Project Play 2nd Sem Week 6

Oh my goodness, I never knew making a podcast could be so easy! I definately want to make use of this more often! I made my toddlers sing for me this morning and we recorded our hello song from story time. Then we listened to it as well. They were super excited when I told them I was going to put it on to our web page. :) 1 and 2 year olds can be so cute! I have added the podcast (minus the gabcast advertisement) to my blog. You can find it on the lower right side.

The other children's librarian and I were bouncing the idea around of having the kids do their own verbal book recommendations for the summer this way and having a link for the library's website. Kids love technology and we think it would be fun for them to do and then to be able to hear themselves on the libraries webpage. We were thinking one afternoon a week for an hour kids could come in and record them selves. It would be a great new way to report for a week.

I still can't get over how easy this was! I didn't look at the directions until this morning and I was able to do the whole process rather quickly without too many problems. The only issue I had was locating my email with the user email and password so that I could log in. This is such an awesome tool. It was a lot of fun playing with this one.

Project Play 2nd sem. Week 5

I got to skip week 4 - how nice. :) Catch-up time is always nice. You can't go wrong there. This week's topic was social networking. I went and visited La Crosse PL, Oshkosh PL OurSpace, West Bend PL , Winnefox Library System MySpace pages. I liked how Oshkosh added a picture of one of their lions. It is very cute - how they guard over the library. I think I had the most fun skimming through all of the friends of the libraries. I couldn't believe how many West Bend has! It was sort of nice to see how many authors wanted to be friends of libraries. I also liked the video clip on La Crosses site. Granted it was old, but you can tell the teens put it all together. It gave them a voice. The only thing I found difficult were the backgrounds. It's hard to figure out what they all are, when boxes cover it all. The wonderful book tree background in West Bend's page is nice, but it took a while to load and text is hard to read over the top of it all. I liked the simplicity of the Winnefox's and Oshkosh's backgrounds.

I think libraries have a place in social networking. It is just another way to let the public know that we are out there as a great resource and we want to help. This is a great way to reach tech savvy users. We need to go to and create places where people are going. However, I admit, they still need to maintain a professional attitude and look. Who is going to take a library and their account seriously if they just had a bunch of unrelated messages and pictures on their site that have nothing to do with the library. It needs to be done tastefully or we can give people a negative viewpoint about the library. I like how links to the catalog and other resources appeared on the pages. Then all you have to do it click to get to where you want to go - it's a lot simpler than trying to search for it.

I think it would be great to have a MySpace and/or Facebook page for the library. What a great way to reach out to users who would normally think the library has nothing to offer them. Yet, it also means someone needs to be responsible for the page. Things should get updated on a regular basis - so it looks like someone is checking and taking care of the page. We would also need to think about who we are trying to target and who is putting the page together. Not all of our patrons are going to be using the web and finding content that way. Young children aren't generally going to be looking for us on the computer, but their parents probablly are. :) nees

Project Play 2nd Sem. Week 3

I thinks these tools will be super helpful! I haven't tried Jott yet. That is on my things to do today list :) I need to wait until after story time is done.

I think it's a great way to keep track of things and be able to have it input directly into the calendar in google. It's nice.

I can't wait to try Jott. If it is going to work as well as I think, I'll have to program that number into my phone. I'm always remembering things I need to do as I'm driving in the car, before bed, etc. and this would be a great easy way to leave a reminder.

I like how so many things interact with one another! It's nice not to have to input the same thing into different places - the can sync themselves for us. How wonderful - it just makes things so much easier!