Thoughts on the blog.

All in all this exercise was a great eye-opening, mind expanding exercise. I feel a bit disappointed I didn't complete the tasks in the given time however for some reason I thought it was going to be an hour a week and it turned out sometimes to be quite a bit more than that - time I didn't always have.

Many of the tasks I also could have spent more time on and I know that I will need to revisit them to keep informed - I don't want to forget all that I have discovered in the past 10 weeks or so.

One thing which stood out for me as being very useful is the free online productivity tools. The people in the library often need to do their CV's or other correspondence and if they want to store the information online rather than on an external device this would be a good option for them. There have been problems lately with the computers crashing and losing information - this would alleviate that problem !

So thanks for the opportunity and help in discovering many great new tools - I now need to help some other people to also discover them.

Onwards...................

You Tube, podcasts, eBooks, eAudiobooks and Downloadable Media.

Thanks I enjoyed the walk down memory lane with some Fred Dagg !!

My kids are on You Tube quite a bit watching music videos, Bindi the jungle girl, soccer videos..the list goes on.

I had a look at a few podcasts - Podcasts New Zealand, Radio Nz podcasts and PodcastAlley.com - decided to have a more indepth look at the i-tunes podcasts as that's what is on my computer. Was great - lots of stuff for me and the kids. I'll definitely use this tool again and it's great as all the podcasts in i-tunes are free.

The next task was looking at eBooks etc. Wow that was cool. I was aware there were eBooks but didn't realise there were so many different ways that people can access them, including such things as the "kindle" digital book reader. It sure would be good for travelers so they wouldn't have to carry books or even have the difficulty of finding them in their own language.

There were some good sites showing the 10 best places to get free books - also a useful thing to know.The Net Library was currently unavailable however i will visit it at a later date.

Thats it for week 9 !

Online wordprocessing and spreadsheet tools.

Was great to have a go on Zoho writer and especially liked the fact that you could easily insert tables photo's and my favourite was the watermark feature !

Think these online tools are great because as things are saved online you can check them from different computers and don't have to worry about the different software versions that may or may not be available.

Also a good use is that you can have multiple users who can edit the same file.

I then had a look at the short list for the Web 2.0 awards list and had a browse of the following sites. Lulu, Google docs - liked the look of the family budget planner, My Heritage and I'm cooked - could have used the hot cross bun recipe ; will keep that for next year.

It's great to have these lists of the most popular because there is so much information out there that I like to look at the best sites and not waste all my time trying to find out where to go !

Managed to add myself to the favourite blog page on ACL PB Wiki. Fell like I'm finally getting through this Web learning programme !

Onwards to the next task

Week 7 Wiki's.

I was really pleased to see the ACL training and development wiki and I will be visiting it again.Was also pleased that it had a tutorial on databases and eResources-I will find this very useful and I noticed that other people do to looking at the recent activity. Wiki's are a great way for many people to share knowledge, brainstorm ideas, create and design an encyclopedia of knowledge.

I liked the Library success - a best practices wiki and it was great to see what other libraries are up to.The SJCPL wiki was also interesting and they had many applications - all of which would work well in libraries. eg history, local events, info on education, sports activities, book clubs....the list goes on.

Tagging del.icio.us andTechnorati

I'm still here,just got carried away with the other life ! I can see that having Del.icio.us as a tool would be good to keep track of your personal favorites. These mechanisms are all really good for people who are moving about and use different computers - like our patrons in the library or travelers. I was interested to see that the tags described the bookmarks so then i could look up the tag and see what else was related to that subject. Looked up howto and photography - it means that you would find things that maybe you wouldn't have found before !

I hadn't heard of Technorati before but it's a search engine to search blogs ! Tags are used to help categorise the search so you can check out other blogs with similar tags ; there's that time factor again - I can see how people get lost in their computers !!

The next thing i looked at was :

Web 2.0 and the Future of Libraries

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I think the web is amazing and you can just add things here and there..............however there is a little bit of an information overload at times and even though you can get so much from the web people still will need the human interface and real books they can take home and know that the information they are getting is well studied and correct.

It will be important for libraries to keep up with innovations and what's happening on the web as well as the other ways of sourcing information. More importantly it will be important for us to know where to get accurate information as it seems everyone can put things on the web for all to see however sometimes things are opinions rather that fact.

Times are changing and so is the way we source information - it will be interesting to see in the future how libraries operate - we are changing with the times : computers and now wireless available free of charge...........who knows what the future will bring ?

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Rollyo

Well I'm sure this must be very good when it's up and running but I've tried a few times to get some info on it and both times have got the message that "Rollyo is(again sorry) it's undergoing some much needed maintenance..............will leave them to it I think and get on with the next task at hand !!!