Week 6, #14

I just spent hours exploring Technorati. Glad there is such a thing, though with 50 million blogs out there, the vastness of it is overwhelming. I experimented with searching--first, I used the "search the blogosphere" bar and entered School Library Learning 2.0. Though some of the results were relevant, many were not. So, I went to Advanced Search and typed in the exact phrase and got 0 results. I tried using the phrase "library 2.0" and just "2.0" and was interested to see the difference in the results. On the advanced page, you can search by tags and those results were more relevant. However, as I learned from reading the Technorati information, one must register and of course, add tags if blogs are to show up there! I wonder how many bloggers actually add tags.

I follow a couple of blogs, one of which is my 89 year-old mother's blog. I entered the name of her blog in the search bar and the result was 6 bloggers who mention her blog. It surprised me that her blog would not come up as one of the results. Am I missing something?

I spent time looking at some of the top 100 blogs and was fascinated by the diversity of them. Boing Boing which came out at the top covers a wide range of topics. Many of the top 100 are technology oriented, which makes sense. Looking at the "top searches" list was interesting too--the majority seem to be either about Hollywood people or technology. One was for news. One could spend hours looking at these results.

I think tags are important. Though there is no controlled list of tags (like the concept of Library of Congress' subject headings), tags reflect the way we are trying to teach our kids the idea of keywords and brainstorming possible ways to find information. We try to teach them that they should think of multiple ways someone could classify information. I think showing kids the lists of tags that show up on Technorati would be a great lesson. Again, though, I think it will be awhile before most bloggers add tags so it does limit the results of a tag search.

Week 6, #13 Del.icio.us

Like my colleague Lisa, I don't create lots of lists of bookmarks. We link useful webites on our school portal pages and that has worked well. The idea of tagging makes sense and I was interested to see what some tags were on some searches I tried as well as what websites popped up for various tags. For example, I tried "YA authors" and there were very general tags such as "books" and "reading" which I would not try, though I did find lots of the YA sites interesting. I also tried "elementary graphic novels" and thought many of the websites were useful. I also agree with another of my colleagues, Dee, that this tool could be useful for us as a team when we are developing a unit together.

Week 5, #12

I played around with Rollyo and created a mini-Searchroll with some bird websites I use with a first grade teacher all year long. She does an extensive project about local birds and the kids do research in the library for each bird (not the dreaded Loertcher bird report!). I often use the same sites over and over, so I created a Rollyo for those couple of trusted websites I use. When I searched on Rollyo, I was a little disappointed because I got a lot of other websites as well. I noticed that it lists the sites I entered and also says "entire web". I will try to figure out how to take that off because I don't want all the commercial sites and ads to come up. I had created a specialized Google "search engine" a few years back and this is very similar. I think it was pretty easy to use, but I just need to fine tune it.

Week 5 #11

2.0 Award Winners
I had fun looking around these winners. I first chose "food" and saw that I could watch a video of Paul McCartney making mashed potatoes! I saw another winner that said "Community Walk" and thought this could be helpful when we are studying local history. But, that was not the purpose at all. It was a place where people could share hotel ideas, for example. I have used Pandora quite a bit and like it a lot. The internal functioning of the site must be amazing in order for music of a similar type to be found. We are always teaching the kids how to be effective searchers, using appropriate keywords and I just wonder what the program for Pandora must look like! I need to play around with some more sites to think of good applications. Of course the Google map sites are invaluable, but it will be fun to discover some of the other useful places to take the kids.

Week 5 #10

Long ago, I used an image from ImageChef (the beach scene and I said Read on it). I had trouble loading it on my blog and one of my colleagues now has it on her blog. So, I had to try something new. Let's see if I can import the image! Yipee, it worked and I didn't have trouble. Success. The url for this is http://www.imagechef.com/ic/final_widget.jsp

I am thinking of student applications. Hmmm...I think the visual poetry application could be fun for kids to use (this is National Poetry Month, afterall).

Week 4 #9

I just added Jane Lofton's blog to my RSS feed and top news stories from SFGate. Still feels a bit like information overload.

Week 3 #7

New Technology

I have so much to learn. The path for downloading photos into my blog is still a bit problematic for me. I will master it before long. I also want to know why so many people are "atwitter" about twitter. Also need to understand about jing, too.

Shared with the teachers the use of a document camera--it is not new tech, but it was new to them. As a result of a PTA fundraiser, all teachers now have an LCD projector and a doc camera. That's exciting and they are thrilled.