and probably easier to explain to my students too.

Google Earth
Woohoo! I have downloaded the GE at last and am thrilled that my townhome is finally visible online. For the longest time, the satellite pix still showed a vacant lot, although the place had been built for 3 years now. Of course, I also looked up my home in France, but when I zoomed into my little village, it remained rather blurry. What a cool tool that my ESL students could use to include in their personal memoir to show the place they are from... Although the 3-D feature didn't work well for me, I was thrilled to discover the "Explore the Sky" feature, where you can learn about the different aspects of the universe around us.

Thing #6... Mashups & 3rd Party Sites

I guess, why reinvent the wheel when you can use mashups? :) What a clever idea! I can see how I could use bighugelabs.com with my ESL students to create a mosaic of self-selected pictures from Flickr to illustrate a theme from literature. I enjoyed playing and designing my own mosaic, although I had some technical problems a few times and the page remained blank when I just pasted the URLs in the boxes. When I used the other option of linking bighugelabs.com to Flickr Toys, everything went smoothly. Here is the mosaic created with pix of pooches that I cherish and who continue to be a big part of my life; students could use non-copyrighted pictures on more abstract concepts instead. Another application I can see for using bighugelabs.com is to have students create their own magazine cover after they have been introduced to informational text features. They would use the tool from Big Huge Labs. Of course, Warholizing a pix is fun too... and makes me wish I were an art teacher too! :)

Thing #5... Flickr

I was a little worried about choosing an image that might be "copyrighted," even after reading the Creative Commons information. The 4-page comic strip was a fun reinforcer to help internalize most of the differences. I think it would be a useful & concrete tool to explain the different laws that govern intellectual properties to my ESL students... I was still very relieved that just before you get to download the actual image, there are Creative Commons icons again just in case you need extra reassurance that you are not breaking the law! The coolest part is that when you actually click on either them, it tells you exactly what you are allowed to do with the pix in plain old jargon-free English! I just wonder what I need to do to now to give credit to the author and so that it shows right below the picture... FYI, this picture of the Paris subway sign was taken by pedrosimoes7 .

Thing #3... The Process

Wow, I really enjoyed creating my avatar a whole lot! I played with my design for hours, trying to get it as accurately as I could. Too bad, there was no blonde pixie hairstyle... Of course, I could have completely redefined my style, couldn't I? I was wondering if there were any other known websites that allow you to create "funkier" and more "artsy" avatars. Also, thinking of my kids, I was wondering if it would be possible to export from Animal Planet's "Mutt Maker" (http://animal.discovery.com/pet-planet/mutt-maker/mutt-maker.html)...

Thing #2... 7 1/2 Habits

Because of my innate curiosity, I think that accepting responsibility for my own learning is a habit that I have nurtured my entire life without really trying. It definitely has to be the easiest of the 7 1/2 Habits of Highly Success People for me, especially since the Internet era. Not making a mountain of a mole hill continues to be a challenge for me on a daily basis, but this natural-born drama queen has been showing some progress and is learning to be proactive and to "control the controllable!"