Project Play Weeks 10-12

I have really like my experience with Project Play! I have been out of school for that long so my technology skills are still pretty good. However for the past 3 years I worked in a school library media center. There was nothing like this to help keep me up to date on technology skills. Yet, I was the one in charge of teaching all of these types of things to the students and teachers. It was super difficult to find courses that would allow me to explore technology and allow me to apply it to me and my life, before applying to anything else. This is just what I had been looking for! If only I could have been doing this for the past three years as well! I'm working on getting a technology coordinator license to help keep me up to date as well.

I haven't overly started to use the tools I have learned about. I want to catalog all of my own personal library books, but that would also require me to know where they all are and then to pack, label, and tag them so I can easily find them in the future. It is a lot more time consuming then I have had time for lately. I've had a difficult fall. I've also created a library thing account to help me keep track of the books I've read in a year. It's always frustrating to remember I read this book, but now what was the title of the book and who wrote it. It will be nice to see at the end of the year how many books I have read. That is one of my New Year's resolutions.

I've tried using Flickr to upload pictures. But the day I brought my camera in to do it the batteries were dead and there were not double A one to be found. I would like to be able to easily share the pictures with other library staff. It sure beats putting them on a jump drive and transferring pictures and then losing the jump drive. I think this is my favorite week. I really like taking picture and being able to manipulate them on the computer. I didn't know that flickr existed as an easy way for me to do this.

I'll most definitely continue with the second semester. I've liked keeping my technology skills up to par. It's something that hasn't been easy to do in the world of teaching as a profession. The only thing I would like to be able to see is making somethings a little easier to run on SCLS computers. It took forever to figure out how to get around to adding the del.icio.us links to favorites and getting the link on the Internet window. Because the computers are locked down, I couldn't just download the program on. I found that out with flickr the other day too. It would be nice to batch upload more than 6 pictures at a time, but in order to do that you needed to download a program. I understand why the computers are locked down, but it's just a little frustrating to find the ways to work around it. However, I've like learning and I'll keep playing :)

Project Play Week 9

I like how easy it is to share ideas with a Wiki. If I had known about this when I was going to school it probably would have made some assignments a lot easier! It reminds me a lot of Google docs, except that the users in Wikis have the choice to make it public or not. It is so much better than sending emails to a group of people and then getting a response and trying to coordinate meeting times, assignment details, etc.

I really like thecommoncraftshow videos by Lee LeFever! He has made things so simple to understand. I think the videos add a lot to my understanding of the topic we are talking about.

I'm not quite sure how to use a wiki in the library yet. I work in the children's area and it is difficult to know how to use it with kids.

I had fun playing around with Wikipedia. I added a link to our library's homepage and then I decided to take it off because our website is difficult to use. I didn't want to direct someone to hard to use information. I know it frustrates me when this happens.

Wow! It's hard to believe the semester of Project Play is almost over - it's gone by so fast!

Project Play Week 8

I'm caught up - at least for now anyway. :) I've even added tags to my old posts and I added some while I was playing around with Flickr and LibraryThing. I think it does make things easier to locate.

I like the idea of tagging, it isn't too unsettling to me. Working with children, I found it difficult to assign Sears subject heading to materials. It used formal language - which was fine if I was searching for something, but was more difficult for kids to come up with the right key term to enter in. I like being able to include the language that the children are using. It makes it easier for them to find what they are looking for.

I will most definitely use it for craft websites. It would be so nice to just have a list of the sites I use all of the time to find craft ideas that aren't buried somewhere in my favorites. Or to keep track of craft ideas that I want to use in the future. I found a really cute bug craft on accident yesterday that I want to use for this summer.

I think the “massive amounts of participation” help people to find things they are looking for easier. Most people don't think of more "formal terms" when searching for something (like subject headings are). It would be nice to see what terms that children choose to use when describing a good book.

Project Play Week 7

I've been looking at LibraryThing. I can't wait to add more. I have so many children's books, I don't even know what I all own anymore. So far I've added 10 books - mostly kids books, but like a true librarian, I want my cataloging to be exact so I need to wait until I get home to do most of my collection because I have so many that have been reprinted by Scholastic. If you want to see the 10 books I do own look at my LibraryThing account.

Here is the link to my LibraryThing account: http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Tifi_Librarian

I really like how easy it is to add titles to LT. What's even better is how it adds the covers of the books! I like the quick visual pics of the books I own. I also like how I can add my own tags - it makes it easier to keep my books in categories. I dislike that it only allows 200 free books (I know I have way more than that at home), but I understand they need to make a profit too. It would also be nice to keep track of all of the books I have read - not just own. Librarian are avid library users! It would make it easier to recommend the newer books if I had the titles on hand. I know I think all the time this would be a great book to recommend to this patron, now if only I could remember the title.

