Week 10: #23 Is this really the end? Or just the beginning...

I particularly liked learning about Library Elf and Bloglines during this training. I've found them quite useful. I got a good look at the vast amount of information out on the internet. Unbelievable! Now we need to learn the easiest way to navigate this immense amount of information and how to find the most reliable information. The Library perhaps?

There was alot of information I just skimmed going through this training so I will be going back and taking a more in depth look at some things. For example, I have not tried making a badge or twitter.

The group that put this training together did a great job! It really introduced me to a lot of new things. I don't feel like I'm in the stone age anymore. The more I have gotten into it the more questions I've been asking my kids and coworkers and getting into wonderful collaborations with them. This training was great and I hope we have more of them.

Week 9: #22 Downloadable Media

When it comes to searching for downloadable material I liked the library's site the best. It was easier to find things. When using "Wowio" you could only search by one term. "LibriVox" was just plain confusing. The library site had more popular authors also. "Wowio" did have a few new titles but they were for obscure authors.

Congrats Harris County Public Library on have the best elibrary catalog!

Week 9: #21 Podcasts, Smodcasts!

I can see some useful items here. It is time consuming to find things but if you really needed something it would be worth the time. I've subscribed to a tech podcast to help keep me up to date.

Week 9: #20 Discover YouTube and other video sharing sites

Thank you ebranch for getting my avatar on the parade of avatars.

I thought YouTube was great. A little unwieldly but I'm finding all internet sites are like that. I'll just have to take some lessons from great librarians who know how to find their way around lots of information quickly. A great source for teaching information, and a lot of fun too. I found the Creative Commons Comic to be the easiest way to understand Creative Commons. I still had many questions though. Maybe the library could tape some of the interesting programs we offer and put them on YouTube for people who cannot attend the programs.

I am posting a couple of videos that my husband found on YouTube that I just love. These are from the Britain's Got Talent show.




If you have trouble accessing the embedded videos try the Url: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Gn5L5U92_54
and http://youtube.com/watch?v=sxOytYLlhiQ

Enjoy!

Check out my new "Meez" avatar & ZingFu pet

The motorcycle does wheelies and moves around but not when uploaded to a blog. Awwwww!

The motorcycle I currently ride is a blue Kawasaki Vulcan 500. When dirt biking I ride my husband's KLR 650. I do not do wheelies! I also wear a helmet but I really wish it was safe not to wear one. Helmet hair, Yuch! I love the wind in my face and hair. Not so crazy about the bug splatters though.

I cannot change the font back to black! Okay, there, I did it. Can you feel my frustration?! Notice that the color black is different though?

If you move your cursor over the ZingFu pet he moves his paw, eyes and tail.

Riding Free

Go to meez.com to see me do tricks!

Week 8: #19 Web-based Apps: They're not just for desktops

Here I am in Zoho Writer Online Word Processor. Here is a cute picture of my granddaughter. Can you tell she cannot read yet?

I wanted this picture to be much smaller but could not figure out how to do it. Any suggestions? I tried putting in a comment but it did not work. Now, to try posting it to my blog.

Yes! It posted. I did downsize the picture in blogger but it won't show my picture on the blog. It put line spaces before and after the emoticon too (sporadically).

Okay, now the picture is posting correctly in the blog. Maybe it just depends on which day or time you try it. To top everything off, I accidentally deleted the picture four times! Aaaargh! Had to reinsert it from a different place and now it doesn't look as clear.

I don't think Zoho is a good place to put confidential information. Even if you don't make the document public you are still giving the Zoho people access. When I use "LibraryElf" I notice that they are looking at what I check out and suggesting similiar titles. Users beware.

Week 8: #18 Social Networking: Making friends in the comfort of your own home

You need to be a member to get into a lot of these sites. Signing up for things and getting into them is so time consuming. I can see the appeal if you truly are looking for socializing and/or have special interests, but beyond that it is just something more out there. I see my kids use myspace and love it for keeping in touch with friends for school and the neighborhood. They have rekindled old friendships and developed a few new ones. Kids seem to already know several of the security risks and how to avoid them. My daughter who was job hunting knew to make her site private, invitation only because prospective employers now look to social networking sites to find out more about you. This can also be a place to put your best foot forword for prospective employers.

At this time I don't see me using social networking sites until I have more time, like retirement maybe.

Week 7: #17 Blog About Technology

Technology - It is moving way to fast for me, although I really do like all the new features. Online banking, fast fill holds, online texts, email, faxing, photosharing, quick access to almost anything if you have a fast server and know what you are doing, the list is endless. I wish more sites would use the same "basics". It is hard to learn all the new programs. Maybe that will be one way libraries can be useful. They can direct users to user friendly sites.

