Struggling to commit...

Appalling I know - but I must finish - even if I should have done it in July!

I've been looking at ebooks quite a lot recently as we are putting an ebook management system into our Library. It'll be up and running at the beginning of 4th term. We do have over 100 ebooks already but they don't have a high usage. That might say something about our school, or our lack of advocacy! I'd be interested in your opinion of Overdrive if your Library has it. 

Now...I have downloaded ebooks but it'll take a trip OS to make me a real convert. I'm still attached to print.

Appalling I know - but I must finish - even if I should have done it in July!

I've been looking at ebooks quite a lot recently as we are putting an ebook management system into our Library. It'll be up and running at the beginning of 4th term. We do have over 100 ebooks already but they don't have a high usage. That might say something about our school, or our lack of advocacy! I'd be interested in your opinion of Overdrive if your Library has it. 

Now...I have downloaded ebooks but it'll take a trip OS to make me a real convert. I'm still attached to print.

Time management! Working on it...

As it is now August and I should have completed this weeks ago, this skill is obviously not my forte! Drinking from the torrent of the internet fire hydrant is demanding some content curation and organisation. Diigo and Evernote have been excellent tools to catch the content but now the task is to curate/ condense the collected content for others. paper.li and flipboard look promising but there are only so many tools one can use! I'm finding Twitter and Scoop.IT quite productive and possibly what I can cope with at the moment.

This is my first Scoop.IT

http://www.scoop.it/t/librarians-rule-ok

I've been looking at shortcuts to help students find better search strategies. This one's from Google.

Google does more

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE...! Google Images have redeemed themselves with their camera search feature.

Video

Back from Palm cove in Tropical North Queensland - 28 degrees!!! But despite the inherent summer joys there was no free wifi. And at $7 for half an hour, my catch up is even further behind. I did have a bit of a whine - amid quite a bit of wine - but then remembered comedian Louis CK's vent about whingers like me. IT IS AMAZING! (And now I've worked out the resizing!)

Visualising The voice of the active learner

Pictures of you

Most photo editing sites have too many features - like a mobile with so many different functions, you want to ask if it actually makes phone calls. Gadgets need to be user friendly in a constantly changing technology world. I've found Picmonkey the simplest photo editing site to use, although when working on a PC,  Office Pictureviewer is quite straightforward. I prefer fewer features and more seamless use. I've edited this photo of my daughter's formal in Picmonkey.

Tag galaxy and Morguefile look fantastic and allows access to some brilliant photos, so I did a search for Paris and found some superb ones ( I'm a French teacher!)


http://flic.kr/p/6rbcPt




 I've also used many images from Flickr's Creative Commons site recently and after years of resorting to Google Images I really appreciate the variety of different sites as well as the CC licence which advocates acknowledgement.

As you can see, I have quite a lot of catching up to do! I keep posting as I go as the connection can be difficult up here.

This is me on Twitter             https://twitter.com/galloised

It was my daughter who introduced me to it - as a music writer she has over 600 followers - but it's been slowly slowly for me. I can use BitLy successfully though! I find I'm much more interested in what others have to say and following the links of particularly gifted Teacher Librarians has provided much insight into what is essentially a new sphere for me.

Google Reader has not impressed. Perhaps I'm not finding what I need but there's only so much time and I'm already being told by my nearest and dearest that my screen time has grown exponentially.

I think I'm letting Twitter be my guide. It's quite compulsive - much more than Facebook - which really I only used to keep up with my children, especially while one of them was overseas. That is an interesting one and truly challenges my desire for privacy. Suddenly one is finding images of oneself for all and sundry to view. Twitter can be similar, if it's used for connecting instead of texting.

Twitter has been a wonderful tool to connect with brilliant Teacher Librarians and link in to their networks. Just not so impressed with banalities. Just saying.

Great ideas from Katrina Schubert at Alfred Deakin High ACT on National Year of Reading



I've used Google Docs for collaboration with other Library staff and like the features.

(In the words of Sir Ken Robinson)

And as I was saying...

I've been playing with Google Docs and Google News. My preferences are still for news sites such as the ABC and SMH, plus I still have a print subscription. I just can't let it go. I find the Google News interface quite distracting and sprinkled with annoying irrelevances.

Social media

Love this article about social media from Sarah Lacy of the Huffington Post.

www.huffingtonpost.com/sarah-lacy/social-media-entrepreneurs-mark-zuckerberg_b_1518471.html?ref=tw

Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Williams (Twitter), like Marc Andreessen (Netscape) understand that "People love people" but they don't necessarily feel the same way.

The irony.

BTW, I've begun collecting bookmarks from similar posts using Diigolet which is now sitting on my toolbar. And on a Mac.

Creating a blog is very simple - having interesting posts is quite another matter! I'm a bit of a convert to the Susan Cain theory of the value of introverts.

Do we really have to share everything we think?

Having said that, I'm also a Twitter fan...and I'm thinking of how to use a blog with the upcoming Literature Circles.

Crawling through cyberspace

I still love books. Cyberspace just has different ways to share.