Thing 26

This was a neat assignment to do.

I like all the things at Yourminis.com you can add to for creating your own widget. It was fun. Everything can be personalized to whatever background color you want. The background of the widget itself can be personalized to color or photo background. Very easy to use.

Here's my yourminis.com widget:




I love the humor of their website administration, too--here's a copy of the email on accepting my application for membership:

Thank you for registering for an account at yourminis.com. A team of 33 highly respected individuals analyzed your data and performed a thorough background check to ensure that you meet the proper requirements for becoming a member of yourminis.

We then held an anonymous vote in which, 31 of the 33 aforementioned individuals voted to accept your application (the other two were out to lunch). We had a big celebration in your honor and toasted you as our newest member.

You are now an official yourminian! Congratulations!

You now have the ability to access your personalized start page from any computer, publish your pages into the community, rate and leave comments for pages, widgets, blogs and people. You can even create your own widgets and blogs and upload them to the community.

We hope you have a wonderful experience using yourminis.com and tell all your friends and family to try us out. Thanks for your support - have fun!

- yourminis team

Thing 25

Another fun assignment!

Letterpop was a lot of fun to use. The only thing I found annoying about it was the the window on the side offering templates & photos floats downward when you want to scroll to see the bottom items. I liked how you could move photos around in the blocks; changing an image was a little challenging since there isn’t a delete photo option—you have to just pick another photo to drag over to that block.

I can see our library turning the Happenings at the Library into an online newsletter. Of course, the only way this would work would be to add a link to the newsletter on the library webpage—can’t actually post the newsletter itself on the webpage (as far as I could discover). You wouldn’t want to email the newsletter to everyone—the free account limits email to 10 mailings & only 25 email addresses. You would have to delete old newsletters as you can only have 10 published newsletters, too. Well, maybe it wouldn’t be such a good idea to use this for the Happenings…

But it’s still fun & easy to do and easy to recommend to others & to help them use it!


You can see my profile and newsletter at the following links:

Fantasy Book Lover's Profile on Letterpop

Fantasy Book Lover's Newsletter

Thing 24

This was a great assignment pointing out a very useful web app.

Zamzar was very easy to use.

Hardest part was deciding what document I had made that I wanted to use as my test for this assignment. Here's a link to my document, in case anyone's interested in downloading it:

Solve Raccoon 5 Finalized Answers Poster.pdf

This makes it so much easier to share documents and everything else (it can convert images, documents, music, and video) with others across the world. For librarians, it’s a great way to share program ideas. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn now that some of the pdf documents I’ve found on library storytime websites were created by using this program. We, at YPL, could work at creating our own wiki with pdf files of storytimes to share.

part 1

Get Your Animation

part 2

Get Your Animation

Part 3

Get Your Animation

Beyond 23 Things

Alright!!! I'm at the next step after Thing 23. I'm now signed up to the feed for Library 2.1. Also, I'm listed on the Library 2.1 wiki. This wiki uses Front Page for editing--little different look, but more dressed up, too.


I even joined Explore Discover Play Ning site. Here's my page:

http://explorediscoverplay.ning.com/profile/fantasybooklover


Well, I've got 10 steps to complete to catch up with everyone else here. Looking forward to starting them at some point. I'm going to review the first 23 things some more first. I am glad that we can move on to learn more though.

Thing 23

I am so happy to have successfully reached this point. I love computers and usually have no trouble learning new computer applications, but I must admit that some things stumped me a bit--took looking at help pages and sometimes searching the internet for answers to problems I encountered. Just yesterday, I was helping a co-worker with her blog, and I could not get blogger to accept a photo into her profile--something that I do have on my blog and did all the 'supposedly' correct steps to put on her blog. Just like many things in life, computers & their applications sometimes have annoying bugs or other unknown problems. Of course, I may have missed some step or the problem may have been because our computer server was going up and down most of the day.

Let's see, my favorite discoveries/exercises, hmmm. Wiki would be one of my favorite discoveries. Playing with image generators would probably be my favorite exercise.

This program has definitely assisted my lifelong learning goals. I want to keep learning new things, and this certainly taught me a lot. I look forward to keeping up my learning by re-looking at many of the lessons. I hope to pick up more new Web 2.0 learning in the future.

The only thing that really took away some of the fun and made things harder at times were that some of the lessons were dated in their tutorials. They showed how to do something one way, which no longer exists today. I think that those need to be updated if anyone is available to do that.

I definitely would participate in another discovery program like this in the future. It's so helpful to have something set up that takes you from one step and application on the web to another, even with the problems of dated tutorials. It helped learn what I didn't know and should work on learning.

Well, that's all for now. I'm heading to Beyond Thing 23 now.

Thing 22

I found the most information about both NetLibrary and YPL's Digital Books by going to the Help pages. NetLibrary has a really great Demo from www.oclc.org.--nicely paced and very informative. Digital Books also has a good easy to read Quick Start Guide.

