Thing #19

The directions say to select one site. I had to contain my self to looking at 9 sites and then I had to stop. I could spend all day looking at the different sites. Two that I liked were for parents: MothersClick and Minti. They had areas where parents could pose questions and then people would answer. MothersClick had recipes that I found were useful but the site was mostly for mothers with young children. Minti had advice about older children also so I found that more helpful.

There was another site that was good called DonorsChoose.org. It's a site where teachers all over the United States can put in a request for an item for their classroom and the dollar amount and anyone can give money towards that item. It shows the total cost, how much has been given, and how much is needed. It also tells if it's a poverty level area or moderate poverty level. I found this helpful to teachers who are teaching in poverty level areas.

I also looked at Craig's List. I've heard of it but had never looked at it before. In North Dakota it's only for the Fargo-Moorhead area. I think they need to get Bismarck added. This is a very helpful site and it's amazing at how much it contains.

Thing #18

Wow, this is so easy to use. Why aren't we all using this instead of Microsoft Office. It's free and we'd all be using the same version. I imported two documents and I was able to make the same changes that I would normally make using Microsoft Office. If I understand it correctly, I could work on stuff at work and post it to this and then work on it at home. Brilliant!

Thing #17

I found this one to be a little difficult. It took me a while to figure out but it is pretty cool.

Thing #16

Wikis are pretty cool. They allow libraries to share information with each other and their patrons. My favorite was the Book Lovers Wiki. If I'm looking for a book to read for pleasure, reading what an average everyday person thought about a book is much more important to me than reading professional book reviews. I think we should do this at BSC Library. We could create the Wiki and then have any employees that want to do a review of the book they just read or do a review of their most favorite book. That way, if we pick their book to read we know who we can contact after we're finished if we'd like to discuss the book.

Thing #15

I read all of them but I liked what Michael Stephens had to say about technolust. We should not invest in technology for the sake of coolness and status. What good is technology if the students do not know how to use it. I think we need to find out where our students are at and then we know what we will need. For libraries to keep up with the changing world I think it is going to cost a lot of money. I don't think any of it is going to come cheap. Above all, we need to keep the librarians educated on all the new stuff so we need to spend money on staff development. I think it's great how libraries are working together and sharing resources. All these changes seem positive and that we're moving in the right direction. What the patron needs is what we need to provide.

Thing #14

Technorati rocks! Wow, I could sit all day and look at other blogs. I went from searching for Learning 2.0 to parenting to recipes. I checked out the popular blogs but I'd rather search by using the tags and come across just the average joe blogging about a topic that I'm interested in. I'm definitely going back to visit some of these again. My favorite was the "5 minutes for Mom" blog. They talked about banning books and then I went to a blog with a lady who lost 200 pounds on Weight Watchers and then I got on a blog post that was giving away a t-shirts that say "My husband rocks". That last one was cool because it listed the people who were reading it live and it said Bismarck, North Dakota and then listed how we found the post. There were only 8 of us reading it and everybody else was from other parts of the United States. I did it by using the tags and the Blog Directory.

Thing #13

With help from Liz I now understand this sight. It's a really handy tool. This could be great for not only faculty but students writing a term paper. We could also use this at the reference desk. When we help a student with a certain topic at the reference desk we could have bookmarked sites for us to go to on that topic. It's really neat that we can access those sites from any computer.