I posted a comment on the "iStar, you Star, we all Star" blog. This person seems to think alot like me.

Week 6: #15 On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0

I added my blog to the hcpl wiki favorites. I then received numerous (understatement) emails from the wiki everytime someone did something to it. I have now chosen to "never" receive email notices. I did find some interesting sites on the wiki. I will definitely be coming back to this for further review.

Library Elf : My Experience

Twice this week at work I had customers mention how they had trouble keeping track of all their library card records. I work at a library where many customers have 2 separate county library cards and a college card. It they have kids they all have numerous cards and mom or dad have a devil of a time keeping up. Many have gone to insisting that the kids use only mom or dads card. Kids want to use there own card and get sad when they can't.

Library Elf to the rescue. I've been telling these customers about libraryelf and they are so thankful, excited and impressed with my knowledge.

I have found it very helpful myself.

Week 6: #15 On Library 2.0 & Web 2.0

I read all the perspectives and agree. We have to provide a service that customers want and need. If customers don't find what they want where and when they want it they will go elsewhere. Providing obsolete service will be the death of libraries and some company will provide the service and charge for it. The internet is definitely the way to go now and keeping up with technology is going to be the most important aspect for libraries.

Technology is changing so fast, it is hard for librarians to keep up with all the new sites and software and how to use them. The same goes for customers. We have to be aware of what is going on so we can direct customers and help them. Obviously we do not have to time train people on all these new changing ideas. We need to make our interfaces easy enough for customers to use on there own. Directing them to these sites, user friendly sites, will be our new job.

Libraries must expand both physically and virtually. They need to stay as advanced as there savvy users and make information available to the less savvy user. This won't be easy but is something to strive for. Embracing change and a willingness to try new ideas is probably the most important thing for individuals and library organizations.

Week 6 : # 14 Getting Not-so-technical about Technorati

When using the Key Word search of blogs in Technorati I got 10 times as many results compared to using tags or Blog Directory. I wouldn't want to have to go through almost 7000 results to see if any looked relevant. I would have to be pretty desperate to go through 684 results. The results in Tags and Blog Directory seemed to be close to the same thing. I imagine if you added a few more tags you could get even closer to what you want.

Popular Blogs in Technorati seemed to be high tech sites, music and video downloading sites and celebrities. I don't see myself using this much.

Halloween Smiley

Here is a smiley I found through an image generator found in "The Generator Blog".

Week 6 : #13 Tagging makes the web 2.0 world go round.

I subscribed to del.icio.us and was able to succesfully add the buttons onto my cubicle computer. This was not an easy task for me. I thought the best part of del.icio.us was that you could move from computer to computer and access your information, but we can't put the buttons on our "circ profile" computers. Is this something that may happen in the future? I can see the benefits of tagging and bookmarklets but you sure have to have a lot of time. I imagine once you take the time to learn a site it will become easier.

toondoo.com, Image Generator, found in del.icio.us

Week 5 : #12 The "Library" Elf will Remind You

This is a neat service. I was able to put all my and my children's HCPL, MCPL, and NHMCCD library cards on this to keep track of them in one place. It even lets you renew from here. I am experimenting with both email & RSS notifications to see which I like best.

Would be great for families and homeschoolers.

Something to tell our customer about!

Week 5 : #11 A Thing About LibraryThing

I have added 6 titles to my LibraryThing library. I learned to change cover designs and delete titles also.

Here is a link to my LibraryThing Library:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php

Here is my Standard LibraryThing Widget:



I tried all styles of widgets and they all come out with a vertical list of covers. I wanted horizontal and the preview showed horizontal, but it still shows vertical on this blog. Any suggestions? Vertical alignment is a real space waster.
Enjoy!

Week 5 : #10 Play Around With Image Generators

My "Sea Lion" creation, originally uploaded by Kim's iHCPL Pictures.

My "Sea Lion" creation

I went to FD Toys, went into my Flicker account from there, chose the picture I wanted, entered a thought blurb onto my picture, soooo... easy, and then uploaded straight to my blog.

I liked this image generator. I also liked the fact that my Flicker pictures came up all at once as opposed to my Flicker account which shows them one at a time. (Maybe I just don't know how to access them all at once in Flicker.) I did want to look at my picture in a larger format before choosing the text but did not find that option.

In case the link information of the image generator I was using (FD Flicker Toys) doesn't carry over, here it is:

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/

I went into "Captioner".

Week 4 : #9 Finding Feeds

I had no trouble finding feeds in "Bloglines". Out of the other four I had the best luck with "Feedster". Technorati, Topix, and Syndic8 were more trouble than they were worth. I just don't have that much time.

