The End

Now that I have come to the end I would like to thank all of the organisers for the opportunity to do this course again. It has been great coming back to it from a position of confidence and i have really enjoyed learning some new tricks. I am keeping up with Facebook most days and have loved catching up with old friends. I am sure that I will be able to use some of these web 2.0 applications when I move into a librarians role in the future.

Week 10 YouTube

You will be very excited to know that I do use YouTube which proves that I do not live in the dark ages completely. I have found it really useful for my daughter and I to listen to recordings of the piano music she is learning. For instance she is starting to learn the Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin and we have found the most amazing pianist who plays ragtime called Chocotiger. We have listened to a number of his performances as Stephanie learnt The Entertainer this year for her grade 3 piano exam. Have a listen he is amazing!!



I have also been using YouTube to listen to and watch the video of Australian Idol winner Stan Walker, as I really loved the song when he sang it on tv.

Week 10 - Podcasting

Well this is my last post for Web 2.0, and I must say it was a good one to finish off with. As you can probably guess I do not listen to Podcasts on a regular basis. I have only listened to them when I have been directed to do so through this course or during my study with CSU. I found them really easy to access through Podcast Alley and I liked the idea of running it through Bloglines which provides a continuous update on the feeds. I accessed a podcast on Doctor Who which went for a couple of hours so I only listened to a little bit. I then subscribed to a Buffy one although the link took me to a blank page (not sure what happened there). I then went a bit more academic and subscribed to Science Times a weekly podcast of science news from the New York Times, quite good if that is your thing. I can't imagine myself sitting at the computer listening to podcasts but it would be really good if you downloaded them to your ipod (of course I don't have one) and then you could listen while walking the dogs etc.

It worked

Well my widget worked. I haven't added many books yet, and yes they are mainly young adult, but that is what I have been studying for the past few months, besides I enjoy reading good children's/young adult fiction along with adult fiction. I often read the same books my daughter Laura (15) is reading, which is nice as we can share our thoughts on what we have read. It also encourages her to keep reading.

Week 9 Books and Reading

This is my widget from LibraryThing hopefully it will work.

Week 8 Productivity

Week 8 offers another batch of useful websites.

Evenbrite has proved to be a great tool for the youth services bookings. I know my husband has found Zamzar useful after I told him about it during the last web 2.0 training session. Google docs sounds a bit like a wiki and could be very useful when you have work colleges in different locations. igoogle is incredibly easy to set up and looks to be a very useful tool. I chose the events category of the seomoz awards and then Upcoming, which allowed me to do a search of upcoming events of all types in Melbourne. Would be a great way of keeping in touch with events which you may not hear about otherwise.

So many sites for the web savvy to choose from!!

Week 7 Tagging, Technocrati and Del.icio.us

I enjoyed this week better than last.

Although I don't follow blogs I was able to easily find a blog on Cavalier King Charles Spaniels through the Tecnoncrati search site. I enjoyed reading about Angle and Bliss through The Spaniel Diaries http://spanieldiaries.blogspot.com/.

I love LibraryThing! The very last assignment (I hope you noticed the VERY LAST bit) for my course involved comparing and contrasting two different genres from the teenage fiction collection using a variety of texts as examples, I choose SF and fantasy. This was followed by another 1500 word case study in which we had to recommend a different genre to a teenager who had read everything in one genre (Fantasy - historical) again using texts for examples. Although I read a bit of teenage fiction I certainly don't have a detailed knowledge of our whole collection. This is where LibrayThing was wonderful. I was able to look up books recommended to me to consider (by the very helpful youth team), as well as books I had read in the past and read multiple book reviews and look at the tags to get an idea (or remind myself) of their plot, suitability etc. GO LibrayThing!!!!!!

I loved librarything so much that I joined it a few weeks ago in order to keep a record of all the books I read on it. I like the fact that I can give them tags in order to find them again as my list grows.

I also really liked del.icio.us. That's 3 out of 3 somewhat of a record for me! I set up an account and used it to find book reviews using tags such as books, teenage, young adult, book reviews. Coming back to it a week later I can see how valuable it is to have a list of sites which I probably would have forgotten all about, waiting for me to access them again. Go Del.icio.us!!!