I used the Unsuggester with the book The Library Dragon by Carmen Deedy but not enough people owned that book. So I used Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. These were the top 5 results:
Diary : a novel by Chuck Palahniuk (expected 21.8, found 0; unsuggestions)
The man in the high castle by Philip K. Dick (expected 20.7, found 0; unsuggestions)
Winter's heart by Robert Jordan (expected 20.4, found 0; unsuggestions)
Count Zero by William Gibson (expected 20.3, found 0; unsuggestions)
No logo : taking aim at the brand bullies by Naomi Klein (expected 19.5, found 0; unsuggestions)
I know this includes every title in LT, but it makes me want to know what the most unsuggested children's books are for this title. :)

Until later--

Project Play Week 6 continued

Okay, so I'm still behind, but as long as it gets done! :) I like Flickr and think it's a great thing. It will save me some much needed space on my hard drive. I can just upload the pictures onto the web. Then I can view the pictures from any computer that has internet access! Yippie! The problem is now just getting the pictures off of my camera - I haven't done that recently. I really like how Flickr allows you to choose if the picture is public or private and who you would like to share the picture with. That is really neat. I know in this day and age not everyone likes to have their picture shared with the whole entire world - (I don't!). It will let me easily share pictures with my friends without everyone having access.

I like the idea of being able to post programming and display pictures on Flickr. The only disadvantage is that everyone in the pictures needs to have given permission for the picture to be used. That means for children, parents have to sign stating that it's okay. Sometimes it's really hard to track down what adult belongs to what kid and have them sign a form after a large program. I wonder what other kinds of policies libraries are using in regards to photos of library patrons. There's got to be a better way of being able to do this.

Project Play Week 6 -- Cockatiel

I have a pet cockatiel. This picture was just too cute to resist!

Cute Rambo
Originally uploaded by volar

My cockatiel is a pied cockatiel and is yellow like this one.

Happy Yellow Feathery Friday!

Originally uploaded by birdyboo

Survey

Okay, so I've been trying out the surveymonkey and I've created a survey about story times. Eventually I want to give a survey out to the people who bring children to storytimes to find out their opinions. It would be nice to give them the option of being able to go online to take the survey. Not all of my wonderful story time darlings would be patient enough to wait while someone filled it out for me. :)

Take a look and see what you think
Story Time Survey

Happy Friday!

Project Play Week 4

This week I am learning more about Feedback Thingies. I love the name! It reminds me of how I name things.


A feedback thingie would work well for story time feedback. I am trying to figure out if what I am doing meets the parents needs or if they would like something else incorporated. I always as for them to give me feedback. We are also trying to figure out if our story time times at the library best meet the needs of our patrons. An example is is there enough interest to do night story times more than just once a month.


The barriers I see to doing this is for patrons to be able to find the information. Our website is complicated enough because users have to find the library page under the city website. Plus it doesn't get updated as quickly as we would like it sometime. (However this might be where a blog can come in as a plus!)

Project Play Week 3

Okay, so I'm behind again. So what's new with that - I always seem to be behind. My mom always tells me I'm a day late and a dollar short. Any how.

This week I have learned about RSS feeds. I'm not quite sure how well I like them yet. Subscribing to the feeds was pretty easy, the difficult part is going to be keeping up with all of the postings. I really liked being able to subscribe to all of the comic postings. I'm not quite sure that I was subscribing to the "correct" feeds all of the time. I tried to subscribe to someone's blog that I work with and I got three options, all of which tell me there is a new post when there really is not. It confuses me.

There is so much more available on bloglines - you can even create your own blog there. I'm a children's librarian and I'm not quite sure how I would use this in for patrons yet. I'm sure that kids would like to be able to easily subscribe to their friends blogs. I could see how this would be helpful for a teacher because then s/he could easily subscribe to all of their students blogs. That would be really neat. I wonder how many schools around here are actually doing this.

Story Time

So, I'm working on getting the hang of blogging. I think I need to do more than just posting on the assignments that I have completed. At our library we just began a baby story time. I am in charge of it. I am also in charge of the toddler story times. I'm including a picture from one of this summers story times.

Week two post

This is my first post for Project Play. I'm slightly behind in last weeks work. However, after I post this, I should be caught up and ready to start this weeks assignment.