The roller coaster ride

Well, the roller coaster was quite a ride. There were a few ups and downs, that's for sure. I totally enjoyed learning about and using the new tools. Some of them like Flickr and LibraryThing, I've already have had an account with. In fact I've had requests for some of my pictures to be used by, Design of Cities, World Scenery Photos and Schmap: Northwest Second Edition. I really enjoyed RSS Reader. You could say I'm hooked on it. Just a finger click away to my blogs, websites, news, etc. I stressed over YouTube. Silly me, it was so easy to do. Can't wait to do it again. This learning to explore and experiment was a great learning experience. Yes I would do it again. But this time with a quiet place and more time to work on it.

Exploring eBooks and Audio eBooks

Internet Literature

There are thousands upon thousands of book titles to choose from and it's just a click away. World Public Library gives you wonderful access to many titles. I enjoyed browsing the American books and also the Canadian books too. The ebook cover gallery was quite rewarding and to still see some of the original covers was such a treat. It brought back such good memories.

In the audio ebooks I explored LibriVox. It was so user friendly. I totally enjoyed going through the site. I wasn't to impressed about the British library online gallery though. The Ultimate Guide - Best places to get free books. Now that was fun!

Podcasts

I had explored Podcast Alley. It has quite a large Genre. Art , travel, education, religion and tv, were some of the Podcasts you could choose from. There was a tv Podshow called "Lipstick N Laundry" that I wanted to watch. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to watch it. I also explored EPN, The Education Podcast Network. It had explained what a podcast was. How to find and subscribe to a podcast. It was quite easy to do. EPN has many useful educational subjects to choose from. What a great teaching tool.

Discover YouTube

Memories of Dewey Readmore Books

I picked this video because I thought it was very fitting to me. I do love cats. All kinds of cats. Large cats, small cats, skinny cats, fluffy cats and even fat cats. They are so much fun to play with and cuddle with.
It was just wonderful that the staff was able to adopt the cat. Cats can be so calming and stress reducing animals. He was such a great asset for the patrons, staff and the community. Another video I enjoyed was called " The Best Cat Video You'll Ever See". I had laughed so hard, that I ended up subscribing to YouTube. I was also amazed at how easy it was to embed the video to my blog. I'm going to try it in an e-mail next.

Embedding a Video (YouTube)

LibraryThing

Well I told Michael I finally created an account with LibraryThing. It just took me 2 years to do it. Well, he informed me that I already have an account. Sure enough, there it was. Oops. Oh well. I now have two accounts. Well I better delete the old one. I did add books to the new one. I was amazed at how many people have the same books I have. When I cataloged them I wanted it to show the covers which it did. But I was amazed at how many that didn't have a picture of the books. There was also one cover that didn't seem to match mine. It had the same copyright, year and ISBN. It must have been a reprint. Well I'm off to add more books.

Zoho Writer

Zoho Writer

Zoho Writer seems to be a great tool. It has so many _^formatting

options. You can make in line comments, share documents

with others. You can work off line. You can also underline your

words, add smiley faces , color your words. As you can see

you can also add pictures to your documents. This picture was

taken at Northwest Trek a few years ago. I also have it posted

on my flickr account.

SandBox wiki

Last week I tried to log into the California Curriculum Connections wiki with no success. The login password "library" didn't work for me. Soooo... I requested access to join calcurriculum PB works. They sent me an e-mail with approval to join along with writers access. I then was able to edit the sandbox. It was sooo cool. I corrected a few misspelled words that were in the blogs. It was great. What power! I noticed then that it showed that I was the last editor. It showed my blog name and what time that I had edited it. I then decided to star the page under navigator. I then opened up a work space. Haven't done anything in it yet. Whats interesting though is that someone has already asked permission to join my work space. Don't know if I'll give him permission yet.

Wikis and Wikipedia

Wikipedia - The free encyclopedia
Wiki - means quick in Hawaiian
Soooo Wikipedia means quick encyclopedia :)
Well I'm not to fond of this encyclopedia. Anyone with internet access can make changes to the articles people have created. Misinformation can be added until it has been edited or removed. I'm not impressed with wikipedia. There is to much fault in this system.I realize one day everything we do will be done through the web. Until that happens I'll stick with the old stand by. The good old hard cover encyclopedia books. I know I can count on them to be accurate. While I was reading about the pros and the cons of Wikipedia I noticed it had mentioned that sometimes it can take weeks or even months to detect or remove misinformation. Can you imagine a kid doing a report for school and someone had just edited some information he or she was reporting on. That person edited that information incorrectly. Not a good thing! I think teachers should think twice about letting students use this as a learning tool.

Tagging, Del.icio.us and Technorati

I feel del.icio.us can be a great tagging or bookmarking tool. I really enjoyed the tutorial about del.icio.us. Very informative. I also enjoyed some of the sites that were bookmarked. I'm going to go back to one that shows you how to put up a free website. I've been thinking about putting a family website together. It should be fun. I did look at the SJLibraryLearning2 site. It was most interesting. One of the bookmarks I enjoyed on the site was called (kids.gov ). What a great learning tool for the kids. They can play games and learn at the same time. Totally enjoyed the NASA site. Other bookmarks you can use are Didd it, StumbleUpon, Technorati and Yahoo.