Both have so many thing to see. NetLibrary has many ebooks--from the Demo, other subscriptions to NetLibrary also have audiobooks and ejournals. There are quite a few language options. The books cover any topic I could think of. It's very easy to use and has a nice format. You can read the books right on your computer.

Digital Books also has wide variety of books and audiobooks to choose. Their books must be downloaded--you cannot just open them up on the screen like NetLibrary.

The advance search options on both are very versatile. I like all the different options you have for searching.

I can definitely see the uses for ebooks and audiobooks. It's great to have something you can access anywhere in the world as long as you can get to a computer and have the necessary devices for reading/listening to the material. With ebooks, particularly, it's nice to be able to search within a book for certain keywords if you can't remember where you read something before and the index isn't helping you. I don't know if I will ever actually use audiobooks for myself, though, as they tend to put me to sleep. I'll use the MP3 player mostly for music.

I'm including a link to the original PLCMC lesson, mainly because I like have a link to each of their lessons in my blog.

Thing 21

Podcasts are interesting. I searched on the 3 podcast directories listed in the lesson:

Podcast.net
Podcastalley.com
Yahoo Podcasts

I found them fairly easy to search. I didn't like that you have to download software to subscribe to anything on Yahoo Podcasts--ended up not subscribing to anything from them. The assignment said that Yahoo wouldn't require downloading--maybe Yahoo changed since the lesson was written.

There looked to be some really useful Library podcasts. I subscribed to 2 different ones, but there were many to choose from.

There certainly are tons of podcasts out there, and many of the ones I found on topics I liked were really long.

I don't know if I will ever make my own podcast, but I did change my blog itself into a podcast. I signed up for Odiogo.

Thing 20

There are a lot of fun videos to watch here. There are also educational videos. One thing I discovered was I didn't need to copy the embedded player code as shown in the lesson. When I clicked Share This--it only brought up the option to email the video. I went ahead and signed up for a Free YouTube Account, and then was able to use the Post Video link to directly post the video to my blog. When I looked at the edit of my post, all the coding for the embedded player is right there. Apparently, YouTube, like Flickr, now offers one step direct posting to blogs.

I like the searchability by keywords, tags, or category. I wish there was a way to search by length of video--mainly because it took a while to find a really short video to post to my blog. It does sort videos by relevance, date added, view count, and rating, though. All of which are helpful. When you find a video, you can click on its category or tags to find similar videos; you can browse related videos, see more from this user, and see playlists.

Oh, just realized the embedded code is listed on the right side--below tags & URL--just missed seeing it. Well, Post Video was just as easy to do anyways.

One of these days, I'll check out the other video sites as well:

Yahoo Videos
Google Videos

And many more sites to try at the Web's Top Video Sites review.

There are just so very many sites to watch videos on, and they include all kinds of videos, instructional to just plain fun.

Library Olypmics, Part 3

Well, we've all heard about "Pimp" your Bookcart; now, here's another use for bookcarts.

Thing 19

For this assignment, I looked at the top winner for maps: Google Maps.

It is a very good tool. I like that you can change the route it offers by clicking on the route on the map and dragging to the highway you want to use. I've always used Mapquest.com before, but I think I'll switch to Google Maps now, and I would recommend it to others for travel directions. You can add all sorts of tools to your map search, too. I think this would be very good for use with library patrons needing travel directions.

There are so many other tools to look at--I know there are others that are also useful. We've already used some of them in previous lessons for Library 2.0, like: Technorati, Bloglines, Library Thing, Flickr, Rollyo, and Del.icio.us. That's just the awardwinners!!! Lots to see and try whenever I find the time.

Thing 18

Well, I found this assignment interesting. I liked seeing all the templates for documents on ZohoWriter. I didn't like that it would not let me really resize images! Also, after publishing to my blog, I discovered that the cute emoticons do not work in blogger--oh well.

The features for ZohoWriter look pretty much like all the features you would find in Microsoft Word, and work pretty much the same way. There were just a few extras--like inserting "layer" and "anchor"--things that are obviously related to web publishing (I think). I do wish it had better Help information--All I could find was FAQ and the Forums or Contacting Zoho directly. I guess if you can't figure out something in Zoho on your own you have to post to the forum or email Zoho your problem and wait for someone to answer it.

Still, I can see how it makes good documents to share everywhere--travelling from computer to computer. And, like I said before, there are so many templates for any kind of document imaginable--much more than MS Word offers.

I really need to look at some of the other online tools out there that PLCMC pointed out on their Zoho Document.

Fantasybooklover uses ZohoWriter

Fantasybooklover--that's me.  Do you see me at the Librarian's Desk?--Hint: I'm the cat!  My alternate name is: Hey Diddle Diddle.

This ZohoWriter is fun to use.  It's so easy!

Here's another picture:

Isn't it beautiful?  This tree is in my yard, and I took the picture this spring.

I'm working on the 23 things for Learning 2.0.  This is step #18--Web-based apps.

I have blog, called Fantasy Booklover's Interests, where I have all my completed steps listed.