Week 6: Thing 14

I searched the Technorati web site for "School Library Learning 2.0" and found 1 hit in posts and 0 in blogs. Still not sure if I did something wrong, but when I did the same search in Google with 1,060,000 hits, Bing with 25,800,00 hits and Yahoo with 11,500,110 hits, I realized that the searching system was very different, much more specific and must rely more on specific tags. I also looked at the link for the top 100 blogs (the popularity link wasn't working) and looked at the top 10 along with their tags. I wasn't surprised to see that many of the blogs had to do with technology and celebrities. Some had no tags, some had an extensive list. I had never looked at any blogs like that and was curious about the Huffington Post and Gizmoto (because it's been in the news recently). I think tagging is important to know about if you are promoting, following or researching blogs. Personally, I don't think I would use this, as I am not following, using or searching for any information in blogs at this time.

Week 6: Thing 13

I viewed the Delicious tutorial and explored the website using the SJLibraryLearning2 account. I saw lots of useful sites covering all aspects of libraries and technology. I searched some of the tags and found some really useful articles. I would like to go back and really explore and read some of these bookmarked websites that were set up for this exercise. I think they would really help and inspire me to begin incorporating more of these tools in my library- and improving my program in many areas!! I really can see the usefulness of this website, both in researching a topic, for professional development or personal topics, and also in creating your own account to save and categorize those useful websites that you have found. I thought that the tagging both in searching on a topic and in providing related tags, was really helpful. I haven't done this yet, but would really like to go back and set up a Delicious account and begin to organize and use more specific websites. Since I really don't usually bookmark websites anyway, I kind of feel like I would be starting from scratch. As with all of these tools, we just really need to make the time to learn about them and use them.

Week 5 Thing 12

Wow, it's been while since I've posted to this blog and time to finish the Web 2.0 tutorial! This activity included exploring Rollyo which I found a little overwhelming, but think it would be useful if you spent a lot of time searching websites that you used a lot. I did find the examples helpful and chose some of the travel sites to explore and created my own Rollyo search tool with a few of them. I thought Wordle was a lot of fun! Just pasting information and seeing how it created the "word cloud" was great! I think it would be a fun activity to do with students. I also tried the Traveler IQ challenge and found that I am not good at this at all- but think students might have a lot of fun with it!