Thing 6: Curation Tools

For this activity, I am looking at Pinterest. I have had a Pinterest account for several years now, but previously hadn't really considered its uses for my professional life. I have created boards that group recipes, craft ideas, nursery ideas when I was pregnant, and home organization ideas. I like that you can create secret boards (perfect when planning a surprise party) and you can follow as many or few boards of your friends as you'd like.

I started following Polly's SLS Cool Tools board and it has inspired me to think more deeply about what sort of Pinterest board would be useful for me in my current position. I have created  a very minimally pinned (for now) "Library Things" board to compile ideas, links, and resources as I stumble across them. I appreciate how easy it is to share ideas and tools using Pinterest, and its graphics-heavy interface is ideal for visual learners.

For use in a school library setting, not only is this helpful for the above-mentioned visual learners, but because pretty much anything can be pinned to a board, it provides a good opportunity to emphasize to students the need to be thoughtful about resources used when doing research and also that not all information found online is to be trusted.

Thing 5: Digital Storytelling

I am going to keep this post short and sweet. A few years back, when I was working as a SLMS in the Schodack school district, I participated in an afterschool workshop with Polly during which she presented us with new tools to use in our libraries. I believe the workshop was called "Web 2.0." Many of the tools I learned were part of Thing 5, so I bypassed Animoto, Prezi, and Glogster, which I have tried before, and went to Toondoo, where I played with and created a cute little cartoon. It is unrelated to anything academic, but it was fun to make. And it's based on a true story ;)

I can see this being a really wonderful tool to use in classrooms to work on narration and sequence, and I also like the idea of using it in non-fiction applications, such as the given example of a life-cycle. For students who are really into graphic novels and comics, this gives them a chance to play with making their own. It was easy to create an account and the free version has lots of features. You can share your toondoo creations on Facebook, make your 'toons private, share only with friends, or add to the public gallery (I did this one). You can invite feedback and allow for editing, or opt not to.

Thing 4: RSS Feeds

I am beginning to feel like a broken record; I was skeptical of RSS feeds - it wasn't so much that I didn't trust them, just that I didn't see the need for them. They were explained to me as a place to keep all of your sites that you frequently check so that you don't need to go check them individually.

But I have bookmarks and favorites lists in my web browsers. And I only work part-time - I've got time to check my favorite sites. But then I started using Netvibes, and now I can't stop adding widgets. It's fun. And it is convenient to see so many sites I normally read anyway all at once.

I have several categories of widgets that I added -- news: global and national; weather; cooking blogs; entertainment blogs; library publications and sites; and miscellaneous other sites. I added these in various ways. Some, I simply visited the site and looked for the feed icon. Some I searched within Netvibes itself. I found that some of the feeds I subscribed to had the option of linking right to Netvibes and others went into a feeds folder in Internet Explorer, but I did figure out how to export these feeds as an OPML file and then they appeared with the rest of my feeds on my Netvibes page.

I clicked on some of my headlines in my RSS feeds and had the option of having reader view or webpage view. Generally, I preferred the more graphics-heavy webpage view. I added several library organization and news feeds, and I can see how this would be useful professionally. First of all, I have access to many sources for book reviews as soon as they're published online and can see them all simply by visiting my Netvibes Dashboard. From there, it is easy to make decisions about which books to purchase, as selecting audiobooks from Overdrive for the Capital Region BOCES Union Catalog is one of my job duties.

Because my job also entails training and technical support for our users within Destiny Follett, I can see adding resources and how-to's from the web to a specialized dashboard that is more job-focused than the personal dashboard I created for this activity. I could also see sharing links to resources with other librarians on specific topics that they are working on with their students.

I was hoping to add an RSS feed from my local public library, but there didn't seem to be a feed available. I did manage to add an RSS widget to this blog (I think! Hopefully it is working right!) and then subscribed to the feed, which will be added to my Netvibes dashboard soon.

Thing 3: Photo Sharing

I already have accounts with many photo hosting and sharing sites that I use for personal photos of myself, my family, and other events in my life - special and everyday. I have used, at various times, Photobucket, Snapfish, Shutterfly, Picasa, Dropbox, Facebook, and Pinterest. When I want to edit photos - crop them, resize, change the color or filter on an image - I generally turn to Photobucket or Picasa, which has easy tools to use for these purposes.

Of the sites I've used I like Picasa's editing features and Dropbox's sharing features best. I wouldn't necessarily have thought to lump Pinterest in with other photo sharing sites, as I have never posted my own photos there - I mostly think of it as a link sharing site. But one of its distinguishing features is all of the photos, tempting its users into making recipes or convincing users that, 'yes, you too can do this craft in a weekend' - never mind that it will turn out nothing like the gorgeous original. But the photos must come from somewhere, so I suppose it really is a photo sharing site at heart.

Because I have used so many of these sites for basic purposes, I thought for this activity I would branch out into a different site I haven't tried before. I was not actually familiar with Photopin, but I've bookmarked the page as it seems like a really good resource to find photographs that are okay to use freely. I also decided to play with Big Huge Labs, which was also new to me.

Since my son was born, my husband and I have used Dropbox to take and share photos of Benjamin. One feature I like is that you can easily share albums with other people and it's also easy to sort photos into albums and change the privacy settings on specific albums. My smartphone is set up to automatically send any photos I take using the phone directly to my Dropbox account. Below is a picture I took of my son and husband recently.

My son, Benjamin, laughing at the fish in the pond at the Crossings park, Colonie, NY.


Using the "Hockney style" collage maker at Big Huge Labs, I took the above picture and made it into this:

And then, using the "Pop Art" setting at Big Huge Labs, I made my son into a Warhol-esque image:

 

Those are just a few of the fun things I was able to do at that site; there are many more I didn't even explore, but I've bookmarked the site to explore more in the future.

There are so many potential uses for photo sharing in schools and school libraries. I am not currently at a school, working for the School Library System department of Capital Region BOCES, but when we have events, workshops, and conferences, there are definitely instances when photos will be taken/shared.

I think I've only barely scratched the surface of what can be doing with photo hosting and sharing sites, but this module was really useful to me.