I really have been enjoying the ease of Bloglines. Now, if I could just post from my blog from within bloglines! I always expect these things to do more than they can.

Week 4 : #8 Make life "really simple" with RSS and a news reader

Getting a bloglines account was very easy and I have enjoyed using it. I do tend to get carried away when looking at each site. On the tutorial it said that you could look at these sites without the ads, but I noticed that several sites have managed to get ads in anyway. It certainly cuts down on them though. I have added weather, jokes, comics, news, the iHCPL Learning Experience site, 3 coworkers blogs and my own blog.

It is to easy to use.

Week 3: #7 Photo Editing Tools : Original Picture

old mexican homestead, originally uploaded by Kim's iHCPL Pictures.

This is the original picture before any editing in "picnik".

Week 3: #7 Photo Editing Tools : Edited Picture

old mexican homestead, originally uploaded by Kim's iHCPL Pictures.

Here I have sharpened, cropped and color edited this picture in "picnik". I had absolutely no luck using "snipshot" or "pixer". "picnic" was fairly easy.

Week 3 : #7 Photo Editing Tools

This is my first attempt to change a photo to the grayscale. Obviously it didn't work, but you get to see the original picture of UNT's Homecoming Bonfire.

Flickr Photo Map

The following is the link to my flicker photo map:

http://www.flickr.com/map/?&user_id=14416900@N02&fLat=35.14371&fLon=-116.982421&zl=12

Good luck.

Week 3: #6 More Flickr Fun

Unless you have a lot of time to spend, many of these API’s and MashUp’s are for more capable computer users than me. I spenthours trying Trippermap and still couldn’t load it onto my blog. Flick’rs map was essentially the same thing.

As I was reading some of the top 10 Flickr mashups and wondering why I should spend so much time on these I came upon the perfect comment: “More of a time waster than anything else, Retrievr shows that programmers can do just about anything with the Flickr API”. This pretty much sums up my feelings on “These cool little tools”.

Yes!

Success, almost. I thought that the description on Flickr would show up on the blog (it appears when you are entering the post) but it didn't.

Sailing Adventure

Sailing Adventure, originally uploaded by Kim's iHCPL Pictures.

This is my second try at posting a picture onto my blog from flickr. My fingers are crossed.

Not There Yet!

If you looked at my blog yesterday you saw that my picture was retrievable but not the way it was supposed to be. I have printed out the "helps" and will try again.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Week 2 : #4 Online Safety

We have entered the new global community. Things are moving faster and faster and there is no going back. With one key click we can communicate with the world and it cannot be taken back. Just as you would take basic precautionary measures in the physical world, like locking doors, traveling in groups, or being aware of your surroundings, the same is true of the online world. I do feel that since the online world is so new and changing so fast we need to be even more careful of what we do online. Thankfully, alot of others are just as concerned and are making information available everywhere to help us have a safer experience on the internet. Avoiding the online world is not an option. We just need to keep up with online safety issues.

Week 2 : #3 : Thoughts on my learning habits.

Negatives:

1. Without asking a supervisor for time to work on training I would have no time for training.
2. There is no place to go at work where you are not interrupted constantly.
3. Age is leaving me with less short term memory, so I need to learn to use "tabs" efficiently in order to move back and forth from the instructions and learning parts to my blog and it's posts, etc.
4. Goal setting is one of my weak areas. I agree that having a goal increases your learning ability but getting motivated to learn something that you may never need to use is hard. Knowing "why" you are learning something new helps.
5. I need an "Undo" tool in Blogger Edit.
6. Once I get "Moving" on learning something new, I get interested and start looking at all its facets. This is especially easy to do online when you can just click on a link. It is easy to get "lost" or "off on a tangent" when you are doing this. There is an awful lot of information out there and not enough time. Online training seems to take a lot longer than training that you go to. I think I learn more from the online training though.
7. I can get carried away with what I'm doing. I need to learn that enough is enough and go on to the next thing.
   

Positives:

1. I like being able to train, or learn, at my own pace, in my spare time, and without having to drive somewhere. These online training programs are great.
2. I learn best when I do something hands on and have time to repeat it to reinforce the knowledge learned. This online learning program is perfect for that.
3. I write down shortcuts to remember something new and post it where I can find it until I know I have it mastered. My blog may be one place to post these things.

Success with Using Tabs!

Shane showed me how to using Tabs to move from one screen to another. I haven't mastered it yet, but I have been able to apply it successfully. Thanks Shane!

Continuing Success

Yes! I have registered on Harriet and have successfully reentered my new blog and account.

Successful Blog Setup - Yeah!

Well, I have just set up my first blog. Now I will check to see if it really is there, and if so, register it to start getting my bling.